I’m on a Zoom with Kim Deal discussing Nobody Loves You More, her first solo album in an almost 40-year-long musical career—first with The Pixies, and later with The Breeders, the band she started with her twin sister Kelley Deal. Nobody Loves You More is a sweeping emotional landscape, with a musical score that ranges from romantic lullabies, to electronic dance beats, to just pure rock n’ roll, all with her signature honey-sweet voice, whose dulcet tones remain as lovely and devastating as ever. “If I had to look at all of it, I would say it’s about shame.” A beat. “No, I’m fucking around! Sort of.” She laughs. Her giddy energy comes off as a surprise for someone who has never not been the embodiment of an ineffable brand of cool. What about her “obsession with failure,” mentioned in the album liner—isn’t that a kind of shame?
“I’m not obsessed with failure, but with this sort of outlaw, bravado living—like the Waylon Jennings and the George Jones and their character arc. Their eyes turn yellow from liver disease, they have mutton chops, and they’ve got their cop glasses and they’re on their third wife.” She continues, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I’ve had to talk about [the album] and actually use words to get the feeling out of my head.” On the album cover, she recreates the last known picture of Bas Jan Ader, a conceptual artist who in 1975 set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, in an attempt to reach Falmouth, England, all by himself. His boat was found adrift 10 months later, his body never recovered. “He didn’t make it. But he fucking tried. And it’s just failure, man.”
The 63-year-old musician strikes me as someone who has always “fucking tried,” and that hopeful feeling is present throughout the album. On the first single, “Coast,” a jazzy ditty with horns and surf guitars, she sings “I had a hard, hard landing/ I really should’ve ducked and rolled out—out of my life,” like she’s looking back at her life and thinking things could’ve been different, but you know what, they still worked out after all. “When I start writing a song and playing the guitar and chugging along, I can definitely hear [Breeders drummer] Jim MacPherson on something; and if I hear his drums, then it’s going to be a great Breeders song, so that’s easy,” Kim explains of her songwriting process. “I can’t really do it on purpose.”
The songs on this album are unmistakably Kim Deal and, at the same time, could never be confused for Breeders songs (with the exception, perhaps, of “A Good Time Pushed,” the last song she recorded with the legendary producer Steve Albini before his sudden death earlier this year). And yet, there is a strong Breeders representation. MacPherson and Deal’s sister Kelley appear on a number of songs, as does Mando Lopez, who played on an early lineup of The Breeders. “Josephine [Wiggs, the Breeders’ bassist] played on something, but it sounded funky and then, she wasn’t around after that—otherwise it would have included all the Breeders people.”
Kim describes “anything that’s, like, ‘wow, that’s weird, let me look at that sort of thing,” as material. On “Are You Mine,” she heartbreakingly sings, “Are you mine? /Are you my baby?/ I have no mind / For nothin’ but love.” The song was inspired by something her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, said to her once. “She couldn’t put a lot of things together, but she was still walking, and she stopped me in the hall one day and said ‘Are you mine?’ and it was just so sweet,” she explains. “I knew she wasn’t saying ‘Are you somebody I’ve met before?’ The bonds of motherhood were still stinging inside her.”
“Crystal Breath,” meanwhile, came through her love for the Australian actress Rose Byrne. “Somebody asked me, ‘Hey, do you want to do a TV theme for a new television show?’ It’s like, no, not really. ‘Rose Byrne is in it.’”—Deal charmingly recreates both sides of a conversation when she is recounting a story—“Oh, excuse me, Rose Byrne is in the television show? Okay, yeah, I’m going to do this, I’m going to try to get this to work. I want anything that she does. But it was declined.” On that song she sings, “Beat’s gonna lead us/Live on.” Luckily, she’s always got the beat.
