A Playlist That’s as Cool as Kim Deal

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!