Kim Deal’s favourite moment making her solo debut album Nobody Loves You More was watching Steve Albini record the orchestra for a breezy, swaying melancholic number called Summerland. Deal had worked with the famed producer and engineer, who died earlier this year, often throughout her career, from Pixies’ trailblazing 1988 debut Surfer Rosa through to the 2018 Breeders album All Nerve.
But she’d never seen him work like this.
Albini, she says, was the kinda guy you went to when “You and your two mates have 17 songs, you’ve got time off on the weekend and you drive 40 minutes to Electrical Audio and he records you beautifully and you're done after two days."
This was a different side to Albini. “When we were doing the strings for Summerland," she says, "there’s like 11 or 12 players, French horn dudes, strings, violas, cellos. And Steve’s not harried, nobody feels rushed, everybody is very relaxed, and he’s got them sitting exactly where they should be sitting.
"He was so elegant and so professional, I’d never seen that from him.”
Nailed in one take, the swelling strings on Summerland are one of Nobody Loves You More’s many mesmeric peaks. An album that places Americana-ish ballads, country laments and Mariachi horns next to rattling grunge and icy, danceable electronic pop, it is the sound of one of rock music’s most supernaturally talented figures breaking new ground.
Kim Deal has been many things over her near four-decade career – bass-playing extraordinaire in the Pixies, the central creative dynamo of The Breeders, ringleader of The Amps – but she has rarely been a solo artist.
It was around the release of a run of seven-inch singles a decade ago that she decided maybe she would become one. “I ended up doing five of them,” she says. “It was the first time the records had my name on them. The Amps was basically a solo album but I didn’t put my name on it. The seven-inches had my name on, and that was a good gateway drug to doing a solo album.”
Kim Deal is 63 and speaking from her home in Dayton, Ohio on a Tuesday morning in early November. It is the day of the US election and to avoid spending every other minute checking on progress, she is distracting herself with interviews instead.
When she first started work on some of these songs – some of the oldest tracks were written almost 14 years ago – trying to tell people that Trump would be about to enter his second term as US President would be akin to Marty McFly trying to convince Doc Brown that Ronald Reagan is running the country. It’s not the only seismic change in the intervening period since the record began. “When I started this album, there was no streaming,” she says.
The limitations of 7-inch vinyl were one of the motivations to make a full-blown album. “I was like, ‘It’d be nice if I could make something where you don’t have to stand up and turn it over’,” she says. “I always think about albums anyway. When I do the sequence, I’m like, ‘OK, side 1, song 1’.”
When she looks at the finished record, she’s surprised by how it turned out. “I thought maybe it would be a bit more indie when I first started it,” she says, “and also a little less ambitious-y. But then came a couple of songs on it, like Disobedience and A Good Time Pushed and Crystal Breath, and those were like, ‘Hey there, let me have your attention!’.”
But right now, something else requires Deal’s attention: her dog, Ruby, dmeanding a treat. The clocks have changed, she says, but Ruby hasn't adjusted. "Pets don’t care what the clock reads," she says. "They’re just like, ‘Fuck you!’”
Ruby has primary glaucoma, but deals with it just fine. “Dogs are fucking weird," she says. "They don’t care. It’s like the least important thing, their eyes. She’s got her hearing and her smell and she’s rocking through the house.”
Deal’s daily routine usually goes like this: Dog, dog stuff, dog stuff, some work stuff, dog stuff, some work stuff, dog stuff, dog, dog, dog, relax, dog stuff. She takes Ruby out for a walk twice a day – mixing up the up the route here and there – and she’s been basking in a surprisingly warm autumn.
“Fall was great,” she says. “Global warming is horrible and all but damn, it makes for beautiful weather. It’s been gorgeous, I love it, it’s like beach bathing suit weather.”
Deal moved back home to Ohio in the early 00s to help care for her mother who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She died in 2020 and Deal’s father also passed in the same period. Her parents, she says, cast the biggest shadow over Nobody Loves You More.
“I was living with them and there was so much fucking pathos, man,” she says. “18 years of Alzheimer’s? Jesus Christ. That’s a lot to lose and it doesn’t go any way other than like this,” she says, making a downward motion. The album, she says, hits a lot of different emotions. "They're all just moments in time. And I just love them all, even the sad ones. There’s light in all of it and I love being alive.”
Not that she ever sat around pontificating about highfalutin lyrical themes. “I do have a pet peeve about bands when they sit down and they have a grand idea, ‘This album is gonna talk about the love of the planet!’, or how we should all just get along. I’m not good at that,” she declares. “I just want this song that I’m working on not to suck.”
