In her pink-tiled bathroom with a sky-blue tub, Kim Deal gripped a wad of cables in one hand and squatted to peer down a laundry chute.
She bought this modest Dayton, Ohio, house in 1990 when she was in two of the defining bands of the alternative era — Pixies and the Breeders — and turned its basement into a laboratory of rock. She eventually added recording gear to the main bedroom, and was demonstrating how she’d threaded its wiring up to the second floor.
“There’s a snake down there that has many inputs,” she explained, then dashed up a flight of white wooden stairs with the deftness of someone who’s done it a hundred thousand times. She grinned and pointed at the cords’ destination. Wasn’t it great?
It was a crisp October night in the unassuming Midwestern city that’s still home to the Breeders, and leaves rustled beneath Deal’s yellow-soled Hokas. The two-bedroom, like Deal herself, is low-key and designed for music-making. A collection of hard drives lay on the floor in front of a bookshelf holding paperbacks and 45s, though ironically, she’s never been good at keeping a record collection. “Supposedly I have some rare ones,” she said, thumbing through a handful. “This is El Inquilino Comunista, a Spanish band, they were good.”
Trends and names come and go, but despite living very much out of the spotlight, Deal has had a grip on the popular imagination for nearly four decades with her confounding lyrics, starry nonchalance and a distinctive singing voice that’s like cotton candy cut with paint thinner. “Cannonball,” a crunchy earworm with a slippery bass line from the Breeders’ second album, “Last Splash,” is sonic shorthand for “the ’90s.” Kurt Cobain loved her songs and took the band on tour with Nirvana in 1993; the 21-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo did the same in 2024.
This month, at 63, Deal is finally releasing a full album under her own name, titled “Nobody Loves You More,” that is more than a new twist on a familiar aesthetic. It’s a statement of evolution from a fiercely independent artist in maturity — a project that evolved over the tumultuous years as Deal sorted out her sobriety, pried open old band wounds and devoted herself to her aging parents. Her mother and father both passed before she turned these long-gestating songs into an album. After it was finished, the man who helped make it, her beloved co-conspirator Steve Albini, died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 61.
Grappling with loss (and what’s still at stake for the living) didn’t lead her to withdraw; she expanded. The solo album brings together lushly orchestrated dreamscapes, wistful reveries and even noisy beats. Deal, who does not rush into anything, approached the transformation with her trademark scrutiny and humor.
“The fact that there’s trumpets and horns — trombones and stuff. I really had to think about it,” she said over the summer, reflecting on her past catalog of amped-up rock. “The ukulele almost broke me.”
DEAL’S CAREER BEGAN one week after she moved to Boston in 1986, when she was the lone respondent to an alt-weekly advertisement for a musician “into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary” that came with an amusing caveat: “Please, no chops.”
She had married one of her brother’s co-workers from the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, and relocated to his hometown. (Speaking with Deal today, one gets the impression this was the most conventional series of decisions she’s ever made.) The ad led her to the college friends Charles Thompson — the songwriter, guitarist and frontman known as Black Francis, later Frank Black — and Joey Santiago, and she agreed to switch from guitar to bass for their embryonic band.
Two years later, Pixies were on the road in Europe supporting their first album, “Surfer Rosa,” when their melodic, thrashy rock — a spark that exploded into flames and quickly shrank to a smolder — clicked with audiences. In a cheeky eye roll at heteronormativity, Deal billed herself as “Mrs. John Murphy” (she got divorced the next year), and in a stroke of serendipity, she had women tourmates: Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh from Throwing Muses, who became fast friends. Back home in Dayton, “Dudes weren’t dying to play with the chick,” she said. “It made you look a little weak.”
For Deal, who had been working as a medical laboratory technician and playing bars and weddings with her twin sister, Kelley, that first trek was “the best tour I’ve ever been on,” she said. But as Pixies swiftly blew up into one of the hottest bands in underground rock, the reality of road life hit hard.
“I just remember all of ‘Doolittle’ as me heavy bleeding all through Europe in a bus with men, looking for sanitary napkins,” she said of the group’s tour for its wildly influential 1989 breakthrough. “I didn’t journal about like, the struggles of being a woman in a band. What I did was I went to the desk and asked them in the best way I could, ‘Where is a farmacia?’”
Pixies’ music was startling and mysterious; the two characters trading lines onstage were too. Deal was a former cheerleader with a mischievous yet reassuring smile who started writing songs shortly after getting her hands on her father’s acoustic guitar at age 13. Her airy backing vocals provided a foil for Thompson’s gritty howls, yet the group’s musical magic didn’t align with its personal alchemy. Deal was comfortable with her role, but ultimately Pixies were not her band.
