Kim Deal, the illustrious Pixies/Breeders bassist/vocalist hits Vicar Street on June 16th showcasing her wonderful first solo album.
After getting married in the mid-‘80s, Kim Deal moved with her new husband from her hometown of Dayton, Ohio to Boston, Massachusetts. Kim and her twin sister, Kelley, had experience in writing, playing, and recording music, but she soon found that the expectations of musicians in Massachusetts were totally different.
“Me and Kelley played here, and I had an eight-track TASCAM, reel-to-reel, one-inch, here in Dayton, so I had my little studio here,” Kim says of her background when she spoke with Totally Dublin. “So, I had my little studio and was recording here, but it was only until I went to Boston in, like, ’85 or ’84 or something, and all these bars… – it was a big university town, college town – …and all these bars that people were hanging out in, like, T.T. the Bear’s, and ‘The Rat’ (it’s called The Rathskeller, but we all called it ‘The Rat’), and Chet’s Last Call, and Jack’s, and all of these bars, you weren’t supposed to play cover songs. They expected you to be a band that played your own music.
“That was completely new to me. Nobody did that in Dayton, Ohio; you had sets that you played through the evening. Me and Kelley would play sets at little bars. We would play original songs, but just a few. People in Dayton would think that you were very cheeky if you started playing your original material. I thought it was weird, too, that, in Boston, you would play one set, you know? You played your fucking songs and then you left. You got drunk and embarrassed yourself, or whatever.”
While living in Boston, Kim responded to an advert in a local newspaper seeking musicians inspired by Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary. This advert would birth Pixies, who would swiftly become local college radio legends. In their initial short lifespan, Pixies would get signed, release several acclaimed records, tour the world, and influence acts across the globe to this very day.
“[After their success] Pixies, they moved out of Boston,” Kim recalls. “They didn’t really tell me they were moving! [Laughs] I was recording [their third album] Bossanova in Los Angeles. We were actually recording outside of Boston. We were recording in L.A. …because they moved to L.A.! I was like, ‘What are we doing in L.A.?’ I knew Charles [Thompson IV , a.k.a. Black Francis, their frontman] had moved out there with his girlfriend, but then it’s like, ‘Oh, Joey [Santiago, their guitarist], you’re not in a temporary apartment?’ ‘No, me and Linda, we moved out here.’ ‘You have an apartment out here? Really?’ [Laughs] “So, after everybody left Boston, I got a divorce. The divorce came through in ’89. The band left Boston in about that same period of time. So, I just took my stuff in a U-Haul and went home to Dayton, and I’ve been here ever since, working in my basement. It’s been nice.”
Through a record advance for Bossanova, Kim was able to afford a down payment on a suburban home in Dayton. She partly moved back out of a discord with urban living. “I am used to the suburbs,” she says. “That’s my natural state, the suburbs. I can do suburbs very well. It’s easy for me because I know how it goes. There is something about having to learn subway lines and stuff that was a big learning curve for me. It was very steep. Also, it’s expensive and it’s not really convenient to be in a band in a city because, think about it, where are you going to put your gear? Where’s the drum set going to live? So, now you’re in practice spaces, rehearsal spaces. It’s nice just to set my gear up in the basement.”
When she returned to Dayton, Kim would form the alt-rock project The Breeders with Kelley, which existed as a side project until Pixies split in 1993, and then it became her primary band. “Jim [Macpherson], the drummer from The Breeders, I could walk to his house, and Kelley lives nearby,” Kim says of living in Dayton. “And then my family were here. My mom and dad were here. They got pretty sick, eventually.”
As Pixies were slowing down before their initial break-up, The Breeders broke big thanks to their 1990 debut album Pod and its 1993 successor Last Splash, which had a massive radio hit with its lead single “Cannonball.” In 1995, they would take a year off as Kim worked on her only album with her side project The Amps, called Pacer. In 2003, The Breeders would split as Pixies were regrouping. While Kim bounced around from place to place to fulfill the demands of her projects, she never left Dayton. Although she continually wrote and recorded demos in her home, she didn’t give much credence to starting a solo career. That was until a series of singles under Kim’s name were released between 2012 and 2014.
“I had done a solo album before, actually, but I like bands,” Kim says. “It was ‘The Amps.’ I even pretended that I was a band: ‘Tammy and the Amps.’ ‘I’m Tammy, and that’s the Amps.’ But the ‘Tammy’ thing got on my nerves, so I just named it ‘The Amps,’ like I’m a band! But there wasn’t really a band, man; it was just me doing stuff. I played with some of the people that ended up on some of the songs on the record, but it was solo, basically. Jim’s the drummer, but I didn’t put my name on it because I’ve always liked bands.
“But, with the Kim Deal thing, it was 2011, and Pixies had just done what I thought would be the last touring that we would be doing, which was The Lost Cities Tour. Me and Jim were mad at each other, and José [Medeles, a drummer and frequent collaborator] had opened a beautiful drum shop, and he lives in Portland with his family.
