melissa auf der mauR
ABOUT this week’s guest:
photo credit: Craig Boyko
The Canadian-born artist, musician, and author Melissa Auf der Maur is best-known as the former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins: two alt-rock bands that helped define the music and popular culture of the 1990s. Hole, in particular, paved the way for so many women in music, pushing through an extremely male dominated landscape. Now over three decades after joining Hole in 1994, this year Melissa has published two incredible books that document that time - Even The Good Girls Will Cry: A 90’s Rock Memoir, and a companion photography book called My 90’s Rock Photographs, which showcases a vast archive of photos that Melissa took during that decade while on tour, backstage, onstage and in the crowd. She also released a companion album called Bass Womb Room - My '90s 4-track Demos x Field Recordings. As a teenager growing up in Montreal, Melissa discovered her love of photography early on, and not long afterwards, picked up the bass and formed her first band while at university, called Tinker, and it wasn’t long before her path would take her to the biggest stages in the world, the covers of the biggest music magazines, and she would step into her role in making music her-story. This episode was recorded live during the O+ Festival at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York, just 30 miles south of Basilica Hudson - the arts and performance center she co-founded with her husband, on October 11th, 2026.
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