Kim Deal

0:06Pushkin.

0:10Kim Deal is an indie rock icon. In the mid-'80s, she joined the Pixies as the band's original bassist and co-vocalist. After the release of their debut album, Come On Pilgrim, in 87, followed by the classics Surferosa and Doolittle, Kim took a break from the Pixies to form her own band, the Breeders. With the help of Kim's twin sister, Kelly, on lead guitar, the Breeders released a couple of EPs and four studio albums, including the platinum-selling 90s hit, Last Splash. After a run with the Breeders opening up for Olivia Rodrigo's worldwide Guts tour this year, Kim Deal is once again heading out on her own with the release of her first solo album, Nobody Loves You More.

0:49The album was recorded by the late Steve Albini, a close friend and longtime collaborator of Kim's. And it features a slew of her other friends and collaborators, including Slint's Britt Walford on drums, and the Breeders' Josephine Wiggs, Jim McPherson, and of course, Kelly Deal. On today's episode, Leah Rose talks to Kim Deal about working with Steve Albini on the Pixie Surfer Rosa, and why he always regretted a specific contribution to that album. Kim also recalls recording the Breeders' first two albums, and she remembers how a group of surfers on a druggie trip to Nantucket helped inspire her new lead single, Coast.

1:26This is Broken Record, liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm Justin Richman. Here's Leah Rose in conversation with Kim Deal. This is an iHeart Podcast. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at Ooclas Speedtest. And they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage. That's your business, Supercharged.

2:08Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ukla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. This episode of Broken Record is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. Traveling is one of life's greatest joys. Honestly, can anything be more exhilarating? Well, actually, yeah. with Chase Sapphire Reserve. It's your gateway to the world's most captivating destinations. First, you will earn eight times points on all purchases through Chase Travel. And the card gets you into Sapphire Lounge by the club at select airports nationwide and access to one-of-a-kind experiences.

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3:31Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Let's talk about the first song from the upcoming solo album, Coast. So tell me about that. How did that song come about? What was the inspiration? The song was written sort of in 2019, something like that, maybe. But sitting down and writing the guitar chords and wanting to come up with what I thought it sounded like and what I wanted to talk about was this period of time back when I was staying in Nantucket in the off season in like 2000. I was living a very druggy sort of life in New York City and I thought I needed to clean up so I went to Nantucket.

4:27What I did was I got a lot of drugs and put them on the island and did them. Eventually, I just decided I can't do this anymore. And one of the things I always will remember are these young island off-season workers, you know, there was a daytime for them. They went out and enjoyed the outdoors. And they were so nice and weird. And I was like so depleted. But I was hanging out with them. and then they would be yelling about the Wham. Check the Wham. We checked the Wham. And then they would take off. The Wham is a way, it's a model, a government model for wave action because they're on the attack.

5:06There's no huge Portuguese, sir. So they, you know, need to know if there's some, even a possibility of some waves. Then they would, with whatever they're doing, they're, you know, painting job and they're getting the bar ready for the evening jobs. And they would run to the ocean, you know, with their stuff and their boards out and their wetsuits and the water's cold. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it was just like it was so, the idea that people were doing an outdoor activity. It was really nice to see that. Yeah. And I always have a fond memory of that, thinking about that. And I just like wham, I thought it was cool.

5:48Uh-huh. Anyway, it had always stuck with me. and so that's what the the songs basically i recorded it out steve albini's lindsey glover is the drummer mondo lopez is the bass player he's a bass player for the breeders too for a long time yeah was he the one who was in the um i watched an old documentary it's like a dutch documentary from i think like yeah he was in 2002 yeah yeah yeah from east l.a when you lived there yeah yeah i liked los breeders i was wondering what happened to that lineup I was in New York City, and I was thinking I would get, I was recording, trying to kind of Rivington and Christie down, like, again, to about 2000 or something.

6:36And I was in a bar, surprisingly, and there were some dudes in there. it was really close to the studio and i liked them a lot and they told me they were playing with the leading the singer for fear they were in fear now obviously this is not the og guys in fear but there was a show and they were playing and now they were hanging out in the bar and i said there's studio nearby you guys want to go hang out and we played all night long they were such good players. And I told them, I'm going to follow you guys out. Where do you guys live? And they said, East LA. And I said, I'm going to follow you out to East LA.

7:20They were so surprised when I got there. I didn't even know what East LA was, but I soon found out when I got out there in East LA. Everybody was so cool. I think they told everybody to be cool to us. And everybody was, they would probably have been cool anyway. And we would go to Vernon. That was where our rehearsal space was. Then we rode up at Title TK and all those guys were on Title TK. And then also they were on Mountain Battles too. Got it. Yeah. But I wasn't living there during Mountain Battles. I was living there during Title TK. I went to rehab after the tour for Title TK. I went to rehab.

