Kim Deal begins with a geography lesson. “I’m in f**king Ohio,” exclaims the indie rock legend, famous for playing piledriver bass in Pixies, the original moshpit messiahs, and who then, with her own group, The Breeders, wrote one of the great 1990s alternative anthems, the Olivia Rodrigo-approved Cannonball.
“Do you know that people are using the word ‘Ohio’ as slang for ‘cringe’? Oh man, ‘that’s soooo Ohio,’” she says, doing a decent impersonation of an eye-rolling Gen Zer.
Deal grew up in the state, in the city of Dayton, a gritty sprawl with a population of 135,000, and this hard-knock town is prominent in her thoughts as she prepares, at the age of 63, to release her first solo album, Nobody Loves You More. She wrote and recorded it after she had moved back to Dayton to care for her ageing parents, who died shortly before the pandemic.
Nobody Loves You More isn’t explicitly about her parents or Dayton, but songs such as Coast and Crystal Breath pulsate with autumnal sadness. The emotions are heightened by Deal’s move away from bulldozing power chords in favour of plaintive ukulele, folk guitar and, on Crystal Breath, wheezy disco grooves. Her voice remains both vulnerable and effervescent, a spectral presence tiptoeing through soundscapes soaked in regret (“Clearly all of my life/ I’ve been foolish,” she sings on Coast, against a backwash of mournful ukulele).
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It is strikingly raw and vulnerable, though Deal takes care to sprinkle in lots of gorgeous melodies. “It really was a whole time,” she says of the conception and recording of Nobody Loves You More. “When someone has Alzheimer’s – and I was living with my mom and dad in the house, taking care of them – when they do have Alzheimer’s, and she had it for 18 years, that is actually losing somebody for 18 years.”
Saying goodbye was a complex process. Week by week, sometimes hour by hour, little pieces of her mother would slip away. “It doesn’t happen all one day. Every day you see a little bit more gone, a little bit more gone. You’re constantly losing them. Dad died in 2019, April. Mom died in February 2020. But I didn’t feel I lost them in a year. That whole period of time I was losing them. It’s such a strange journey.”
Nobody Loves You More was largely engineered by the producer Steve Albini, a beloved figure in alternative music, whom Deal had met when he produced Pixies’ first album, Surfer Rosa, in 1988. He was a dear friend, and she was devastated when he died from a heart attack last May.
Albini worked with Deal on one of her finest early songs, the woozy, menacing chugger Iris, from The Breeders’ 1990 debut, Pod. He also produced PJ Harvey and Nirvana – the latter were seeking to salve their consciences, after the mainstream success of Nevermind, by collaborating with this ultimate indie figurehead on their 1993 swan song, In Utero.
His contribution to alternative rock didn’t start or end with these blockbusting figures. Albini treated every artist equally, regardless of their profile or recording budget, and worked with several Irish acts, including The Frames and Adrian Crowley. “I didn’t know that he was particularly known for, like, giving Irish bands the time of day,” Deal says. “That doesn’t f**king surprise me.”
Deal was born in 1961, her father a laser physicist at an air-force base, her mother a teacher. Her parents adored folk music, and in her teens Kim formed an acoustic duo with twin sister, Kelley. In 1985 she moved to Boston with her (now ex) husband and got a job doing lab tests at a doctor’s office. At work one day she was flipping through the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly, when she spotted an ad: “Band seeks bassist into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary. Please – no chops.”
She had chops but answered anyway, bringing along Kelley’s bass, as she had none of her own. At that stage Pixies were just Black Francis, their singer and frontman, and the guitarist Joey Santiago; it was Deal who suggested her husband’s friend Dave Lovering as a potential drummer.
Pixies – the indie-rock Beatles – dazzled from the outset. Deal had a standout moment on Surfer Rosa with the instantly anthemic Gigantic. Success led to tensions, however – or so fans believed. The perception was that Francis – real name Charles Thompson – regarded the troupe as a vehicle of his songwriting and wasn’t willing to share the spotlight.
