Kim Deal interview • Part I: “You would freak the fuck out if you were me!”

Read part II of this interview here

In the spring of 2011, Kim Deal’s patience finally snapped. After eight years of living with her parents, helping to take care of her mother as her Alzheimer’s progressed and her memory worsened, the intensity of the situation simply grew too much for her. Having been resistant to asking for outside help up to that point, when her father started to show signs of dementia too, it dawned on Kim that coping alone was no longer really an option. She needed a break. “I was looking at him, looking at this house, and it hit me,” she says, her voice dropping low into the phone. “I was like, fuck this! I’m getting the fuck out of here! I felt like I was being overwhelmed by the situation, you know?”

Having made the necessary arrangements to keep her parents comfortable, Kim resolved to take a year away from Dayton to enable her to focus on music again. Loading all her instruments and gear into a van, she first drove up to Portland, Oregon to visit Breeders drummer Jose Medeles and his family, before heading down the 101 all the way to Los Angeles. “It was like a beautiful dream,” she says, drawing out her vowels to emphasise the luxury of the Californian sunshine. “I’ve been back in Ohio since the start of October but it feels like it’s been decades. It’s dark, it’s gloomy and it’s almost freezing. Sometimes I think of L.A. and I’m like, ‘God, is there really such a place as Los Angeles? Does it really exist?’”

As someone who has toured the world several times over, and cris-crossed America at least triple that, Kim surprised even herself at how much she hadn’t seen of the city. Even at the turn of the millennium, when she lived in East L.A. for a spell, she admits to never having really made any connection with the city. “First of all, East L.A. is wayyy different to actual Los Angeles,” she explains. “Second, all the time that I was travelling with bands I never really explored any cities. I was never the type of person who went on tour and went to all the cool museums and shit. I was just fucking drinking in the bar, man. Being hungover, trying to get on the bus. That was my whole life, basically.”

Determined to make the most of her temporary freedom, she rented an apartment not far from Echo Park. The owner was a woman with a major thing for wine who just so happened to be in the process of building a cellar for her stash (“She really worshipped Bacchus, good lord! There were statues of him everywhere!”), and it was down there that Kim installed a makeshift studio. It was a simple set up – a recording desk consisting of an old, beat-up Tascam-388 eight-track (“consumer quality, so only the inputs were working”) and a Tascam 16-track reel-to-reel machine, her favourite amps and guitars on the flagstone floor – but from the way Kim tells it she couldn’t have been happier. “The sound was really sweet down there. I really liked it. It wasn’t like a garage or a basement with very reflective surfaces; you can get a really harsh slapback off that. This room had some reflection but the cellar was unfinished so surface of the walls was more porous than a regular wall, or brick even, so there was also some absorption.”

Over the course of a year, with a break of a month spent touring with the Pixies on their ‘Lost Cities’ tour, Kim would spend hours down in the cellar working on songs, often with friends but sometimes on her own. As you can probably tell from her choice of gear and the conspicuous absence of a laptop among her studio furnishings, Kim is all about analogue. At several points throughout our conversation we end up back on the topic of tape versus digital, and the anecdotes keep flowing. Like the time the Pixies loaded into their van for their first proper tour in 1987, supporting the 4AD mini-album Come On Pilgrim, and Frank Black – Kim calls him Charles, of course – brought along a CD player given to him by his girlfriend at the time (and now ex-wife), Jean Walsh. “I’d never even heard of one!” she shrieks, “We all just sort of stared at it. I thought it was a neat present, don’t get me wrong, but I remember being a bit of a player-hater even then because he put it on and I was like, ‘Man, this sounds like shit!’”

Kim is careful to point out that this isn’t just the grumblings of an older artist – she’s always been this way. “It’s funny, this issue I have with digital versus analogue reveals itself in different ways. I feel like I’m always on the wrong side of whatever the latest technology is. It became a real problem in the mid-‘90s when people started using these DA-88 digital tapes and DAT tapes, which always sounded to me like the machines were on the fritz. People would wave their arms and talk about things like oversampling rates, and I’d be like, ‘Er, can’t we just use tape?’. Then around 1999, all the studios in New York – even the small, cool ones – got rid of their tape machines. You’d go in and there’d be peanuts from packing boxes all over the floor. You could smell new product.”