7:57So then I moved back to my parents' house. And you moved back to your parents' house? after rehab. After rehab to take care of your mom, is that right? No. I couldn't have taken care of anybody. They picked me up from rehab and they drove me back home. And they told me on the way home, mom was diagnosed, but she was fine. I guess once you're diagnosed, there are some obvious signs within the family that there's some trouble, but it wasn't huge. which, you know, have you ever dealt with anybody with Alzheimer's or dementia? I haven't. It starts a little bit at a time and then it gets worse. So it was pretty new.

8:37So, yeah. No, I wasn't taking care of her. Okay. Yeah, I landed there. Got it. Yeah. What was rehab like? Do you feel like it was effective? Did the rehab work? What was your experience like there? Oh, I loved it. I loved being sober. I loved not drinking. I had a great time. I haven't had a drink since 2002. That's incredible. Yeah, I really liked it. I really like it still. Do you miss smoking pot? I do. I miss smoking cigarettes. Oh, you don't smoke cigarettes anymore? No, sometimes I go past a big cigarette cloud and I'm just like, oh my God, that's so good. Yeah. So you miss it. You miss the weed.

9:18You miss the cigarette, the smoking stuff. I've heard that the weed isn't the same and it's kind of a bummer. like you get too stoned or something well I would I had to quit because I was a wake and bake person so like everything like I didn't just smoke when I drank I smoked you know two packs a day and yeah yeah so I saw on Reddit people are saying that I guess you have a collection of hundreds and hundreds of solo songs that you've written over the past like 20 years but is this collection the new Kim Deal album that's coming out, is that all new songs or is that some of old stuff mixed in?

9:58I don't have hundreds and hundreds of songs, though. I wish I did, but I don't. Thanks for rubbing it in. Now I feel like I just haven't been doing anything. No, that was not the intention. They are new songs. You know what, though? There are two that are not. But if you just follow me, you'll see why these two had to be on there. Okay. One of them is Are You Mine? That was a solo song that I've released on a seven inch, okay? But I did it on a 388 Tascam. That's consumer grade. That is a quarter inch tape. The Tascam 388 looks like a huge four track machine. But it's got one driver. And so it's consumer grade.

10:49It's really no good. That's what I recorded the seven inch on for Are You Mine. Lindsey Glover, Mondo, this guy named Jeffrey played guitar on it. I played guitar on it. Sang eight tracks. We played at the same time. Mic'd us all up. But the three, it's an old dumb machine. And it lost track eight. So the guitar player, Jeffrey, his beautiful guitar playing was gone. You can hear it. When you play or you might, you could hear it in the distance. It's like a ghost track. So, of course, I'm going to try to fix it. So I take the quarter-inch tape and put it on a different 388, that consumer grade.

11:33You can't go from one machine to the next. Basically, it's a cassette tape, a bigger cassette tape. It won't go and play. It sounds warbly and out of pitch. So to me, that recording always sounded a little broken. I like it. But to me, it was like, oh, man, too bad. So we recorded it professionally. We recorded it in Dayton, Ohio. I'm sorry, in Dayton, Kentucky. We drove from Dayton, Ohio to Dayton, Kentucky. It's one hour and one minute away. From one shitty place to an even shittier place. Let's say that. And then Mondo was going through town. Man, he was on stage with Morrissey. He was playing bass in the band.

12:18So he said he would do it. So we got some time. Lindsay flew out from L.A. And we recorded the basic tracks over again. And then I finished it up at Albini's. And then there's a pedal steel on it. And then there's strings added on to it. So I really like the way it turned out. But that's why I recorded that song. And then Wish I Was is the other song on the new album that has been released as a seven inch already. Got it. But it has vocals. It always had lyrics, but I never could make the lyrics sound cool. I sang on the seven-inch version of Wish I Was, and Kelly told me it didn't sound good.

12:56Just released it as an instrumental. Like, that's my sister telling me. It's like, eh, it's not great. But still, gosh, that's harsh, Kel. But I did. And it sounded cool. I released it as an instrumental. But I always liked how, you know, I even took Wish I Was, and I went to Australia. I was doing a Pixies tour. I stayed over late. I went to the studio. I thought I can get some Australian players. We can pull up Wish I Was. This time I can sing on it. I have it. I've got it unlocked. It's going to sound cool like this. Three, four, sort of a country song. There was even pedal steel on it down there.

