DT 1
am used to the suburbs,” she says. “That’s my nat
ural state, the suburbs. I can do suburbs very well. It’s easy for me because I know how it goes. There is something about having to learn subway lines and stuff that was a big learning curve for me. It was very steep. “Also, it’s expensive and it’s not really convenient to be in a band in a city because, think about it, where are you going to put your gear? Where’s the drum set going to live? So, now you’re in practice spaces, rehearsal spaces. It’s nice just to set my gear up in the basement.” When she returned to Dayton, Kim would form the alt-rock project The Breeders with Kelley, which existed as a side project until Pixies split in 1993, and then it became her primary band. “Jim [Macpherson], the drummer from The Breeders, I could walk to his house, and Kelley lives nearby,” Kim says of living in Dayton. “And then my family were here. My mom and dad were here. They got pretty sick, eventually. ” As Pixies were slowing down before their initial break-up, The Breeders broke big thanks to their 1990 debut album Pod and its 1993 successor Last Splash, which had a massive radio hit with its lead single Cannonball. In 1995, they would take a year off as Kim worked on her only album with her side project The Amps, called Pacer. In 2003, The Breeders would split as Pixies were regrouping. While Kim bounced around from place to place to fulfil her projects’ demands, she never left Dayton. Although she continually wrote and recorded demos in her home, she didn’t give much credence to starting a solo career. That was until a series of singles under Kim’s name were released between 2012 and 2014. “I had done a solo album before, actually, but I like bands,” Kim says. “It was The Amps. I even pretended that I was a band: Tammy and the Amps. ‘I’m Tammy, and that’s the Amps.’ But the Tammy thing got on my nerves, so I just named it The Amps, like I’m a band! But there wasn’t really a band, man; it was just me doing stuff. I played with some of the people that ended up on some of the songs on the record, but it was solo, basically. Jim’s the drummer, but I didn’t put my name on it because I’ve always liked bands. “But, with the Kim Deal thing, it was 2011, and Pixies had just done what I thought would be the last tour that we would be doing, which was The Lost Cities Tour. Me and Jim were mad at each other, and José [Medeles, a drummer and frequent collaborator] had opened a beautiful drum shop, and he lives in Portland with his family. “So, I just went out to Los Angeles and I hung out with Mando [Lopez, a former bassist for The Breeders] and Lindsay [Glover], a drummer, and we started playing, and I started putting them out on seven-inches. And I guess since it was a seven-inch - putting ‘Kim Deal’ out on a seven-inch, like, ‘Here. It’s Kim Deal; it seemed like lowhanging fruit. It wasn’t [in bombastic announcer voice] ‘Here’s a Kim Deal album!, like I’m a solo performer. It’s just like, ‘Here’s 16 my name, and these are a couple of songs I did, and then it got to be five of them. “But then when I did Nobody Loves You More with Britt [Walford, the original drummer for The Breeders; also of Slint] and Jack [Lawrence, the song’s bassist], and finished it up with [the engineer Steve] Albini, I said, ‘I’m not going to put this one out as a seveninch because the audio quality is very good.’ You know, the sound quality is horrible on a seven-inch. So, I thought I would just direct things to an album and have a certain quality.” This would eventuate in Kim’s first solo album, named after the track that inspired the full-length concept, Nobody Loves You More. The album began in earnest in 2019, with Kim demoing the tracks in her home. Then the COVID-19 pandemic locked everything down for a while. Across a five-year timeline, the album was primarily recorded piecemeal in Kim’s basement, Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio facility in Chicago, and Candyland Studios in Dayton, Kentucky. Nobody Loves You More is a deeply personal record that is principally inspired by Kim’s mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s and her subsequent passing. The personnel on the record features a litany of collaborators from her entire career, adding to the album’s introspective, nostalgic and sentimental tone. “I thought they were going to be good for the song,” Kim says of who she chose to collaborate with. “I do have a good sense of… I don’t know if it’s quite pride, but I do feel like patting myself on the back a little bit that these people that I’ve played with for thirty-five years, the relationships are so respectful, musically and non-musically.” One of these collaborators is the late Steve Albini. Steve was a powerhouse of an engineer (he rejected the term “producer”) who, until his sudden passing from a heart attack in his home on May 7th 2024, had worked on albums from Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Plant and Page, Manic Street Preachers, and many more, as well as fronting acts like Shellac and Big Black. Albini had a deep, personal friendship and a decades-spanning working relationship with Kim and The Breeders since he engineered Pixies’ 1988released debut album, Surfer Rosa, in 1987. Nobody Loves You More was released five months after Albini’s passing. Albini’s passing came as a gut punch to many, including Kim, who admits that she doesn’t know who she will rely on to engineer her future output. “This is horrible to say, but I wish Steve had been sick before he passed,” Kim says. “Isn’t that horrible to say? ‘I wish you were in pain and sick a little bit before you passed.’ ‘Oh, how’s Steve doing? No? He’s not so good, huh?’ Like, I could have those conversations with people. “I wish that happened! It was so fucking shocking! He was 61?! He was younger than I am, by the way. I don’t know what’s going to happen. We did everything, from reelto-reel, on tape. So, Disobedience is on tape. Summerland is on tape. Are You Mine? is on tape. Coast is on tape. Nobody Loves You More is on tape. Come Running is on tape. “...these people that I’ve played with for thirty-five years, the relationships are so respectful, musically and nonmusically.”