“My main understanding of Kim is that she’s a songwriter,” Kelley said in a phone interview. Deal co-wrote “Gigantic,” one of Pixies’ most beloved songs, but it was one of her only contributions. She found an outlet with Donelly for what became the first Breeders album, the dark trip “Pod,” which they recorded in Scotland. Pixies relations by then had deteriorated as stress, egos and poor decisions collided in stifling proximity. When Deal returned to the United States, she learned that the rest of the quartet had moved to Los Angeles to make a new LP.
“One hopes that doesn’t happen in a band,” she said outside an L.A. hotel in August, her deadpan barely covering the scar.
Pixies released two more albums before splitting in 1993. By then, “Last Splash” was in the chamber; Donelly had stepped aside to start her band Belly, and Kelley was recruited as a replacement on lead guitar, an instrument she did not yet play. The bassist Josephine Wiggs — a dry Brit whom Deal had met on tour — stayed on, and Deal found a powerhouse drummer, Jim Macpherson, playing in a local club.
Sliding into the driver’s seat of her own band, Deal practically invented a new way to be a rock star. Her songs could scan sexy, but she never performed femininity. She was simultaneously relatable and evasive; precise and loose. (If you’re looking for a through line in Deal’s career, keep an eye on dualities.) “Last Splash” included the warped sound of a sewing machine and a bluegrassy fiddle.
The singer and songwriter Lucy Dacus, 29, said she fell in love with the album’s breadth a few years ago. “From the music alone, there’s this comfortable confidence that a lot of people try to copy, and they’re trying too hard,” the boygenius member said in a phone interview. “I just like people who I can tell aren’t playing by any particular set of rules — they’re just playing.”
The album sold a million copies and the Breeders performed on the main stage of Lollapalooza, but Deal didn’t rush to capitalize with a follow-up. In fact, it never occurred to them. “This is what’s so great about us,” she said. “We have no clue.”
DEAL HAS BEEN cast as both the world’s most intimidating rock star and the most down to earth. Either way, fans are certain they want to hang out with her. (They’d probably end up checking out a laundry chute.) “Got some sunglasses there,” she earnestly narrated on a drive around Dayton. “Couple of tops there — I got this shirt there. It’s a really good, easy shirt to wear.”
Her conversations are punctuated with whispers, penetrating stares, searching gazes and the occasional arm grab. She is partial to physical re-enactments, and can wind any topic back to her comfort zone: the specifics of recording sound. She’s a horror and true-crime aficionado and a coffee fanatic. (The Nespresso travels in its own road case.) Her laugh — a gasp that spreads into a warm giggle — breaks out frequently.
“She is one of the funniest people I know,” Kelley said. “When I look at her or think about her, all I think about is how hysterical she is.” Reminded that many people first think about how cool Kim is (there’s a 1997 Dandy Warhols song about just that), Kelley balked: “She’s not that [expletive] cool to me.”
Another cool Kim’s take? “She’s just herself, which is so great,” said Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, a peer who clocked Deal as a kindred spirit. “She’s not branding anything,” she said, adding that Deal “has a vision that she definitely just will persist at until she gets.”
Deal’s humor is as much a part of her songwriting as her “rich vein of cynicism,” as Kelley put it. Her lyrics evolve in a very quirky way: Deal writes by hand on a “hierarchy of paper.” She’ll start out jotting lyrics on “plain white paper, or lined thin paper,” and the best of her scribbles move to scalloped paper plates. Once Deal is headed to the studio, she switches to folders taped together “because you can hear paper plates moving and stuff, and they won’t stay on music stands.” Working out the music, Deal will exhaustively chase an idea down a rabbit hole until she hits a eureka moment: “I mean it’s so stupid, but it has to sound special for me,” she said.
The two people who best understand Deal’s quirks — Kelley, and Kim’s best friend, Kyle Rector — are never more than a shout or a FaceTime away. (Rector, her weed dealer in the ’90s, is a onetime boyfriend. The Elaine to her Jerry? “Actually, I think I’m Elaine and he’s George,” she said.) Two years ago, she adopted a skittish rescue dog, Ruby, a red heeler mix with remarkable, glassy eyes.
Deal lost the other person with the clearest insight into her artistic hardwiring in May: Albini, the lauded, prickly recording engineer who worked on nearly every one of her projects. It’s hard to imagine a Kim Deal profile without a colorful Albini quote. (“The two elements always at war in Kim’s music are prettiness and decadence, the deb and the dirtbag each holding a ladder for the other,” he told New York magazine in 2018. The duality strikes again.)
Sitting on a swivel chair at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago two days after playing his July memorial, Deal spoke of him exclusively in the present tense, marveling at how he’d shaped her world since he recorded Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa.” Her friends and collaborators “all emanate with Steve,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Oh! That’s why I know all these people.’”
Heather Whinna, Albini’s widow, said Deal’s painstaking process flew in the face of her husband’s straightforward recording philosophy, but he bent to her wishes. “I can’t explain how special Kim is,” she said in a video interview, “except to tell you that I know that Steve admired her more than he admired anyone else in music.”
