How rock’s coolest woman blew Olivia Rodrigo’s mind

Kim Deal has always left the star nonsense to other people. She’s seen it from a close distance for long enough, inside two of the coolest rock bands the Grammys forgot. So when pop sensation du jour Olivia Rodrigo invited the Breeders to open a run of Madison Square Garden shows last April, she wasn’t about to lose her head.

“I’ve done shows at Madison Square Garden before,” she says by Zoom from her hometown of Dayton Ohio. “The Pixies opened for U2’s Zoo TV tour in 1992. We did 32 shows.” Four were at the Garden to a total of 80,000 people, most of whom probably had no idea that the support act had more or less invented that year’s grunge craze.

“We had also opened for the Cure at Dodger Stadium [75,000 in 1989], so I know what the job is. It’s to watch people find their seats,” she says. “That’s what I did with the Pixies, and that’s what I did with the Breeders.” She smiles a happy smile. Ego not pictured.

It was sweet, she adds because once Rodrigo’s fans arrived, the 21-year-old superstar took time to tell them how the Breeders’ Cannonball had changed her life. “So it’s nice to know that music can blow people’s minds and blow their perspective out of the water,” Deal says. “It really can make an impact on somebody other than just, ‘great guitar sound’, you know?”

As Australian fans saw last January, Deal’s best-known song continues to stress-test floorboards whenever she reunites with her twin sister Kelley and the rest of the band she formed on a break from the Pixies in ’89. But her debut solo album is more muted and reflective, as signalled by its elegant orchestration and disarming title: Nobody Loves You More.

The fact that she’s pictured on the cover – all at sea on a life-raft under stormy skies with a flamingo, a guitar and several amplifiers – marks a significant departure. Back when the Pixies appeared on the uber hip English indie label 4AD, sleeve artist Vaughan Oliver “would make fun of any band who wanted their face on the cover,” she remembers.

“I hate water activity,” she says. “I don’t like the beach. I don’t like sand. I don’t like the heat. But my dad really liked to go to Florida [hence the flamingo], and that’s what he and my mother did every year. So when he got too old, I started to assist him … I started bringing my guitars and amps along and the last time I was stuck down there for five months, so I wrote a lot.”

Between April 2019 and February 2020, the Deal siblings lost both their parents. “It wasn’t just that they passed,” Kim says. “I mean, do you know anybody who has had Alzheimer’s? My mum was diagnosed in 2002 … so she had Alzheimer’s for 18 years. There was a pathos to the house. I was there, living there, keeping care of her, and every day seeing a loss. Every day, seeing more and more somebody disintegrate and their mind ravaged.

“You know how people tell you, ‘you’re gonna grow old, but don’t worry, you’ll have your memories to keep you company while you think about all the wonderful things that happened in your life and all the people who love you’? Yeah, right, sure. Although she loved ice cream. She would rub her toes together when she got that ice cream. That really was a joy for her.”

Are You Mine? is the most poignant song on the album. The title is something her mother said to her one day as they passed in the corridor. Her daughter pitches the question between hope and confusion: desperate and sanguine, remote and intimate at the same time.

That’s the atmosphere that envelops Nobody Loves You More from its opening line: “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t care.” Whoever is singing only exists as an expression of adoration. As nostalgic orchestrations swells, the effect is a melancholy act of surrender.

The chorus, the writer stresses, is: “‘I mean to tell you nobody loves you more’… It’s not been said. There’s no guarantee it can be said because the feeling might change. Even more, one might not be brave enough to say it. It’s the desire to say it... and there’s something sad about that. Will it be said? Will it be requited, even? Who knows.”

It’s interesting to reflect on the myriad ways Deal sidesteps the centre of her own story, even on a solo album with her face on the cover. Kurt Cobain always said she wrote the Pixies’ best songs. The Dandy Warhols wrote Cool as Kim Deal in tribute. But on those early 4AD albums, she didn’t even use her own name, opting instead for the ironic cloak of her then husband’s.

“I was working in a doctor’s office,” she says, “and I’m like: ‘OK Ethel, let me get your chart.’ And she was like: ‘My name is not Ethel. My name is Mrs Herbert Schmidt’ — like, ‘I’m only important if I use my husband’s name! Show me respect by using another person’s identity!’ So I was just like, oh my god, I’ve gotta be Mrs John Murphy.”

At the risk of blowing her cover, I have to ask about one more line on her new album, from Coast. “Clearly, my life, I’ve been foolish. Tried to hit hard, but I blew it.” Really?

“I know I’m supposed to say, ‘I have no regrets, every part of my life made me who I am’, but I do have regrets,” she says.

“I have years that I feel like, yeah, you could probably take those out. That song is definitely a lament. I didn’t write it back then, but the story is from 2000, when I was on [the island of] Nantucket. I was trying to dry out, and I saw these 20-somethings and they were like, outside, doing stuff in the daytime.

“They were getting on wetsuits and checking out when the surf is up, so they can know when to bugger off their job so they can get a couple of freezing cold Atlantic waves to surf … it was really a very good place for me to be at the time, seeing somebody outside in the daytime.”

The possibility of an alternative life, perhaps? “Oh, not for me,” she says cheerfully. “For other people.”

Kim Deal’s solo album Nobody Loves You More (Remote Control) is out now.

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