13:32Nice. And I didn't like it. It was okay. Is Kelly usually the last person you play stuff for? Is she like the ultimate judge? Oh, because, you know, if somebody, you know how when you wear something and you say, do you like this? And somebody goes, yeah, you look good. You don't like it. You go, okay, great. And you change. Totally. Because it doesn't, but it's nice to ask somebody because when you show somebody, you look at the outfit differently, you know, in a different way, but it's not what they said. It's how you're looking at the whole thing yourself. Do you know what I'm talking about?

14:04Yeah. It's like your mind is already made up anyway, but you're just asking to ask, but you're already going to do what you're going to do. I'm not sure. It could be. This could be okay. But seeing it, the process of standing there and with another person in the room, like whenever somebody's listening to it, I hear it in a different way. Yes. Irrespective of what their experience was. They could like it. They could turn around and go, I really like that. And I could be cringing the whole time. It's odd. No, I understand that. Yeah. Is Kelly on your solo stuff? Yeah, she's on a lot. She's on Coast.

14:42She's doing the guitar on Coast. And then Disobedience, there's a song. She's doing guitar all over Disobedience. And she's doing bass pedals on a song called Crystal Meth. She's got a cool setup, a cool bass pedal setup. And she's hitting those bass pedals. And Jim McPherson is too. Oh, awesome. Tell me about working with Albini. First time you met him. I was giving him and Nash from Urge Overkill, his real name's Nate. I was giving Steve and Nate a ride in Boston to the studio Q Division. And Steve was producing the Pixies at Q Division. And they were, Steve was playing, they were playing this cassette tape in the car because they had done some stuff in reverse or something.

15:35And they thought it was really cool. But then that's the first time I met him, giving him a ride to Q Division to be the engineer, recordist. He would never want to use the word producer. Yeah, I was curious about that. So he more was just an engineer and he liked to kind of stay out of things and not give his opinion. Oh, he has lots of opinions. He might say that. but yeah you know i think what happened like okay during that period of time he had a lot of ideas and we did and he had this thing that he was taping us that we didn't we knew he was taping but we didn't know which parts he was taping and then he spliced it into the album and it was hilarious it was really fun i loved it but then i think towards you know later on while he was working i know that it bothers him to think that he would suggest anything yes alter any decision that a band would make or to have any influence at all he told iggy pop he was a plumber i mean he's not you know what i mean i don't know why he had to go all that way i like his ideas he had good cool ideas you know well i think it came because of that pixies album he's i heard him talking to Mark Maron, he said because he inserted himself so much and made that suggestion, he didn't like the fact that for history, the rest of history, the band would have to answer to his decision and talk about why that was on the record when it wasn't their idea anyway.

17:16And I think that bothered him. I have a feeling he doesn't know that we were joking. I think he thinks, maybe. I don't know because I don't get it. He feels so much remorse about that. You know, there was this movie called Stripes where there was a guy named Francis and he was a real paranoid guy. Don't touch me. Don't touch me. Don't touch any of my stuff. Don't even look at that sort of thing. And Bill Murray looks at him and says, lighten up, Francis. So me and Charles were doing a skit. And what's on there is him saying to me, Don't touch my stuff. Something like that. I think Steve might have flipped that moment and thought maybe it was a moment of real...

18:02I could see him loving to put that moment on the album. He might have thought he was putting a real vulnerable moment of it. Right. I mean, I've told him it was... I don't know, but I've never heard him say that he thought it was real, but why else would it bother him so much? Nobody really talks about it. Maybe it makes me think that there might have been something else he might have done that he hated, that he maybe made a really bad choice and he sees it. Maybe he came to realize that some of the, I don't know, some of maybe some of the arguments he might have had in the studio that went his way.

18:44maybe he realized as i do it's probably everybody does that listening to it at you know five years later it's like oh my god they were right hmm yeah could be i don't know yeah but you said mark maron that that specifically was bothering him yeah he talked about that exact thing but that wasn't a problem for us personally maybe he didn't like to be asked about it maybe he was being asked about it. Or maybe somebody else in the band came to him and had an issue with it after and that's why? Nope. Nope. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, he also said that you were one of the best people he's ever worked with and you're the real deal.

19:28Yeah, he really likes me. We're like family. We were like family. Yeah. What was it like working with him? How was it different than other engineers? I know he doesn't like the word producer, but other people you had collaborated with. Well, here's why. Okay. People might think he's a big dick about not liking it. He was a big asshole for not liking the word producer. But back in the day, as a producer, if I was to produce Natalie Cole, I would hire out the studios and the musicians. I would also have worked closely with Natalie to pick out all of the songs that people have submitted that we would be covering and trying out with the new musicians.

