Dear listeners,
Today marks an occasion four decades in the making: the indie-rock icon Kim Deal, at age 63, is releasing her first ever solo album, a collection of woozy pop ballads and distorted rockers titled “Nobody Loves You More.”
Deal is best known as the bassist of Pixies (and an indelible backing vocalist: “Where Is My Mind?” just wouldn’t be the same without her high, haunting “oohs”) and the frontwoman of the Breeders (the ’90s themselves just wouldn’t have been the same without the inventive and infectious sound of “Last Splash”). Her voice is inimitable; in her recently published profile of Deal, my editor Caryn Ganz describes it quite vividly as sounding “like cotton candy cut with paint thinner.”
A lot of people in rock bands want to seem cool, and they will spend much of their energy (and wardrobe budgets) attempting to telegraph their coolness to the audience: think tattoos, tight leather and lots of posturing. Kim Deal has always been the other kind of cool. She’s not in-your-face about it. She smiles more often than she sneers. She seems to have an innate sort of self-acceptance of who she is and does not care what you think at all.
Tanya Donelly, who started the Breeders with Deal, once recalled catching some early Pixies shows, when Deal would often come straight from work and play bass in “skirt-suits and office pumps.” Everyone else in the scene was trying to dress as outrageously as possible, she said, “and meanwhile the coolest person there is dressed like a secretary. I have to say, in a day it changed my perception of what was cool.”*
In honor of her debut solo album, today’s playlist is a tribute to Kim Deal’s particular kind of cool. In addition to a few tracks from the new album, it places some of her best-known songs alongside deeper cuts from bands like the Amps, Sonic Youth and This Mortal Coil. I hope it inspires you to check out “Nobody Loves You More” in its entirety; it’s truly worth the wait.
Let’s have a ball,
Lindsay
*In one of my favorite moments from Ganz’s profile, a dissenting opinion comes from Kim’s twin and fellow Breeder Kelley Deal: “She’s not that [expletive] cool to me.” Leave it to a sister to keep your ego in check!
Listen along while you read.
1. Kim Deal: “Nobody Loves You More”
This warm, swooning opening title track from Deal’s new album at first seems like a melancholic, string-assisted ballad, but midway through it erupts into something even grander, complete with orchestral fanfare. As Ganz notes in her profile, Deal was so involved with every element of the song that she “sang the orchestrations and painstakingly figured out each corresponding note before handing them off to an arranger.” Deal added, of this involved process, “It’s like, oh, that’s why people learn how to write music. That would be handy.”
2. The Breeders: “Cannonball”
This alt-rock smash from “Last Splash” is one of those songs that has become, rightfully, a sonic synonym for “the ’90s.” No matter how many times you’ve heard it, though, “Cannonball” retains its singular, haphazard charm: Josephine Wiggs’s faux-flubbed bass intro, the brilliant use of a harmonica mic to distort Deal’s vocals, and even the piercing intrusion of a coach’s whistle. It sounds like a bunch of junk tumbling out of an overstuffed closet and just accidentally striking the notes of a perfect pop song.
3. Sonic Youth: “Little Trouble Girl”
It’s the two most iconic Kims of alternative rock, on a single track! Deal’s sing-songy chorus melody provides the perfect foil to Kim Gordon’s spoken-word deadpan on this Shangri-Las-inspired single from Sonic Youth’s 1995 album, “Washing Machine.” As Gordon puts it in her memoir “Girl in a Band,” “I asked Kim Deal of the Pixies to sing the melodic part. Why? Because I couldn’t! Her voice was perfect.”
4. The Breeders: “Iris”
“Pod” — the first Breeders LP and the only one to feature cofounding member Tanya Donelly, who would soon leave to start the band Belly — is an album full of primal power and off-kilter beauty. (It was one of Kurt Cobain’s favorite albums, and its engineer, Steve Albini, once said it was one of the best albums he ever worked on.) This highlight is marked by Deal’s droning bass and the ragged intensity of her vocals.
5. Pixies: “Silver”
Despite her integral role in the band’s overall sound and chemistry, Deal co-wrote only a few songs in the Pixies catalog. We’ll get to the most famous one shortly, but this haunting, country-tinged experiment that appears near the end of the band’s 1989 masterpiece “Doolittle” is perhaps the most quintessentially Deal — a twangy, ghostly dirge with high harmonies as chilling as a nocturnal desert wind. More than any other Pixies song, it anticipates some of the more atmospheric and abstract work she’d later do with the Breeders.
6. This Mortal Coil: “You and Your Sister”
As guest members of Ivo Watts-Russell’s musical collective This Mortal Coil, Deal and Donelly lent their vocals to this gorgeous cover of a 1978 shoulda-been-hit by the doomed Big Star co-founder Chris Bell.
7. The Amps: “Bragging Party”
After the success of “Last Splash,” the Breeders went on hiatus, but in 1995 Deal recruited a few members to contribute to “Pacer,” the sole album released by her relatively unassuming and lo-fi side project the Amps. (A very good name for a band, in the opinion of this particular newsletter.)
8. Kim Deal: “Are You Mine”
One of the most emotionally affecting songs on “Nobody Loves You More” is this sweetly lilting slow dance. “Are you mine? Are you my baby?” Deal sings. It works as a straightforward love song, but its true inspiration is all the more wrenching: Deal wrote it while caring for her mother as she struggled with Alzheimer’s disease.
9. The Breeders: “Bang On”
While they never again approached the staggering commercial heights of “Last Splash,” the Breeders have continued releasing solid, consistently fascinating albums throughout this century; this oddly infectious, blown-out ditty appeared on the 2008 LP “Mountain Battles.”
10. Pixies: “Gigantic”
Finally, let’s go out with one of the most enduringly cool Kim Deal songs, the sole single released from the Pixies’ earth-shattering 1988 debut album, “Surfer Rosa.” Her low, buoyant bass line sets the scene, but it’s that voice — at once childlike and wise beyond its years — that gives this song its magic.
The Amplifier Playlist
“A Playlist That’s as Cool as Kim Deal” track list
Track 1: Kim Deal, “Nobody Loves You More”
Track 2: The Breeders, “Cannonball”
Track 3: Sonic Youth, “Little Trouble Girl”
Track 4: The Breeders, “Iris”
Track 5: Pixies, “Silver”
Track 6: This Mortal Coil, “You and Your Sister”
Track 7: The Amps, “Bragging Party”
Track 8: Kim Deal, “Are You Mine”
Track 9: The Breeders, “Bang On”
Track 10: Pixies, “Gigantic”
Bonus Tracks
Here are a few reader-suggested additions to Tuesday’s love triangle playlist: Ry Cooder’s “Go Home, Girl,” Betty Davis’s “Your Man My Man” and — of course — Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl.”
And if you’re looking for some more freshly released music, this week’s Playlist has new tracks from Jack Harlow, Tyla, a personal favorite from the Chicago band Horsegirl and more. Listen here.
The post A Playlist That’s as Cool as Kim Deal appeared first on New York Times.