She is her own harshest critic when it comes to deciding what sucks and what doesn’t suck. The reason the record ends with A Good Time Pushed, for example, is not because Deal thought the song’s frayed magnificence was the perfect final stop for the album’s narrative arc, but because for a long time she wasn’t fussed about the bassline. “That’s why that song is at the end of the record, because I didn’t like it,” she hoots. “But now I actually do fucking like it!”
It was the same with the dusty 60s surf-pop of Wish I Was – Deal putting off recording her vocals because she found them too “blah” – plus a moment on the strummed guitars and lively horns of Coast. “On the first chorus, I hit this note on a harmony that still bothers me,” she says. “But after that I like it.”
The latter was written in 2019 but the idea first came to Deal 20 years earlier, when she was grappling with alcoholism. “I was drying out, it was a hard time, but that time always stuck with me, as hard times do,” she says. “The song is about that period of time in 1999.”
It's an album of snapshots across her life. Some songs came to be in 2011, just after she’d got off the road with the Pixies. Was she still in the band at that point? “No,” she says. “Well, officially yeah. We’d just got done with the Lost Cities tour, which was supposed to be the last tour, hence 'Lost Cities': cities that we had never gone to.”
Her departure was confirmed in a statement in 2013, later ratified by Pixies frontman Black Francis in an interview with The Guardian where he claimed that she quit in a Caffé Nero on the high street of south Welsh market town Monmouth.
“I did Adam Buxton’s podcast recently and he’s a real swell guy,” she says. “He mentioned that and everybody laughed like it was known to be a shitty coffee shop. But,” she says, “I didn’t quit then. My bass was done at the time.”
When Deal thinks of all the various strands of her career, she considers them both part of one continuous artistic journey and disparate at the same time. “It’s the same and then it’s different,” she says. “It’s a lot different singing a lead than when I play bass, where I have to focus on the drum and focus on the harmony and I know that sounds techy, but that’s the big thing that makes it different.”
Cannonball, one of The Breeders’ all-time classic songs, has gone Gold, recognising 500,000 sales. “We were just told yesterday,” she says, reflecting on what she might consider her biggest achievement. “I think in career achievement, if those two words go together, it would be something like that, maybe. It’s nice there’s still a growth that’s happening. Last Splash went Platinum. I don’t know if Pixies went Platinum yet.”
Perhaps one of the reasons for The Breeders’ enduring appeal has been their ability to reach a new generation. They spent some of 2024 on tour with Olivia Rodrigo as the opening act on the pop superstar’s spectacular Guts World Tour, Rodrigo saying after the shows, “I thought Kim was the coolest girl in the world. I’m very inspired by them and everything they stand for. They are absolutely iconic, and playing these shows with them has been a surreal honour.”
“That was an adventure,” recalls Deal. “Jim McPherson, the drummer, had never played Madison Square Garden before – this is before the KKK rally that Trump just did there recently – but still, it’s a big deal and he was excited to do it. It was a big adventure for us. I’d done it with U2 already with the Pixies, and I had done Dodger Stadium with The Cure, Pixies, Love & Rockets, so I know the assignment.”
But Deal was not prepared for the ear-piercing screams of Rodrigo fans. “The loudest sound I’ve ever heard in a music venue is those girls when she comes out,” she laughs. “I actually put my hands over my ears, it was louder than any music I’ve ever heard. As support band, you just play and you watch people find their seat, but it was a different crowd. Breeders opened for Foo Fighters this past year too, most of the people were in their seats there.”
For the immediate future, though, Deal’s focus is on her own shows. There are plans for gigs in early 2025 that will include additional string players to bring some of Nobody Loves You More’s more sumptuous moments to life, including a date at The Barbican in London. “It’ll be very cool,” she says.
She also needs to work out what to do with tracks that didn’t make the cut. “I do have a couple of songs that I didn’t finish, we did one at Steve’s that needs to be done over again,” she says.
The problem, she says, is how to approach it after the death of Albini. “Now that Steve is gone, that has to all be looked at in a different way. I haven’t even begun to imagine what I’m gonna be staring at,” she states. “Everybody is missing him for lots of totally different reasons.”
Working from her basement studio, she used to have Albini on speed-dial as her own personal engineering guide. “I could just text him and send him a picture of me holding two things and going, ‘Am I allowed to do this?’ and he’d just go, ‘Yes’.”
But, like she says, it’s all moments in time. She loves them all, even the sad ones. Look hard enough and there’s light in all of it. Right now, Kim Deal loves being alive.
Kim Deal's debut solo album, Nobody Loves You More, is available now via 4AD. Get your special edition orange vinyl copy via the Louder store.