That was a misconception, and reports of a power struggle between Deal and him are overstated. Deal says she never saw her membership of Pixies as an impediment to her songwriting. That’s why she founded The Breeders in 1989, when Pixies were still a going concern.
“Let me ask you something. If you wanted to write fiction, would you ever say that the newspaper [you’re writing for] was stopping you writing fiction?” she said to me in 2013. “Nobody can stop you writing songs ... People think there is a TV-movie aspect to all that. It’s not realistic. And yet I always get the question. So maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand. I don’t know. Everybody likes melodrama.”
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Deal has a hard time thinking of Nobody Loves You More as her first solo album. As far as she’s concerned that was Pacer, in 1995; it was credited to The Amps but was essentially a stand-alone Kim Deal project.
It came together a year after Kelley was arrested for heroin possession and packed off to court-mandated drug rehabilitation. Kim put The Breeders on ice and wrote Pacer, though the rest of The Breeders – even Kelley – contributed. She recorded much of the album in Dublin, in a studio the name and location of which she has long forgotten.
Her Dublin years were a crazy time, she says. There was a lot of partying, an anarchic impromptu gig at Whelan’s – and, according to the Washington Post, two emergencies where she had to accompany her drummer, Jim Macpherson, to hospital.
“After relocating to Ireland to record what would be their first and only album, Macpherson’s drinking got serious,” the newspaper reported. “He had two separate accidents that required him to get stitches in the same Irish ER. Eventually, he and Deal had a fight, and he walked out. They wouldn’t speak for 15 years.”
“Oh, I was wild – wild – in Ireland when we were making that record,” Deal says. (She and Macpherson have patched up their differences, and he plays on her new LP.) “I was just, like, ‘Aargh’. You go into the studio sometimes and they have a clean sound. I was not into the clean sound. I was trying to ... make it not clean. That was a struggle.”
Pacer was a great album, but it’s The Breeders and Pixies for which she will go down in indie history. Deal left Pixies in 2011 – the band had re-formed in 2004 – but she will forever be associated with an act that did much to catalyse the loud-yet-vulnerable formula of indie rock and paved the way for Nirvana and grunge.
Still, she was bigger than any one group. When Francis broke up Pixies for the first time, in 1993 – informing Deal by fax – the expectation was that he would go on to bigger things, but Deal stole his thunder that summer by unleashing Cannonball, one of the most adored guitar anthems of the 1990s and a song that has influenced Gen Z rockers such as Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy and Boy Genius.
It has also filtered through to Rodrigo, whose zinging punk-pop is infused with Breeders DNA – and who invited Deal and her bandmates to open for her at Madison Square Garden last April. Playing to 20,000 screaming teenagers (and children) was a learning curve.
“I go to rock shows. I have never had to hold my ears because of that screaming and the ear-shredding loudness. It’s quite something, isn’t it? It was really exciting. Evidently, I think Cannonball blew Olivia Rodrigo’s mind when she heard it. She talks about her time in life before hearing Cannonball and then after having heard Cannonball.”
The strangest part of putting out a solo record, Deal says, is having her face plastered everywhere. The cover of Nobody Loves You More features a striking photograph of the singer by Alex Da Corte: Deal is on a raft with a guitar, some amps and a flamingo (a nod to Florida, where she wrote several tracks).
The image is inspired by the story of the Dutch performance artist Bas Jan Ader, who set off from Cape Cod in 1975, attempting to cross the Atlantic in a tiny boat. The vessel turned up nine months later, south of Co Cork. Ader was not aboard, and was never seen again.
“I didn’t know what the cover was going to be. Someone at the label said, ‘How about a photo?’ Okay, well, let’s decide that if there’s a good picture, we’ll use it ...
“I was thinking, oh, my album, my picture will be on the cover of the album. I imagined looking through albums in a record store – ‘That will be my picture on the cover.’ What I didn’t think of was all the big things: it didn’t occur to me that I would be the promotional image, my face. I didn’t think about that.” She smiles. “I’ll get over it.”
Nobody Loves You More is released by 4AD on Friday, November 22nd
