Kim Deal
Nobody Loves You More
★★★★★
4AD
While peers like former Pixies bandmate Frank Black and fellow Daytonian Robert Pollard revel in their productiveness, Kim Deal prefers the slow-drip approach. Her band The Breeders have released a mere five albums over the 35 years since they formed, while her sole side-project, The Amps – a stopgap outfit founded during a temporary feud with twin-sister and Breeders bandmate Kelley – folded after one album, and her first solo album under her own name has been over a dozen years in the making.
Deal ascribes this slow pace to a hazy perfectionism on her part. Though she says she’s always writing, she told me a decade or so ago that “avoiding cliché” was paramount, suggesting that for every song we get to hear, there are dozens more lying rejected in the demo pile. That, for Deal, songwriting is a slow process of honing, of homing into that unique voice so recognisable from her work to date, a voice that rings so clear, and funny, and sad, and with deft power here.
The path to her first solo album began with Deal – who believed that the “disruption” of the internet had left the music industry so impoverished that “nobody could afford bands anymore” – starting up her own cottage industry in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, self-recording a batch of songs, self-released as a series of two-track seven-inch singles that she mailed to customers herself. She fired off five of these perfectly imperfect nuggets between 2012 and 2014 – an impressive work-rate by her standards, all the more impressive considering Deal was doing double-duty caring for her elderly parents.
Deal had planned to compile these tracks as an album, but decided she’d rather record a batch of new songs, a process complicated by the writing and recording of The Breeders’ most recent album, 2018’s All Nerve. And then, a year before the pandemic and within 12 months of each other, Deal’s parents passed away. Add in the complications of lockdown, and it’s amazing this album was completed at all.
Nobody Loves You More is a singularly uplifting, life-affirming listen.
Nobody Loves You More doesn’t signal the end of The Breeders – they’ve just finished a tour of America’s stadiums as guests of pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo, while band-members past and present make guest appearances throughout this record. And it doesn’t herald any grand stylistic shift for Deal, comprising swooning pop, subterranean dissonance and at least one waltz, all firmly within her long-established paradigm. It is, however, the most autobiographical record of her career. The loss of her parents permeates the album, its songs referencing struggle, trauma and bereavement. And yet Nobody Loves You More is a singularly uplifting, life-affirming listen, where joy and despair, love and loss, are irrevocably entwined, and kept afloat by Deal’s unfailing lightness of touch.
The back story is most explicit on Are You Mine, though still veiled enough that it could pass as a simple love song. The titular refrain: “Are you mine/Are you my baby?” began as words Deal’s mother Ann, in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, asked her daughter late one night. The song unspools with economy and restraint, its crooning pedal steel establishing a subtle empathy, while strings sound a note of uncertainty: the choppy waters that surround her. The understated lyrics inhabit Ann’s sense of disorientation, her displacement, while also locating bonds of love and motherhood thought lost to the fog of dementia. “I have no mind,” Deal sings, the line dangling precarious and unfinished, until she resolves it with, “For nothin’ but love”. “Have you seen me lately?” she asks, adding, “I have no time”, referencing the temporal confusion experienced by late-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Still, that precious sliver of recognition remains in the song’s refrain. It’s a brilliant, frankly devastating piece of songwriting, and yet still uplifting.
Throughout, Deal layers the happy with the sad with more happy and more sad, her songs rich with chiaroscuro. The opening lines of the opening title track – “I don’t know where I am” – again conjure Ann, but we’re in Kim’s head now, experiencing the complex, limitless, painful love felt by the carer for her ailing parent: “I just stop at the sight of you standing there”. The impossibly upbeat Coast – its lackadaisical lilt scored by Chicago marching band Mucca Pazza – is moored in the darkness of Deal’s addiction years, revisiting a winter two decades past when, Deal tells MOJO, she was “losing my mind in Nantucket, trying to dry out on the island”. It opens with a grimly droll assessment of her circumstances – a “hard, hard landing” leaving her believing she should “duck and roll out of my life” – but focuses instead on the Nantucket youth, ditching their day-jobs and grabbing surf-boards at merest rumour of waves, the exuberance of these “beautiful kids on the coast” reinvigorating a momentarily defeated Deal. The slow-motion surf music of Wish I Was delivers some further wisdom from this era, Deal singing “Coming around is easy / Coming down is rough” over knowing and lovely Velvets-y chug.
Mortality is forever a background presence here. The impossibly dreamy Summerland traces the path of the artist Bas Jan Ader’s doomed attempt to sail the Atlantic Ocean and finds romance within his fatal misadventure (“This world’s for me… I’ll follow the night”). But amid all this pain and loss – the very stuff of life, especially once you pass a certain age – remains a sense of vitality, of hope. The anthemic Disobedience is mired in existential dismay – “If this is all we are,” she whispers, “I’m fucked” – but is, in essence, a raging against the dying of the light, an assertion of life over death, Deal snarling “I go where I want / While I’m still on the planet”.
The album closes with A Good Time, a shadowy love song where Kim is either fantasising about “follow[ing] you off of this world” or “push[ing] you off of this world”, its final words repeating the chorus over and over: “We’re having a good time”. This, she’s saying, is ultimately all there is. Life is short, and hard, and invariably end with sorrow for your loved ones, but the joys somehow make it all worth it. Especially if, once in a glorious blue moon, life brings with it sublime Kim Deal records such as this.
Nobody Loves You More is out now on 4AD.
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Tracklisting:
Nobody Loves You More
Coast
Crystal Breath
Are You Mine
Disobedience
Wish I Was
Big Ben Beat
Bats In The Afternoon Sky
Summerland
Come Running
A Good Time Pushed
Photo: Steve Gullick
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