Kim Deal's newly-released debut solo album, Nobody Loves You More, has justifiably been receiving rave reviews, and looks set to enter the UK Top 20 later this week.
While the collection is the first long-player issued by The Breeders vocalist/guitarist and ex-Pixies bassist under her own name, Deal actually began releasing solo material over a decade ago.
Her debut solo single, Walking With A Killer / Dirty Hessians, was released as a limited edition, 1,000-copies only seven inch vinyl single on the musician's own single's series via her website in 2013. The song later resurfaced on The Breeders' fifth studio record, All Nerve, released by 4AD in 2018.
In a new interview with Vulture, the 63-year-old musician reveals that the song was inspired by an unpleasant and unnerving personal experience she had in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio.
Asked by writer Drew Fortune to nominate a song which reminds her of Dayton, Deal replies, “Walking With a Killer, and there’s a story behind it.”
“Growing up, we were surrounded by miles of cornfields, and they can be very creepy,” she continues. “We were in Huber Heights, which is a suburb of Dayton. There were little towns separated by cornfields, so I could walk to the store but have to pass by the creepy cornfields. It was dark, and suddenly these dudes in a van sped by and yelled out, 'Rape victim!'
“It was so fucking creepy and weird. It was like I was asking for it, because I was taking space on the earth. There’s a lot of creepy places to walk around here, but that moment with the assholes in the van inspired the song.”
As Louder's Niall Doherty reveals in his cover story interview with Deal, the limitations of seven-inch vinyl became one of the motivating factors behind Deal finally making a full solo 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’.”
Read the full interview with Kim Deal here.