You can see where she’s coming from. It’s one thing to understand that studio engineers get excited about new machines, and that the only way they can develop their skills is to use them intensely, but it’s perhaps another to be willing to subject your best takes to unproven technology. “I was never against it; I was against other people making me use it and telling me it was better,” says Kim. “But here’s where I’m coming from right now. These days, digital can sound incredible and it’s just going to get better. It’s not just MP3; digital is way beyond that now – that was just a fad. If you get a good programmer now, people who’ve really spent a lot of money getting good plug-ins and things like that, it can sound really good. But I’m on the other side of the issue still, because I still have a problem with it.”

Kim’s opinion remained unswayed after experimenting with ProTools while working on the Breeders EP, Fate To Fatal in 2009. Now, when she listens back to ‘The Last Time’, which features vocals recorded at home by Mark Lanegan and traded over the internet with Kim in Dayton, she’s convinced it sounds thin. “It doesn’t even sound as good as the stuff I do on the four-track! I have to accept that I am just not a digital person – I do not sit in front of a computer to make, or even write, music. The work that goes into it is just players in a room. It’s not programmed drums, it’s someone trying out a drum beat and seeing if it works. And when we go into a proper studio, we count in and we play the song to the end…” She pauses then laughs. “Unless there’s a big space in the middle and the end really sucked. Then we might tail it off and play the end better, then razorblade the tape, put a bit of adhesive down the middle and put the two pieces of tape back together.”

Now, about those new songs. Having always been a “band person”, Kim once said that the thought of playing solo made her feel sick, but evidently things have changed. Rather than setting out to make a new Breeders record, she knew by the time she reached the West Coast that she wanted to try recording under her own name (“It’s not like I started out doing Breeders and then decided not to do it; I knew I was gonna come out and do solo”). The fact that Kelley was busy with her own new project R. Ring (a duo with Ampline guitarist Mike Montgomery), and both Jose and Breeders bassist Mando preoccupied with being good fathers, actually made things simpler. “When I said that about feeling sick, it’s not the kind of sick you’re thinking of – the being scared because I’m nervous about playing alone. It’s just that I’ve always liked bands, always wanted to be in a band. But it seems I can’t just be ‘in a band’ any more. Mando and Jose have family and full-time jobs now, so it’s hard to get practice time in. Things are different now, so I have to hire people to come and play with me. And that’s fine. That was really nice, actually.”

While Kim won’t be pushed to let on what the new tracks actually sound like, beyond saying that she’s demoed both full-band songs and some that are just her and a guitar, she does reveal with a bit of prompting that her first ever solo single is already done and pressed up on vinyl. In fact, she’ll have some with her for sale when she plays at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ Nightmare Before Christmas this coming weekend at the request of her close friend Steve Albini and the other members of ATP curators Shellac. On the A-side is a song called ‘Walking With A Killer’; on the flipside a track named ‘Dirty Hessians’. It’s the first release in a planned series of self-released 7” singles, though the more intimate details are still being fleshed out. “I’ve been thinking, ‘Why can’t I just put out a single?’, ‘Why can’t I just put out an EP?’, but other people have been saying, ‘No, put out a record’,” she explains, adopting a slightly manic tone. “So I don’t know what to do. I’m confused!”

Working without a label is nothing new for Kim. She and Kelley really threw themselves into the production and promotion of Fate To Fatal, and found the whole process surprisingly enjoyable. For someone who doesn’t really get along with computers Kim says she loved working with Tunecore to get the EP online, right down to assigning the ISRC codes. “It’s so different, the way that people consume music these days. I remember I would really pore over an album obsessively. Things like tracing the logo on the album sleeve so I could transfer it to the cover of a notebook to make it look cool or whatever. Or I’d get stoned and just lie there listening to the record quietly in a room, wondering what the band was like. Whatever you liked to do, there was just a certain amount of time that was spent with a record. I’m not saying that people don’t do that any more, or that it was ‘better’ when I was a kid, but I imagine that if I asked my niece or someone like that to spend a couple of hours with me just listening to records she might be like, ‘How dare you ask me to devote so much of my time to something like that? That’s like a study project – are you crazy?!’.”

Having survived the music business for 26 years and counting, Kim is of course a little wary about being misquoted or having her words interpreted out of context, and sentences like “This isn’t me complaining, just explaining” and “I’m not saying that at all” crop up a lot as she speaks. When she talks about money, or rather the lack of it, she’s careful not to come across like a ‘back in my day’ caricature. The fact is plain: with few exceptions music just doesn’t pay for a comfortable living any more, especially when you’re in a band. “Things are different now, and that’s fine, but it does inform the way I do things. It seems the only people in music who have money any more are those who have sponsors or who promote their own lifestyle brand. I’ve heard Kid Rock is getting into beer, and I remember when Jessica Simpson put her first country CD out she said that she was really thankful for her shoe line, because having that rake in millions each year enables her to continue to make music as a hobby.”