20:06As we rehearse this record together, I would probably also have hired the musical director to work over the arrangements with her. Maybe we'd start with the piano. Just me as a producer of the record and Natalie. And a pianist and a musical arranger or something, a musical director. So the producer is very involved. In the old days, that's what a producer did. So there are bands that just love Albini. And he is available to anybody. You call up the studio, he might answer and book your session. Or somebody there who's at the desk will just book it. Two days, you want to go in without being? This is what it costs.

20:49Okay, see you there. And so they come in and he's never heard of them. He'll do it professionally. He'll make sure he has the tape. Then he'll know what the mic setup will be so it will all go quickly as possible. but you know if they put produced by steve albini on the record then it kind of sometimes can look like they went there to get produced by steve albini on the record sort of sometimes yeah because it's not really true and so you know he recorded it and he did he was the engineer but he wasn't the producer who right i mean he had never heard the songs how could he produce it without ever hearing the songs.

21:34He didn't produce the recording at all. He recorded the recording. Right. So I think that's what he was saying. It's not like he doesn't like producer. It's like he doesn't produce. So it just would bother him because it's not true. Right. It's not technically what he's doing. It's not at all. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. After a quick break, we'll be back with more from Leah Rose and Kim Deal. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at Oocla Speedtest, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

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23:06where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ukla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. This episode of Broken Record is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. Everybody loves to travel, right? We can get away as a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, all of it. And no matter where you're going, Chase Sapphire Reserve is your gateway to the world's most captivating destinations. Travel is its own reward, you know. You're out there having experiences you can't have any other way, and with your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, you're also being rewarded. You earn eight times points on all purchases through Chase Travel.

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25:00Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the runway. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with more from Kim Deal. When you first started working on the first Breeders album, how was that different than when you had worked with the Pixies? We were up in Edinburgh in Scotland. And we were there for, I think, 11 days.

25:41And I had Tanya and Josephine and Carrie and Britt Walford. You know, Steve is the one who introduced me to Britt Walford to be the drummer of the band. You know, he loved, you know, Slint and Britt. it. He's an 18 year old kid out of Kentucky. His role playing is so killer. He's such a good drummer. Brits awesome drummer. It's insane. He's so cool. He's on some of the solo stuff. You know, that's one thing I really, and he's on this record. That's one thing I really think is cool about this record. Like I've played with the, I've known Brit in the eighties. It was 89. he passed out at the pub down the road and they do this thing where they black out your face if you pass out he came back to the Edinburgh studio he had black ash all out from the chimney soot all over his face it was done with love I mean they loved him of course but they totally sooted him up so it was really we had a good time it was really fun I loved it how did it feel for you just creatively like leaving or not leaving because you weren't leaving the Pixies yet, right?

26:56You were still in the Pixies like on a break. That's right. How did it feel for you creatively to have this different band? That's a weird question. Like, how did it feel to get your hair cut? It felt like the wind blowing. It's just like, I don't, I didn't feel, I don't know what, I don't have an answer to that question. How did it feel to do music? Was it exciting? Because now this is something new. Oh, yeah, I was excited. I mean, it's always exciting. It's exciting to do records with the Pixies, too. It's super exciting. Yeah, I was excited. I was excited to be in Edinburgh in a new place.

27:33Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know. I'm just guessing from the outside what it was like for you to have a totally new lane where it's all coming from you. I didn't feel like it was all coming from me, though, because we went to where Josephine lives in Bigglesway, the family manor. It's run down. It was a run down. I had 32 rooms or something of run down. But it was so, it was, they were, her mom and dad were so sweet. And we cleared out one of the rooms and she left, we played there, we rehearsed there. brit had drums which we had our stuff there so we rehearsed at josephine's spot and then we left biggles wade and steve came for a minute and then we left biggles wade and went to edinburgh so it just felt like we just were recording what we were doing so but it was cool to be in edinburgh yeah yeah yeah and then at what point how soon after that did you start playing shows like when did you start playing the songs live?

28:34You know, we didn't do it. We did two shows for Pod, or maybe one. I don't know. And I thought it was weird. I remember those two shows, and I remember thinking, this feels weird. I don't know why. We were over there. I was nervous. we didn't have the album wasn't out or anything we just were there recorded and then also we don't have a whole set we have a 28 minute album or whatever I don't think we did every song it was weird and I don't remember it really clearly but I remember not enjoying it I thought it was weird how soon after did you start working on Last Splash well Well, we recorded Pod in the December of 1989.