DIGITAL DRAMA, ANALOG HEART

DIGITAL DRAMA, ANALOG HEART

Kim Deal is finally pulling the strings

Zachary Lipez

hen I was smoking pot,” Kim Deal says, using her glasses to gesture, “I tuned my Autoharp so every single peg, whatever, string, was the same note. So it just went 'Wzzzschhhhhhhhh.' I did that high. I’ve never been able to put it back.”

I tell Kim Deal that’s amazing.

“Stop.”

I tell Kim Deal that, no, it is.

“No,” Kim Deal says, “it isn’t."

The songwriter then undercuts her own denials, admitting to using the Official Kim Deal One-Note Autoharp (patent pending) on one of the songs she’s been working on over the past 10 years. She says, “I think we used it on ‘Big Ben Beat.’ There’s a part of the song where I went ‘Wzzzschhhhhhhhh’ in an amp, etc., then spun it backwards on a fourtrack and distorted it, and then it goes real quiet. And I went up to Albini [Steve Albini, the Chicago engineer who passed away on May 7 of last year] and I had this noise, and he said, ‘What is that? Digital drama?'"

After some back-and-forth, where I encourage Kim Deal to at least consider monetizing her invention, she muses on the possibility of naming an album A Digital Drama: “Which is what albums are anyway now, just digital drama. It’s not even funny to people who are regular, but people who know other things.” She considers the possibilities for a moment, adding, “That’s a good name for a pedal, too."

Dollar signs floating before my eyes, I ask Deal if she has a signature pedal. I tell her that, considering how she grew up soldering her own audio equipment, and had only recently given an interview to the studio engineering magazine Tape Op, of which I hadn’t understood a single word, she really should have one.

“No," Deal says, before she too considers the possibilities.

“But it could be...just put a noise in it, it increases the noise, turns it into white noise, and then takes a shutoff at, like, three seconds." Growing more animated, Deal works out the pitch.

“You might think it’s like, ‘Oh, she’s got a great new lo-fi pedal,’ ‘She’ll make it sound like an 8-track,’ ‘She’ll make it sound like an Analogizer pedal,’ or ‘It sounds like it’s going through an analog tape’...no!” Deal exclaims, reveling in her bait and switch. “It’s DIGITAL DRAMA.”

There are probably lazy jokes to be made about digital drama and Kim Deal’s innovations within that field, but I’ll leave those to DIY gossip rags, disgruntled Stephen Malkmus fans, and habitués of 120 Minutes message boards. For our purposes, and respecting that Deal’s publicist asked that she not be asked about her former band (no, not the Amps), what matters is some of the other things that Kim Deal has invented, and what she’s reinventing currently.

First, with apologies for the narrative spoiler necessitated by respect for Kim Deal’s career-long contempt for preciousness, the “reinvention" in question is Kim Deal herself, who, just last year, at 63, released her first solo LP, Nobody Loves You More, an album of grief, vampirism, and joie de vivre expressed as an obstinacy bordering on ornery, and altogether a heart-swooning, elbow-throwing realization of every sonic impulse Deal has ever had that a collaborator assured her was a bad idea. For the invention part, for one, and depending on how hung up one is about exact facts and figures, there’s a strong case to be made for Kim Deal having invented the 1990s.

No, not the concept of there being a 10-year period directly following the 1980s. That would be stupid. “Deal” is not, traditionally, an aboriginal or Persian family name. Kim Deal is not Pope Gregory XIII. Nor did Kim Deal invent Boyz 11 Men, techno, Spice World, or any of the other good stuff outside the purview of a dogmatically rockist magazine such as the one you’re reading. But the other good stuff? That’d be Kim Deal.

Raised in Dayton, Ohio, by a dad with “great taste—Aretha, Ray Charles, you know...” and a mom who “just loved to dance,” Deal got early training (which would prove indirectly useful in the grunt rock revivals to come) via the bands that would pass through town and play Hara Arena: like Brownsville Station, the Outlaws, UFO, all the Hagars and Nugents who littered the middle American landscape where and when “punk” was still a term reserved for kids with slingshots, homosexuals in prison, and AC/DC. Even as a teenager, with “the only roads being disco or hard rock,” Deal had her own standards. When the Nuge would abandon his guitar to run around with his crossbow and loincloth, Deal and her friends booed. Rejecting radio determinism even then (and foreshadowing a career in college rock), Deal says she “knew” that Blue Oyster Cult’s “Dominance and Submission” was better than their “Godzilla.”

