KIM DEAL IS EAGER TO TALK ABOUT HER FIRST SIX DECADES: HOW HER TEENAGE performances with twin sister Kelley led to a lifetime collaboration; how her fractious first band, Pixies, helped expand indie rock’s scope; how her second band, The Breeders, inverted the genre’s gender ratio. She especially wants to unpackNobody Loves You More, the pinballing November 2024 album that marked her proper solo debut at age 63.
“People are always thinking, ‘Where’s she been?’” says Deal, welcoming MOJO into the little brick bungalow she bought in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, from the windfall of the Pixies’ Doolittle. “Well, I released another album and created another band, and now I’m doing something else. I’ve been busy.”
But first, Deal needs to open the mail. In the final days of 2024, Greg Norman – a longtime engineer at the late Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago – dropped by Deal’s place for a night of board games on his way to a family holiday. He left behind a sealed cardboard box, which she finally slices into this morning with a grin of anticipation. She lifts a metallic rectangle from inside and raises both hands in triumph. It is, she explains, a Norma-phone preamp.
“Greg makes these,” she says. “Steve recorded me a bunch with this, and I always liked how it sounded with my voice. Now I can use it at home, by myself.”
More than her velveteen rasp, esoteric but poignant lyrics, or uncanny song structures, no thread has perhaps been more consistent through Deal’s career than the desire to make music herself or, at least, in her own peculiar fashion. This new piece of gear offers another opportunity to do just that. Just minutes later, she dashes down the basement stairs, flipping through rows of tape machines and recording consoles she’s employed to capture her ideas since she was a teenager. She races back up two flights – pausing only long enough to show off the audio cables tucked inside a bathroom laundry chute, allowing signals to pass through the house – to show off still more equipment, detailing each bit’s faults and features. For her, it has all served what may be her only overarching goal.
Fully focused: Kim Deal gets hands on, London, July 16, 2024.
Steve Gullick
The real Deal: Kim the solo operator in 2024; (opposite page) with her fellow Pixies (from left) David Lovering, Black Francis, Joey Santiago, Boston, 1988.
“I COULDN’T GET DRUNK ENOUGH,
AND I COULDN’T GET HIGH ENOUGH.
IF IT WAS STILL WORKING, I WOULD HAVE STILL BEEN DOING IT.”
Steve Gullick
“I am just trying to get some noises to come out of the speaker that sound fucking good,” she says, smiling. “If I can do that? Great.”
Making Nobody Loves You More, however, required Deal to learn a completely new skill set as she neared 60. Days after burying her mother in Ohio in February 2020, she returned to a vacation cabin on Florida’s Summerland Key, where the pandemic marooned her for four months with an ocean view and an unfamiliar digital recording rig. She got to work, unlocking new inspirations and, in turn, the core of her solo debut.
“Her creativity and energy haven’t tapered since I first met her – the appetite to go after it, to just get something recorded,” says Norman, who first met Deal around 1999, when she was recording The Breeders’ album Title TK with Albini. “She also has the energy to change things, if it isn’t working. She’ll just start over.”
Down in Florida, there was no masterplan, no conceit. She just played and wrote. But Deal knows that time is at a premium. Since the 2018 release of The Breeders’ All Nerve, both her parents and an aunt died. After nearly 40 years of work and friendship with Deal, Albini passed in May. Nobody Loves You More was one of the final records he engineered.
“I work at a slower pace,” she says several hours later, bouncing on the balls of her feet, then shrugs: “But I’d like to get going.”