Kim Deal calls me from Dayton, OH, on the day of the American election. It's about 12 hours before the bubble officially bursts, and we're still feeling cautiously hopeful; maybe a little queasy.
To distract ourselves, we're keeping things light.
"My mom had Alzheimer's for 18 years. Do you have anybody you know that has Alzheimer's?" Deal asks me. I tell her I do — or did, anyway; my grandmother passed from dementia complications a few years ago.
Split between Dayton and holidays in the Florida Keys, Deal's time spent caring for her parents — her mother Ann, her father Robert, and her aunt and uncle would all die between 2019 and 2020 — inspired much of her buoyant, heartbreaking debut solo record, Nobody Loves You More.
"I was living with them and taking care of them," Deal says. "So it's just… I don't know, maybe that's why it's not a party record. There's something about watching somebody lose something every day for 18 years."
Nobody Loves You More is a sunny record skirted by groaning storm clouds; coloured as much by the Midwest grit of Dayton as it is the sand-flecked, melting popsicle of the Sunshine State, it tackles mortality, youth and failure with both slapstick vigour and well-earned solemnity.
"I began thinking about George Jones and those outlaw country guys that were really popular in the '80s," Deal says. "They were just living high on the hog. And then as time goes by, their liver disease is kicking in, they're on their third wife, and they just look beat up — that bravado [is fading]. And that might [have had something to do with the fact] that I'm living with my dying parents — God forbid anybody say that in front of my dad, because he had that sort of 'I'm fine' thing [going on]."
She continues, adopting a faux-calming whisper: "There's something about the façade of, 'Okay, so as you get old, you can be comforted in the fact that you'll, one day, be sitting in your chair with a good book to read, and you'll have photographs and the memories that you've accrued your whole life, and that will keep you company in your age.' And it's just like, 'Nuh uh!' Because my mom, her brain was mush for over 10 years, you know? It was nothing. She could talk, but it's so sad to hear somebody talk and they just sound like some sort of sci-fi movie where nobody has a translator, and so they think they're talking real, and it's just coming out so mangled because her language centre is just smashed. There's a lot of weird things — uncomfortable, awkward failures. So many years. Do you want to get off the call?"
We laugh, comparing our calling-the-elderly-on-FaceTime war stories — "It's like with a dog! Sorry, but, you know! You cannot say hello to a dog on FaceTime. It's the same with my dad, and he didn't even have Alzheimer's!" — and I'm struck for the hundredth time in our brief conversation by Deal's effortless balance of brusque goofiness and total vulnerability. Endlessly warm and fearlessly transparent, Nobody Loves You More mirrors its creator entirely. Of all the music she's made in the last 40 years, including her time with alt-rock luminaries the Pixies and the Breeders, it's the most Kim Deal that Kim Deal has ever sounded.
Perhaps the song that maybe best exemplifies Deal's whole deal is rocket-flare centrepiece "Disobedience," a shit-kicking, beautiful breakdown of Deal's particular taste for disruption; rebellion without any casualties, the freedom to live small but uncompromising, reaching someplace more exciting but never truly leaving home behind.
"My disobedience, it's like I want a ride on the Ferris wheel and a pop. That's it, man! No bigger. I owe it to the Midwestern dumbness of me growing up here — I don't want any big plans, no big philosophies and stuff," she says, before spinning into a squirrelly new voice. "You know, the people on the coast are like, 'What do you want, a pop in your mouth? What do you want, a pop in your face?' It's like, it's a soda, dumbass. Just forget it. Give me a Coke, a soder."
The record's ability to capture Deal so truthfully, so wholeheartedly, is in part because of who had a hand in its creation; friends (some old, some rekindled), family and longtime collaborators coming together to make a racket.
"Me and Jim MacPherson didn't talk since the Amps, like, since 1997 or something — we got mad at each other," Deal says softly. "I came home, I went downstairs, and I saw that he had taken his drum set out of my basement. Basically, I never talked to him again, and he never talked to me."
Things changed in 2012, when the Breeders convened for the 20th anniversary of their album Last Splash. "The best thing that came out of ... getting together and playing with these people again was the friendship that I got again with Jim MacPherson. He lives really close to me — we go over and have burgers, we go for pizza with his family."
Kelley Deal, Jim MacPherson, Mando Lopez and original Breeders drummer Britt Walford all had a hand in Nobody Loves You More, and that's not even mentioning former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer and producer Steve Albini, whose unmistakable drum sound is all over the record, as woolly and uncompromising as ever.
Deal built a lot of Nobody Loves You More in ProTools, carving out a version of the record that was confined to her computer screen. Eventually, she knew she'd taken it as far she could in the world of zeroes and ones — it was time to get physical.
"A lot of recording was done there with [Albini]. He did these really elegant recordings of strings that are so gorgeous," Deal says. "The whole session was so relaxed, and everybody knew what they were doing, and nothing was harried, and he was joking around, and the strings sounded gorgeous. And that was a first for me with him, you know? I think that's because everybody knows he does, you know, 'Punk rock! I'm a plumber!' But he isn't just that."
Deal talks about Albini in present tense as often as she does in past, his leaving blurred by decades of friendship and music making — Nobody Loves You More has, unintentionally and with a perfect lack of ceremony or circumstance, become a sort of tribute to Albini. As long as that jaw-rattling, dust-raising thwack can play from the speakers, he isn't really gone.
"I don't think he ever [listened to my music]. Maybe he played 'Are You Mine' or something like that, and enjoyed that. I don't know! I know his wife liked it, so he had to listen to it because she played my stuff," Deal says. "I don't even know if he ever liked any of the songs. I know he loved me, and I loved him. And I know he liked my voice — I do know that."
Albini's wild sonic lineage, his ability to do just about anything and everything without compromise, might have seeped into Deal's psyche as she conjured Nobody Loves You More. The album has Deal's rattling, meat-and-potatoes skeleton, but its softer parts are built with strings and horns and twinkling keyboards, a lushness that the Deal of the mid-'90s would've scoffed at.
"I think I've gotten more weirdly interested in [songwriting]," Deal says. "I'm playing a song, and then I hear strings in my head, and instead of just ignoring it, I'm like, 'Now wait a minute, those sound cool!' Maybe this song can have strings. How can I get what I hear in my head into the air?"
She adds, "And [now I have] this patience and this real curiosity. And then the incredibly awkward, non-graceful way of getting that [sound], which is really hard for me. But I enjoy it."
Like so much of Deal's music, Nobody Loves You More manages to conceal that effort in swathes of swagger and cool-eyed ease; these opulent new clothes fit her just fine. The title track opens the record on a surging horn-and-string reverie, while "Bats in the Afternoon Sky" disintegrates and shifts like the light at dusk — shadows swing from above and crawl slowly across the grass.
"With 'Nobody Loves You More,' I had this real pretty thing. But then it gets to the big bridge, and I'm hearing these horns in my head. It sounds to me like Playboy After Dark, but you're not old enough to remember that, are you?," she says, laughing. "[Nobody Loves You More] could be a party album for the Playboy After Dark people, you know? Snort coke on a white piano to [the title track], while the big 'bop, bop, bop, bop, bop' comes in. Who knows? I'd like it to be a party album."
I tell her it could be the soundtrack to a very specific kind of party, though I'm not sure I know exactly — a gathering as failure-ridden as it is joyful, full of bruisers and quietly disobedient weirdos, equal parts tears and laughter. Before I can finish, she beats me to the punch.
"It's orgy music!"