IN THE LATE ’90S, Deal searched for her perfect sound in New York studios, burning through money and good will. In 2002, she checked into rehab. “Somebody said this and I recognized myself,” she told me five years later: “I wasn’t a musician with some drugs in the room, I was a drug addict with some musical gear in the room.”
When her parents picked her up from the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, they delivered upsetting news: Her mother, who’d worked as an X-ray tech and teacher, was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Deal moved home, but was soon on the road again. In a surprise that stunned fans and kicked off a reunion craze in the concert industry, Pixies got back together to tour. Deal agreed, as long as they still sounded good. She was part-tickled, part-horrified to find they sounded “exactly the same.” A documentary crew captured an uncomfortable band struggling to relate while a freshly sober Deal nervously puffed a seemingly endless cigarette and young female fans swooned at her feet.
Deal, who had long said she wouldn’t play on a new Pixies album, stuck around until 2011; the band released an LP in 2014. She returned to a familiar refuge — her “Last Splash” lineup of the Breeders, all fences mended after two albums with different casts of musicians — while chipping away at a batch of songs that felt appropriate simply to call her own.
The writing and refining slowly progressed; her mother’s condition worsened. It’s the inspiration behind one of the beautiful, haunting songs on her solo record: “Are You Mine?,” which Deal hopes reads as a love song (“Are you mine? / Are you my baby?”) even though it’s rooted in heartbreaking confusion. Deal lived at home and cared for her parents until her father passed in April 2019, and her mother died in February 2020.
“I think back and it’s like, I can’t believe what I went through,” she said in the Dayton kitchen, pressing her hands against her face and staring into nothingness. “It was [expletive] intense. I’m not complaining. It’s just like, totally unbelievable. Like the difference between what a life is, living, and then when you put caregiving in as a No. 1 job, and then what that entails and how much of my day and life was about that.”
And then they were gone. Soon their house was too. It was sitting on a culvert the city needed to access; Deal watched as a giant claw tore down her bedroom.
Her father, a physicist who specialized in lasers, had always loved the Florida Keys, and Deal found herself wandering down to the islands for creative breathing room over the years. “The view is nice to write to,” she said; there was an addendum. “But I don’t like the beach and I don’t like the sun. And I don’t like to get hot. And I don’t like water sports. And I don’t like laying out. But I did like the view.”
She had just settled in with two carloads of gear when the pandemic hit. For five months, she was trapped there, alone. (There were checkpoints on the island for residents, and she couldn’t abandon the equipment.) Out of necessity, the queen of analog recording learned the digital software Pro Tools. Kelley thinks she secretly loves the ability to adjust the landing of a kick drum just so.
“Nobody Loves You More” opens with a delightful surprise: Its title track is one of a handful of songs that comprise a grand, cinematic universe of swooping strings and robust horns befitting dancers twirling around a ballroom floor. Its counterpart, “Summerland,” features the aforementioned ukulele, a gift from Albini when Deal played his wedding in Hawaii. She sang the orchestrations and painstakingly figured out each corresponding note before handing them off to an arranger. “It’s like, oh, that’s why people learn how to write music,” she said. “That would be handy.”
Kelley plays guitar on “Coast,” a winking sand jam inspired by a trip to Nantucket to dry out around 2000, as well as “Disobedience,” a crispy rock song about desires big and small. The woozy “Wish I Was,” like “Are You Mine?,” was released as part of a singles collection in 2013, but as an instrumental; its lyrics are uncharacteristically straightforward: “Wish I was,” Deal sings, pausing before the word “young.”
THE BREEDERS ARE such a bedrock of Dayton history, they’re now enshrined in the city’s Walk of Fame for their “indelible contribution to alternative rock.” Deal missed the ceremony when she was in Europe preparing for her album release, so she added it to an impromptu tour of the city, and squatted down for a pic beside their square, adorned with a treble clef.
She navigated to a charming strip in the arts district, pausing outside the Trolley Stop, a 19th-century tavern with a small stage where she and Kelley used to perform in the early days. After a quick FaceTime with Kelley to clarify why their father decided to have his cremated remains housed in a columbarium — a word she said with relish — Deal directed us to a leafy cemetery and pointed out the two spots beside her parents’ names reserved for her and her sister.
After so many years of caregiving, she ostensibly was about to embark on a fresh era free from the hum of constant worry. But over the summer, she learned her dog was going blind. Ruby is now on a regimen of five-plus eyedrops a day, and has become a growing concern.
“I’m having trouble with the dog,” she had confided in a near whisper the night before, leaning over her round kitchen table. “I cannot write a song with the dog around.” Ruby has a lot of energy, and “I have this train of thought and it’s like …” She was flummoxed.
But Kim Deal has never suppressed a flicker of creativity. “Now I really have some ideas,” she said. “I’m going to have to hide somewhere with the guitar.”
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