“And I like guitars. Guitar heroes were a big thing. When Joe Walsh got in the Eagles, it was a big deal. I liked his guitar playing. I liked any guitar playing that had a melody that you could air-guitar, because it was melodic enough to go, like, 'Dnah-nah-nah-nah-nah, dna-na-na-na, dneh-dneh-neh-neh-dneeneeee,'" Deal says, deftly mimicking Joe Walsh’s guitar line from “Life in the Fast Lane. “I like that.”

Without discounting the totemic importance of her joining after answering an ad that asked for “no chops,” it’s not hard to see how the music of Deal’s childhood would help make her a perfect candidate for a band as devoted to their record collections as the Pixies. With the accessible spookiness of BOC and the melodicism of Joe Walsh ingrained, Deal became the bassist and costar of the Boston surf rock quartet, the first band to play quietly and then real loud (before them, everything was either traffic noise or “Rhiannon”). In all of the above, Deal helped codify a dynamic that would then become the template for the vast majority of the American rock music made in the first half of the decade.

“WZZZSCHHHHHHHHH.”

—KIM DEAL, AS HER AUTOHARP

On cue, I can hear the pedants howling, screaming into their pillows about “hardcore punk,” about “Minneapolis,” about “Sub Pop,” and about “Mother Love Bone.” Fair enough, Kim Deal has indeed never been photographed in an amusingly oversize hat, so how much credit for the ’90s can she really claim? To that, I can only point out that she doesn’t claim any of this, I do. And I further plead that the whole “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” thing that everyone is so googoogaga about might also be extended to the Alternative Record Guide currently sitting dog-eared next to the reader’s toilet.

Also, according to his obituary in the Dayton Daily News, Robert Edward “Ed” Deal “helped develop the U2 high reconnaissance camera.” Meaning that Kim Deal’s father did work that helped determine the course of the ’80s. Maybe her dad’s influence was more through history’s reverberations than him literally going to Ireland and teaching Bono how to stare off in the distance during photo shoots, but the evidence stands: Affecting generational epochs is a Deal family tradition.

Anyway, concurrent to inventing 1990-1994, Kim Deal formed the Breeders, a supergroup (drawing from Pixies, Throwing Muses, Tragic Disaster, and Slint) made up of some of the coolest creeps in indie rock. From their first album, 1990’s Pod, the Breeders were startling enough—vocal sweetness, guitar serration, Cheap Trick harmonies, and melancholia slowed to a syrup—to make them one of Kurt Cobain’s favorite bands. Not content with that accolade, Deal & Breeders upended the grunge applecart entirely with “Cannonball,” three minutes and 33 seconds of the grooviest bassline utilized by Caucasians since the James Gang, with '60s fuzz, flying monkey chants, and some space-age hully gully thrown in for taste. That song’s success made Deal a genuine rock star. If not quite “marry your cousin/die young” levels of stardom, still definitely in the upper echelons of the “top tier indie” division. More important, the improbable sunshine ’n’ crunch success of “Cannonball” gave non-ideation guitar rock permission to chart again. From there, the decade was Beck, Space, Spacehog, and a million billion one-two hitters all the way down, some of whom made a lot more money than Kim Deal, but none of whom can claim to have invented the second half of the 1990s. (Maybe Weezer can, but let’s not pretend that all cool creeps are created equal.)

Through all this, nobody can reasonably claim that Kim Deal was underappreciated. At least not exactly. For as long as memory holds, Kim Deal’s coolness has been a given. There was even a song, released by the Dandy Warhols in 1997, titled “Cool as Kim Deal." The song was okay, if vaguely patronizing, and mainly served to ensure that, whenever an article about Kim Deal runs, in perpetuity, the headline writer gets the day off. As far as fates go, there are worse ones than having one’s coolness be a critical trope.

But, as compliment or critical cliché, and as the Warhols’ song title makes clear, Kim Deal being cool isn’t really so much about Kim Deal as it is about, you know, the “gaze.” Male gaze, critical gaze, or the vicarious/voracious gaze of an indie rock fan who, upon seeing a lady on stage, wearing sunglasses at night, rocking an unkempt heap of Ally Sheedyesque hair, and singing “Gigantic” (an ode to miscegenation whose lyrics may raise some eyebrows in 2025 but, for Boston in 1988, were practically “Brother Louie”), can’t quite let it go. After all, coolness—as opposed to art and truth and whatnot—requires a mirror. Without hurting anyone’s feelings, let’s just say that, when considering Deal’s body of work, the trope is insufficient to the task at hand.

The good news is that, 25 years after the '90s technically ended, and roughly 15 years into a ’90s revival that threatens to outpace us all, Kim Deal is getting something like her due.

Maybe. Hard to say, really.

