‘I’m intrigued by failure’: Kim Deal on death, addiction – and releasing her debut solo album at 63

In all of her decades as one of rock’s great frontpeople, Kim Deal has not once appeared on an album cover. “Back in the 80s, it wasn’t the fashion,” she says, remembering the words of Vaughan Oliver, her label 4AD’s late graphic designer, who did all the artwork for her former band, Pixies, as well as her canonical 90s albums as the Breeders with her twin sister, Kelley. “He would say: ‘You’re an asshole if you want to be on the cover. You just want to be recognised in the streets.’ So it never even occurred to me to be on album covers, because I’m not a weirdo.” She sighs, catching herself. “Not that people that do that are …”
Deal has evaded being that weirdo ever since. The 63-year-old is the star most likely to “show up in sweats”, a self-taught producer who used to solder her own cables. While many of her peers struck out on their own – even her sister – she has always had a band mentality. After the Breeders went on hiatus in 1994, she briefly flirted with going solo. But even that became a band (the Amps) that turned back into the Breeders. “You know, you’re right!” she says. “Kelley and Jim [MacPherson, drums] wormed their way in.” That said, they never quite regained momentum. “Everybody needed a break. And there were things going on that made it difficult. There were struggles …” Well-publicised ones, too: addiction, arrests, fallouts, rehab. “Exactly,” she adds. “But I’m always going to keep writing.”
That writing has become a solo album – her first, Nobody Loves You More, due in November. Deal, finally, is on the sleeve. She agreed to it on the basis that it would be “a good shot”, so she enlisted the artist Alex Da Corte to take her picture: on a podium, out at sea, with a guitar, an amp and a flamingo for company. It’s inspired by a photo of the Dutch performance artist Bas Jan Ader’s attempt to cross the Atlantic in 1975. He set sail from Massachusetts in a tiny boat “and they never saw him again”, says Deal. “He’s dead because he’s fantasised this journey.”
It’s a bleak image, but one typical of Deal’s dark humour as she sips on a Sprite one afternoon in London, clad not in sweats but smart 50s-style slacks and a shirt. She is enjoying the promo cycle without the band so far, but is also missing their input. “I’ll send them stuff anyway, like: ‘Do you like this photo they want to use?’ I think Kelley wishes I would just lose her number.”
This period is perhaps one of her busiest since the Breeders reformed with their classic lineup in 2013: Deal and Kelley, the British bassist Josephine Wiggs and – after he and Kim didn’t speak for 15 years, although neither of them can remember why – Macpherson. The group played a scene-stealing Glastonbury slot in June and, as of this year, are the only band who can say they have supported Nirvana and Olivia Rodrigo. The US pop star has said of Deal: “I thought Kim was the coolest girl in the world,” while the Breeders’ sibling harmonies, freewheeling playfulness and slacker cool have influenced Rodrigo’s sound.
So it feels like the right time for an artistic statement, however much that phrase would probably make Deal shudder. She has been writing new material since about 2011, when she returned from Pixies’ Lost Cities tour and then quit. Some of it became a lo-fi 7in series two years later, which she posted out by hand, and some made it on to the Breeders’ last album, All Nerve, in 2018. The rest eventually became Nobody Loves You More, she says, for practical reasons. “I thought: nobody likes to have to walk up to their stereo and flip over [the record after] three and a half minutes, that’s kind of a drag, so I could put them all on an album.”
The Breeders have been performing a few of Deal’s solo songs live and all members except Wiggs (due to bass parts that had to be redone) play on the record. Why didn’t these songs just go to the band? She gives the simple reason that she started playing some of them on the ukulele, to which Wiggs would have said – Deal puts on her plummiest English impression of disgust – “Absolutely not!” Instead, Nobody Loves You More was recorded across different studios with a slew of old friends, including Josh Klinghoffer, Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub, Slint’s Britt Walford and the late Steve Albini. There are fragments of biographical details throughout, but Deal shrouds them in her usual surreal imagery.
In the words of Albini, who recorded much of the album, Deal makes “intense, personal little masterpieces that reward repeated listening like a great novel does reading”. Nobody Loves You More channels classic American sounds: there are moments of tender country and sublime Rat Pack strings and doo-wop; the sweetest melodies, but also left-turns such as the dance-punk of Crystal Breath, a rejected theme for the aerobics comedy series Physical.
Making it was unmooring at points, to say the least. Deal’s mother, father, uncle and aunt all died within a year of each other, between 2019 and 2020. Their family was close: when her mother, Ann, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2002, Deal moved back to Dayton, Ohio, to help care for her. Her parents were incredibly supportive of their daughters’ careers: Ann would often capture their vocals on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Their father, Ed, meanwhile, once drove the Breeders around on tour with Nirvana (and listened to Ray Charles on headphones the whole way). Deal would later return the favour, ferrying her elderly parents down to the Florida Keys for holidays.
She came to see Florida as a writing retreat and went to stay there alone at the start of 2020. No sooner had she settled in than Deal was called back to Dayton as Ann’s condition worsened; she died shortly after. “It had been a long time coming. I would have liked it to have happened way earlier,” she admits. “She was pretty ravaged physically by that time, let alone mentally.” After her mother’s death, Deal returned to the Keys. Then – she delivers each line like she is telling a ghost story around a campfire – “Covid hits. They shut off the two-lane road to get out. I get trapped in Florida for months with the Trump flags. No neighbours, no friends. It felt harrowing walking down the street.”