“So, I just went out to Los Angeles and I hung out with Mando [Lopez, a former bassist for The Breeders] and Lindsay [Glover], a drummer, and we started playing, and I started putting them out on seven-inches. And I guess since it was a seven-inch – putting ‘Kim Deal’ out on a seven-inch, like, ‘Here. It’s Kim Deal; it seemed like low-hanging fruit. It wasn’t, [in bombastic announcer voice] ‘Here’s a Kim Deal album!, like I’m a solo performer. It’s just like, ‘Here’s my name, and these are a couple of songs I did’, and then it got to be five of them. But then when I did ‘Nobody Loves You More’ with Britt [Walford, the original drummer for The Breeders; also of Slint] and Jack [Lawrence, the song’s bassist], and finished it up with [the engineer Steve] Albini, I said, ‘I’m not going to put this one out as a seven-inch because the audio quality is very good. ’ You know, the sound quality is horrible on a seven-inch. So, I thought I would just direct things to an album and have a certain quality. ”
This would eventually result in Kim’s first solo album, named after the track that inspired the full-length concept, Nobody Loves You More. The album began in earnest in 2019, with Kim demoing the tracks in her home. Then the COVID-19 pandemic locked everything down for a while. Across a five-year timeline, the album was primarily recorded piecemeal in Kim’s basement, Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio facility in Chicago, and Candyland Studios in Dayton, Kentucky. Nobody Loves You More is a deeply personal record that is principally inspired by Kim’s mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s and her subsequent passing. The personnel on the record features a litany of collaborators from her entire career, adding to the album’s introspective, nostalgic and sentimental tone.
“I thought they were going to be good for the song, ” Kim says of who she chose to collaborate with. “I do have a good sense of…I don’t know if it’s quite pride, but I do feel like patting myself on the back a little bit that these people that I’ve played with for thirty-five years, the relationships are so respectful, musically and non-musically.”
One of these collaborators is the late Steve Albini. Steve was a powerhouse of an engineer (he rejected the term “producer”) who, until his sudden passing from a heart attack in his home on May 7th 2024, had worked on albums from Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Plant and Page, Manic Street Preachers, and many more, as well as fronting acts like Shellac and Big Black. Albini had a deep, personal friendship and a decades-spanning working relationship with Kim and The Breeders since he engineered Pixies’ 1988-released debut album, Surfer Rosa, in 1987.
Nobody Loves You More was released five months after Albini’s passing. Albini’s passing came as a gut punch to many, including Kim, who admits that she doesn’t know who she will rely on to engineer her future output. “This is horrible to say, but I wish Steve had been sick before he passed, ” Kim says. “Isn’t that horrible to say? ‘I wish you were in pain and sick a little bit before you passed. ’ ‘Oh, how’s Steve doing? No? He’s not so good, huh?’ Like, I could have those conversations with people. I wish that happened! It was so fucking shocking! He was 61?! He was younger than I am, by the way. I don’t know what’s going to happen. We did everything, from reel-to-reel, on tape. So, ‘Disobedience’ is on tape. ‘Summerland’ is on tape. ‘Are You Mine?’ is on tape. ‘Coast’ is on tape. ‘Nobody Loves You More’ is on tape. ‘Come Running’ is on tape.
“So, what am I going to do now? I don’t know. I like drums on tape. I still do. I don’t know. I’m going to have to get the fuck over it, though, aren’t I? Although, Electrical is still going. It’s still up and running. And I’ve been up there on a sesh without Steve. He’s been busy before, so…Steve who?! [Laughs]”
When Nobody Loves You More released last November, it garnered universal critical acclaim and ended up on the “Best Of 2024” end-of-year lists from most publications. We asked Kim how she felt about the critical acclaim after all the time and effort she put into crafting such an intimate expression. “It’s enjoyable, actually, ” she responds. “It’s not like I’m expecting it, and it wouldn’t change anything, but it’s nice. You know what’s nice? It’s nice when a musician person that I know will text me and say, ‘I’ve been listening to your album nonstop. ’ It’s not so much, ‘Attagirl!’; it’s more like, ‘Oh, somebody is deriving pleasure and having a pleasurable experience listening to music, and I’ve contributed to that.’ Because I used to become obsessed and listen to things, over and over again. I loved that, and if I can get somebody to do that, that’s great, you know?”
Before the release of Nobody Loves You More, Kim did some dates with The Breeders, supporting Foo Fighters in New Zealand and Australia and opening for Olivia Rodrigo on some dates of the North American leg of her Guts Tour. After the album, she has been headlining across the U.S. (with some select dates in London), playing the album back-to-front. Next month, Kim will bring The Nobody Loves You More Tour to Europe for the first time, which includes a date at Dublin’s Vicar Street on June 16th. Inspired by her time doing support slots on those aforementioned tours, and the fact that she will be required to do a limited set at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Kim is considering rejigging the set order and including some past hits, like The Breeders’ ‘Cannonball’ and Pixies’ ‘Gigantic’ for the European leg.
Kim has regularly performed in Ireland since Pixies made their Irish debut at the National Stadium in 1990, accruing (based on my estimations) twenty-two Irish performances across her time with Pixies and The Breeders. We wrap the interview by asking if she has fond memories of touring here, and she highlights the time that The Breeders opened for Nirvana at The Point Depot in 1992. “The Breeders all remember that show,” she says. “Was it The Point? Opening for Nirvana? That was a blast. Jim Macpherson has a better memory because he wasn’t drinking at the time, and I was. But when he talks, I remember some of the things he’s talking about.
“That might be the time that Kurt got into a fight with security, I think, because security was rough on people, [Laughs] then they started punching him, I think. Maybe! [Laughs] Or they didn’t know who he was because he didn’t have a pass on. You have to wear a pass. People who work at venues don’t know who the fuck you are!”
Kim Deal’s debut album, Nobody Loves You More, is available now. Kim will perform at Vicar Street, Dublin on June 16th. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster.
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Photos: Steve Gullick