As Deal herself says, when asked about what effect a recent (buzzed-about within writer circles) appearance on John Mulaney’s Netflix talk show has had: “I was thinking that too. I have no idea. Like, I only got texted by people saying, ‘Hey, I saw you on Mulaney. You were beautiful,’ stuff like that.” Deal enunciates “beautiful” like her friends are saying the exact wrong thing (and will be visibly relieved when it’s pointed out by me that she sounded good as well).

“But I have no idea. Like, I know he’s on Netflix, so...” she pauses, giving us both time to consider how neither of us knows what, these days, being on Netflix might even mean.

“And even if people did see it... I was just talking to somebody about this, about what it might take to get through,” she says, before deciding to take an audiovisual approach.

“Okay. Here’s the internet.” Deal circles the air at chest level, as if creating a whirlpool on a high table, adding a low sound effect that signifies "the internet."

“DNAH-NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH, DNA-NA-NA-NA, DNEH-DNEH-NEH-NEH-DNEE-NEEEE.”

—KIM DEAL, AS JOE WALSH’S GUITAR IN “LIFE IN THE FAST LANE”

“BzzzzzssSHHHSHHSSSSHHS,” Deal says, avoiding confusion by using a different sound effect from her one-note Autoharp.

“Here’s Sabrina Carpenter,” she continues, making an honestly pretty rudimentary Sabrina Carpenter with her hand.

“And here’s Chappell Roan.’’ Deal makes another gesture that, and I’m not trying to be critical here, looks a lot like her Sabrina Carpenter.

“They pop up, and then they go back into the stew that is the internet. Then somebody takes their shirt off or something, and that gets popped up. Guy or girl, whatever." Deal makes another whirlpool.

"BzzzzzssSHHHSHHSSSSHHS."

I nod solemnly, possibly having the most fun I’ve had interviewing anyone ever.

“Like, how does it even... How do people get through any of that?”

The fact that Kim Deal knows who Sabrina Carpenter is, and can reasonably ponder her own relationship to that level of fame without seeming remotely delusional, is indicative of not just confidence and self-awareness, but of how she’s currently having what is commonly referred to as “a moment." Besides the cultural validation of having the proto-Interpol suit Deal wore in the (Spike Jonez-directed, Kim Gordon-edited) video for “Cannonball” be enshrined within the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Pepsi-Cola-sponsored “Legends” exhibit (as opposed to the “Fucking Losers” exhibit where they keep all the other junk), last year the Breeders also did a short but successful run of stadium shows opening for the alt-appreciating pop star Olivia Rodrigo.

Both of those things are neat. Neat-o, even. But it’s hard to imagine that either of them gives Deal the same pleasure as making her solo album, or the amount of pleasure that Deal exhibits in the reality of the album’s existence. Every anecdote related to the album is told with evident joy. Even the stories that sound like incredible hassles, involving her attempts to approximate the sounds of strings and horns that she heard in her head with every musical instrument available within four hours’ driving distance of Dayton (before finally recording those head sounds on strings and horns), are delivered with laughter, with her contagiously delighting in every obstacle she throws in her own way. When discussing Steve Albini, the other pivotal Big Black mess in Kim Deal’s life/discography, Deal isn’t effusive so much as she channels the way her longtime friend and collaborator was matter-of-fact about his own enthusiasms. Having recorded with Albini since 1988, for the span of what would prove to be a lifetime, all she has to do is what she does: pepper our conversation with mentions of him. Albini giving her shit for one thing or another, Deal being frustrated about a recent studio experience where she hadn’t anticipated the bleed from her amp to the violin pickups because “whenever I’ve recorded strings, Steve Albini did it,” or a recent concert, at the Barbican in London, where Deal played with an orchestra and it did go well because Deal was better equipped and found the right people to help, but still she makes clear that “of course I know all this because of Albini anyway.”

If the Albini stuff feels like a digression, it is not. If Deal’s tone, when discussing Albini, is one of wry gratitude, it’s part and parcel of her tone throughout. As down-to-earth as her reputation leads one to expect her to be, it’s suffused with a touch of wonder as well.

“Whenever strings come in"—again, Kim Deal is using her hands—“it’s because I have a song and I’m liking it, and I am playing it, and I’m singing, and all of a sudden it comes in. Enter stage right. It just starts playing in my head. Literally the entire symphony plays in my head. All of it. ‘Da-da-da, da-da.’ It’s a mess. It’s beautiful."

It probably helps that the response to Nobody Loves You More has been uniformly positive, also with a touch of wonder. Which, cloistered as I am, I thought was true of all of her albums, but apparently not.

“On the whole, what’s been nice is that people have been actually interested in the record,” she says. "And they like the record. So that makes it a little easier because they might like a song on the record, and then we can talk about that song."

