Kim Deal Interviewed: “Cannonball broke Olivia Rodrigo’s brain…”

Unlike her former bandmates Pixies, who last month put out their fifth album since reforming at the start of the millennium, Kim Deal has taken a more outwardly leisurely approach to releasing music. The Breeders, the band she formed with sister Kelley in 1989, have made just five albums in their 35-year history, while her side-project The Amps folded after just one LP, 1995’s Pacer.

This week, however, Deal releases her first ever solo album Nobody Loves You More. Although informed by the loss of her parents, it’s a glorious, life-affirming synthesis of swooning pop and subterranean dissonance, and might just be her best record since 1993’s Last Splash. You can read MOJO’s review of Nobody Loves You More HERE!

Last month, Deal spoke to MOJO’s Stevie Chick about why we’re only now getting to hear a Deal solo LP, her surprise patronage from pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo, coping with her late mother’s Altheimer’s and The Breeders’ festive musical plans…

Hi Kim, where are you speaking from today?

I’m in Dayton. Ohio’s a fucking meme now, dude. Like you know how kids say ‘Rizz’, meaning something has charisma? Ohio’s the opposite, because the state’s so sketchy. It doesn’t have much ‘rizz’, right?

“Rizz”?? Did you pick up this slang while touring with Olivia Rodrigo?

That was so great. We did four nights at Madison Square Garden with her, and the Forum in LA, and this big new place in LA, the Intuit Dome. But playing as the opening act of a big thing like Olivia means basically playing while you watch people trying to find their seats. It’s not like when me and you go to the club and there’s an opening act and you actually watch them. But still, it was an exciting, adventurous thing to do. And she’s a fantastic singer, really super at what she does, and she’s been very supportive of us. There’s a section in her show where she’s at the piano and talks about how, for her, there’s ‘before hearing Cannonball’ and ‘after hearing Cannonball’, and how Cannonball broke her little brain.

Why make a solo album?

I’m not a big picture person, like, ‘This next album is going to be a new statement from me! This is Who I Am, Now!’ I can’t think like that. I had a plan to make a bunch of seven-inches… I went through a period of exclusively listening to 45s in the 90s. I ended up doing five of them, and towards the end I thought, ‘That’s 10 songs – that’s, like, an album. If I put them out as an album then people don’t have to keep standing up to flip the 45 over.’ But then I thought, ‘People would just be buying those same songs again’. And then The Breeders got back together to do the whole 20th anniversary of Last Splash thing, and then we recorded All Nerve. And once that was all done, I started writing solo songs again. I’m always writing. And it became a whole new album.

What determines if something you write is a Breeders song or a Kim Deal song?

It’s pretty obvious. For instance, Summerland has a ukulele, and I knew that that would really bum [Breeders bassist] Josephine Wiggs out in such a deep, profound way that it could never be a Breeders song. And when I wrote Coast, I could hear the horn part in my head, and I thought that could either be cool or could be stupid. And I tried to get Kelley [Deal, Kim’s sister and Breeders guitarist] to play the horn part on guitar, but it didn’t sound as fun. It sounded like it would be more fun to have the horns play it. But again, I didn’t think Josephine would like that. So the songs kind of put themselves in a sorting hat. That happens. I don’t say if they’re Breeders or Kim Deal songs, they say what house they’re going to be in.

And there are strings on the album, too…

I hear this stuff in my head. I heard those strings, and then I had to figure out how to put them down without being able to write music. So that’s very labour-intensive, because I have to hum them. And the minute I start singing what I hear in my head, I’m like, ‘that’s not it. Let me try it again.’ I find the note, and it tries to run away from me, but then I catch it and I write it down.

What’s Coast about, and is that some delicious Massachusetts slang there?

[sings] “Wicked fine fine fine…” Absolutely. I was in Nantucket in 1999 or something like that, and I was losing my mind. I was on the island, trying to dry out. It was wintertime, off-season. But there were all these kids that lived there, and they were up and around… [voice of disbelief] in the daytime! They’d all be checking the WAM, the Wave Action Motion, to tell them where the waves were, and then they’d all bugger off from their bartending jobs and grab their surfboards and go be outside, doing outside things. And I just thought, it must be so nice to be outside in the daytime, and I always think of that moment fondly.

Your record label says the sleeve artwork speaks to your ‘current obsession with the concept of failure’.

I’m not obsessed. I think it has to do with all this pathos that was happening in my life. My dad died the year before my mother, and I would drive his old Caddy, listening to his old Mellow Hits Of The 70s cassette. I was driving around, listening to that and my life was basically watching the cycle of our bodies falling apart. Maybe that had something to do with that, I don’t know. But I really got thinking about the bravado of George Jones, Waylon Jennings, all these guys going from the black and white photos of their macho, middle-aged 70s heyday, to the late 80s, when they’re wearing mutton chops, cop glasses and liver spots, and they’re on their third wife, and just everything is failing and they’re tired. I just think it’s interesting, the look, the whole thing.

I was intrigued by it. And I think that there’s a comfortableness to failure. I like living in failure. [laughs] No, I don’t, I don’t! But when I was visiting Alex Da Corte, who did the album cover, he had this book with photos of all these rock’n’rollers from Boston, Robert Longo and a couple other guys, these wild artists and performance artists. So one of the guys, Bas Jan Ader, decides he’s going to take off from Cape Cod to Ireland on a boat. And it’s the search of the miraculous, one of those, ‘I got a case of beer, I’m going to do this, man, and it’s going to be awesome.’ They have this last photo of him in the book, before he goes. And they never see him again. He failed. And it’s just interesting to me, the idea of him pushing off the coast in his boat and going across the Atlantic... and he didn’t make it. I don’t know if there’s anything to be learned from it or not. I think it’s good that people try.

Tell me about Are You Mine? The title suggests it’s a love song – but it’s more complex than that, isn’t it?

My mother had Alzheimer’s. And when you’re living with someone with Alzheimer’s, it’s interesting to see how much is there to lose. Like, how much of a human is there to lose? Because you think losing one part of them is going to be it, but then it’s like stacks of things. It goes some way down. Many things. Losing time is a big one, because when they lose time, the sense of time, they’re losing a network of connections.

When my mom stopped me in the hallway and said, ‘Are you my baby?’, what was so sweet about it is that, she didn’t know what sisters and cousins were anymore. She doesn’t know my fucking name. But she knows that I look more than familiar to her. It’s more than, like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ She meant, ‘Are you my baby?’ And I thought that showed that the strand of motherhood actually is quite enduring. Even with the mind completely gone and all notion of what a family might be and what relations are, there’s still some umbilical cord, like, ‘Were you my little baby doll?’ And I thought that was sweet.

When she said that, I knew that would be a beautiful sentiment that I wanted to live in. I wanted to think about it, and I wanted to have that be a title of a song and sort of understand it. And also it’s a good love song too. So it holds up more than just, like, ‘my mom’s real sick’. And I was so lucky. She was so sweet. The thought of it is just so warm and great, to live in her asking me that, and just thinking about it. And also, figuring out the thing of, ‘I have no time’. It really was weird to watch somebody lose time. Because I always knew Alzheimer’s patients might think their grandchild was their child, or be like ‘Uncle Bobby’s still alive’ when he’s been dead for years. But if they lose the sense of time, all of it’s possible. They’re not being weird.

Will you make another solo album? Is there more Breeders music to come?

I swear to God, The Breeders have a Christmas song. It’s not done, but it’s an idea. A pretty good idea. Josephine’s not pleased, but she’ll just have to live with it…

Nobody Loves You More is out November 22 on 4AD.

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Photo: Steve Gullick

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