During this unnerving period, she cut a lot of the demos that ended up on the album, this staunchly analogue musician having begrudgingly learned Pro Tools with a friend over FaceTime. The aggressive Big Ben Beat bristles with the frustration of that time, based on a backing track sent to Deal by Fay Milton and Ayse Hassan of Goddess (and, before that, Savages). Other songs are sunnier, such as Summerland, which she sketched out on that ukulele – a gift from Albini after the Deal sisters played at his wedding in Hawaii. “We were doing the bridal march and sang a Dolly Parton song,” she says.
Albini engineered much of Nobody Loves You More, while Deal produced. He used many of the same techniques he deployed on Pixies’ Surfer Rosa in 1988. Yet, on Summerland, he recorded an orchestra in a day; on Coast, the Chicago marching band Mucca Pazza. “He’s better with me solo,” declares Deal. “He was more open to being adventurous.”
Albini died suddenly of a heart attack in May, at 61. “It just devastated an entire community,” says Deal. “He was, like, a year younger than me, so it was really surprising.” She fights back tears. “I’m sorry. I think I’m tired. Sorry.”
Understandably, Nobody Loves You More grapples with mortality. “It has to come through,” she says. “I’m getting older, too.” There is a sweet nod to her mother on Are You Mine? “One time, she stopped me in the hallway and said: ‘Are you mine?’ There was something inside her that knew that [we were] connected, but you could see her trying to piece it together.” After Ann’s death, Deal felt a release. “I remember thinking: no prescriptions to pick up, I don’t have to watch out for a fall. It’s like I’m a teenager. I could even move house if I wanted to.”
Other influences seeped through while she drove around in her dad’s Cadillac, playing an old easy-listening compilation. The tracklist included George Jones’s He Stopped Loving Her Today, a song that was played at her dad’s funeral. Deal became “fixated” by crooners such as Jones and Waylon Jennings, “these old outlaw boys with the mutton chops, aviator glasses, they’re on their third wife”. Does she consider herself an outlaw? “I have no idea … it sounds good when you say it like that,” she says. She was drawn to their “sad songs, with regret”.
“I have regrets, of course,” says Deal. She rarely explains her songs, but brings up the lyric “I really should duck and roll out / Out of my life” from Coast, one of several on the album that suggest wanting to start anew. “I guess that is wanting to disappear from the dumbness that I just did,” she nods. Like what? “Oh, 1997, ’98, ’99, 2000, 2001 and most of 2002.” This was the period in which she experienced substance abuse and had a tumultuous time making the third Breeders album, Title TK, then got sober. “I would like to do those years again. I. Did. Not. Like. Them,” she enunciates. “They were a waste of time.”
She says there is something about the idea of defeat that she keeps returning to in her solo music, although she can’t put her finger on it. “I’m intrigued by failure, I swear. I don’t know why … Failure is more comfortable.”
More comfortable than success? “No, I don’t know if it’s failure versus success. There’s just something about trying to do something and then just getting utterly clobbered by life.”
The Breeders never matched their critical acclaim with commercial domination like their arena-filling friends Soundgarden and Nirvana. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis once wrote that “a sense of ‘What if?’” hangs over Deal’s career – that if certain stars had aligned, and egos kept at bay, then perhaps she would have been a bigger name. (There is an oft-repeated story that Kurt Cobain said he wished Deal had been allowed to write more songs for Pixies – she penned their most memorable number, Gigantic – which alluded to rivalry with the frontman, Black Francis). Yet Deal remains enormously influential: the Breeders’ sound echoes across modern indie-rock and pop, from Courtney Barnett and Waxahatchee to the Linda Lindas and, of course, Rodrigo. Ask Deal what she thinks of thousands of screaming teens discovering her music on Rodrigo’s Guts tour, though, and she is typically self-deprecating. “Somebody said to me recently: ‘You’re gonna be the first band they’ve ever seen.’ They’re seeing Olivia Rodrigo – they’re not seeing us at all. But they do feel the vibe. So that’s a positive thing.”
She is, however, happy to be thought of as an alt-rock icon. “I love it. Although the word ‘alt’ does leave a bad taste in my mouth. I’m from Ohio,” she says, where people would sneer: “‘Alternative to what? Good music?’” But she hasn’t considered her legacy just yet. “I don’t think people look upon their own legacy, do they?”
For now, as with its marooned cover art, Nobody Loves You More is Deal’s voyage into the unknown. Will she tour? “I would like to play some shows, for sure,” she says. “But there has to be a demand … I spent my time in bands, not just me, so I don’t know if there’s really any: ‘Oh, Kim Deal’s playing down the road, let’s go watch her.’” Does she know whether there will be new Breeders material, at least? She reverts to her happy place, which may or may not be taking the mick. “There’s a Christmas song, I swear to God. You know, it’s not like Merry Christmas, but it’s of the season. Should we be a band that has a Christmas song? Can you imagine Josephine? ‘Absolutely not!’”
Nobody Loves You More is released via 4AD on 22 November