Deal isn’t being tautological, just responding to a separate question about whether she thought the way interviews are conducted has changed over the years. She does say, as an afterthought, that “there was a period of time when it was a lot of, you know, Pixies and drama stories. The Steve Malkmus stuff got some traction. A lot of people liked that, when me and him were arguing back and forth a little bit. I’d get a call asking for a comment from a comment on the comment. People loved it. I mean, they loved it so much."

Deal then adds, “That hasn’t been going on. Maybe it will, now that I’ve mentioned it."

(She hadn’t mentioned a specific “it.” So, with an eye toward a Kim Deal Digital Drama guitar pedal being manufactured in time for the holidays: In 2008, Kim Deal called Stephen Malkmus, singer of Pavement, “a bit of a bitch.” All requests for comment should be sent to DealWithIt@CREEM.com or PervertedbyMalkmus321@AOL.net.)

“I have noticed that there is this dude-versus-girl thing. That a lot of times in interviews, journalists will mention women’s lyrics and journaling, women’s lyrics and diary. As if the lyrics are coming from a spot of..." Deal’s whisper goes delicate here, with a pause between each word as if to accentuate the gossamer nature of what she’s describing "... inside, feminine, quiet bedroom, feminine mind. Of them talking to themselves, to their diary...”

Returning to her normal speaking voice, Deal completes the thought. “Whereas in somebody like Nick Cave, he’s up at the crack of dawn looking out on his shipyard, and he’s got a pen in his hand and his logs and his registry books, and even if they mention him journaling or mention him writing, it’s this process of profound, profoundly deep thoughts.

"And maybe that’s how it turns out, and they just like that better."

Nick Cave is an interesting example, as I’d argue that for most of his career his lyrics have been met with the same faint praise as those written by peers of Deal, like Kristin Hersh, or by others of their generation similarly inclined to get phantasmagorical in the lyrics department. While his fans have always taken all the succubi-humping as gospel, it’s only in light of his recent calamities, and in the direct way that he’s talked about them outside of his records, that critics have taken Cave seriously as a lyrics writer. In the past, Deal has been a recipient of a similar faint praise, but from a different direction, where her disinclination toward overt trauma-mongering has led to focus on her as a vibe rather than as one of the finer lyricists going—in terms of quality and in the sense of her using the least amount of words to convey the interior and exterior of an entire human world. Not sure what that says about criticism: that Nick Cave has to sing about his dead kids, that Kim Deal has to lose both parents and sing about her mother’s dementia, before the intelligentsia will forgive either for either (in Cave’s case) using all those flowery adverbs, like some kind of chick, or (in Deal’s case) saying what she means, and meaning it. (And also, you know, being a chick.)

Regardless, it makes sense that Kim Deal is concerned with, or at least bemused by, how lyrics by female artists are often perceived as unadorned transcriptions of the womanly psyche, as the spillover that comes out from too much time spent under the yellow wallpaper. Nobody Loves You More is indeed spilling over with lyrics of startling directness, slyly phrased, and sly insinuations, thrown down like a jackhammer. With Deal’s lyrics continuing a 35-year hot streak of peppy fatalism (see: "We stare at the stupid stars/Our love is hard/We are what we’re waiting for” from "Big Ben Beat”), existential defiance ("I go where I want/ While I’m still on the planet/One day I’ll take a ride/On the radar and rock” from the aptly named “Disobedience”), and, as always, the most winsomely deadpan way of expressing “fuck it” in all of independent rock music, as demonstrated on “A Good Time Pushed,” the last song Deal recorded with Steve Albini, with the repetition of “We’re having a good time/I’ll see you around” conveying enough ambivalence, about what’s out there, to power a Unitarian tent revival.

Nobody Loves You More was written over the course of roughly 10 years, which found Deal “writing the whole time, but at the same time doing the Last Splash reunion, doing the album All Nerve,” among other things, which the songwriter notes in order to dispel the interviewer’s misapprehension that the album had been a constant labor, with it being a case of Deal being holed away as an eccentric in some mansion somewhere.

“Let’s just say,” says Deal, “it mostly wasn’t.”

A fair portion of those years was spent taking care of Deal’s parents. While this is not the theme of the entire album, one can be forgiven for hearing echoes of those years, and the years that followed, throughout. Two of the songs, “Are You Mine?” and “Wish I Was,” were self-released as 7-inches in 2013, in forms different enough from how they are on the album to constitute a narrative themselves.