She might have accepted that she’s unlikely to find herself in Jessica’s position, or even Mr. Rock’s position, but it’s hard to imagine Kim Deal ever becoming someone who makes music just as a hobby. She may never have her own fashion empire but, as Pixies have discovered in recent years, the old can pave the way for the new. Kim is no stranger to trading on the past even as she focuses on the future; the ‘Lost Cities’ tour of October/November 2011 saw Pixies take their classic Doolittle LP back out on the road for a second successful run of shows in which they played the album from start to finish. “That was fun. We originally did it for the record’s 20th anniversary in 2009, and it was a good show so we just kept on doing it. I really liked doing those shows, but I don’t know if we’ll ever do that again. I think that was the last time.”

Speaking of anniversaries, it’s hard to overlook the fact that Last Splash reaches that same milestone in August 2013. In fact, Kim is pretty excited about it, revealing that not only are The Breeders in talks with 4AD about a twentieth anniversary edition re-release but also that the band have already started rehearsing to take the album on tour. “Me and Kelley started talking about it last spring and since then Josephine [Wiggs, who was bassist for The Breeders’ first two albums] has come out to Dayton from New York to practice in my basement, and Jim Macpherson [drummer on Last Splash]. We’ve already got the set going from beginning to end and it’s sounding good so I think we’re gonna do it, see if anybody comes!” (Er, yes please! Where do we sign?)

Some people might view the growing trend to re-release albums almost arbitrarily at each apparently significant milestone in years as one that needs to be stopped. It could be argued that such a move is a commercial one dressed up as nostalgia, and that it seldom adds value – or even devalues – the music. That’s certainly true in some cases, but when re-releases are done well (c.f. 4AD’s gorgeously packaged anthology of Throwing Muses in 2011) there is no reason to doubt the artists’ commitment. While plans for the Last Splash reissue are still to be finalised, Kim says there’s talk of including the hard-to-find Safari EP from 1992 – the only Breeders recording to feature both Kelley Deal and Tanya Donelly, who had quit to form Belly in December 1991 – as well as a bunch of demos and B-sides from the three Last Splash singles.

“We’ve actually begun to get so much material together for the bonus disc that we started to think, ‘Wait, are we supposed to put Pod [their 1990 debut] in here too?’. So we kind of had to remind ourselves that this is not an ‘anthology’ release – it’s got to be about Last Splash only. But then we started to think, ‘Wait, maybe we need to just include stuff from the same line-up that we had for the record’. So we’re still talking about it. It’s kind of complicated, so I don’t know exactly how the final package will be.”

Asked whether preparations for next year’s reissue had reopened or deepened an emotional connection with Last Splash, Kim pauses for a minute. “Um. Well. Yeahhhh. But it’s not like a ‘movie of the week’ or anything. I don’t have this warm flow of nostalgia come over me when somebody drops the needle down on the record. Nuh-uh. First of all, I am never in the room when that happens! I rarely ever hear it anywhere, but Josephine says she’s been hearing it all over the place in New York. Like, she’ll walk into a deli and ‘Invisible Man’ will be playing.”

In a way, Kim says, it’s a good thing that twenty years ago doesn’t feel like the beginning of any particular one thing in her life. Last Splash may have been the peak of The Breeders’ success, but her reputation was already long established. Still, perhaps in twenty years from now she’ll look back on next weekend’s appearance at ATP – her first high-profile solo performance – as a new beginning of sorts. “I’m assuming I actually will feel sick before the show now,” she says. “I mean, they’ve given me an hour between Wire and Neurosis!”

She raises her voice to a gleeful shout. “I’m going on before Neurosis! DUDE, have you seen them?! You would freak the fuck out if you were me! I’m like a lamb being led to a slaughter here. I’m just gonna go ‘Baaaa, baaaa’!”

Come back tomorrow for the second half of our chat with Kim, in which she talks more about her relationship with ATP over the years, her early days performing with Kelley in Dayton, Ohio, and her newfound friendships with Nina Nastasia and former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, among other things!

Tagged jessica simpson, josephine wiggs, kelley deal, kim deal, nina nastasia, patty schemel, r. ring, tanya donelly, the breeders, throwing muses