The original version of “Wish I Was” chugs and pulses along nicely, and strangely. It could be a demo for an unmade Breeders album of the time, which splits the difference between the don’t-fence-me-in friskiness of 2008’s Mountain Battles and the “Hey, hey, we’re the Breeders” return to rock city of 2018’s All Nerve. “Demo” isn’t meant as a diminishment, but also it’s got no singing on top. The version on Nobody Loves You More is not an instrumental, with the song’s words and how they’re sung showcasing the subtle, sometimes insidious, forces that Kim Deal, as a lyricist, has at her disposal.

The song begins with “I like the sound of your laugh,” a line seemingly in concordance with the song’s gentle VU-ish strumming and the lullaby of Deal’s voice. The next line, “The shadow you make/I follow them all over town,” subverts this. As does the chorus, beginning with “Standing strong/It makes me wish I was,” then a pause, with the listener expecting an expression of affirmation or love, something along the lines of “...strong like you” or “...smooching you up and down.” But what they get instead is Deal pushing out an increasingly plaintive “...younnng,” which makes clear the song’s intent.

“Have you ever just looked at somebody who’s younger than you and just had this aching desire? That’s one thing, when I was young and I saw older people looking at me, thinking like, ‘Oh my God, they want to...’” Trailing off, Deal says, “I didn’t realize: They aren’t looking at me. They’re looking at what they used to be. They want to be young. Not me.” Out of respect for the author, we’ll set aside whether or not Deal is being willfully naive in her interpretation of what older people, staring at her in her youth, specifically wanted.

Later in our interview, when discussing any perceived obliqueness of her lyrics, Deal emphatically, almost giddily, doubles down, saying, “‘Wish I Was’ seems obvious to me. It’s like, I wish I was fucking young. I look at you, you look strong, and it makes me fucking have regrets and it makes me fucking want to be fucking young. It hurts! It hurts sometimes, that feeling.”

To be clear, the “you” in the preceding quote refers to the subject of the song in question, not me. I am pushing 50, hard, and have the physical appearance of a fish stick that has been left out in the rain.

“BZZZZZSSSHHHSHHSSSSHHS."

—KIM DEAL, AS THE INTERNET

As for the other track that changed over time because Kim Deal’s life changed over time, “Are You Mine?” is built around a quote from Deal’s mother where, having no conscious memory of her daughter outside of knowing that she loved what was in front of her, asked Deal, “Are you mine? Are you my baby?” Both versions of the song share that same essential kindness, but the 7-inch version is a preemptive song of mourning, with a prominent tambourine providing a fragile march. On Nobody Loves You More, “Are You Mine?” is arranged as a waltzing, C&W elegy, with prominent strings and the tambourine recorded to no longer lead a march so much as to provide a shuffling accompaniment to the last slow dance of the night.

Deal’s mother died in 2020, “just really close to COVID 2020, which I’m very...”

The singer almost says “...happy about,” before swallowing, though I knew exactly what she meant, and simply adding “...and she died at home, too."

The “too” in this case is in relation to Deal’s father, who died of congestive heart failure a year prior, on “April 15, Tax Day. He would be very pleased with that.”

The gorgeousness of both versions of “Are You Mine?” warrants further discussion, especially the LP version. A discussion that we begin to have. Never one to miss an easy in with a subject, I’d readied myself to talk about my own parents, whose deaths had occurred around the same time as Deal’s. But when we got around to it, I found it to be a lot less fun than talking about Blue Oyster Cult. In the grueling midst of us sharing sympathies/ horror, with both subject and interviewer doing their duties and then some, and both looking increasingly stricken, Deal’s voice catches for a second time and she says, “Let’s move on.”

When she does this, I want to throw Kim Deal a parade like she’d just saved the world from an asteroid, or just gotten us off the topic of the asteroid that had recently killed both of our parents. Either/or.

If I harp on the “cool” thing, the above is why. The album is why. Nobody Loves You More is a lot of things: It’s an orchestral pop album, a heavy ukulele album, a witty ruing of the clarity that comes with sobriety, a loving and empathetic rumination on dementia, a savage self-examination of the no-longeryoung’s sour hunger for what the kids still got (and also a celebration of that same base need). It’s another Kim Deal album, just as good as the rest, possibly better. One thing it’s not is “cool.” To think of it as so, or even to see it as some vaguely inspiring late-in-thegame epilogue to a ’90s icon’s catalog, is to elide the art, the artist, and all the muck in between. And, for all its swooning ’60s pop accoutrements, Nobody Loves You More is an album that splashes mighty around in the muck. It’s a lovely beast, so much so that it’s tempting to get sentimental and say Kim Deal is inventing Kim Deal. And I would say that, if I wasn’t fairly confident that Kim Deal would laugh that shit out of the room.