The Breeders Are Not Back To Be Your Jaded Rockstars
We talk to Kelley Deal ahead of their Australian tour.
When Kelley Deal gives you advice, you listen.
“Either you have a drive and obsession to make music or art — you either have that internally, [that] you have to do it, and you’re gonna do it whether anybody hears it or not — or you don’t have that thing,” she tells me over the phone, speaking from her home in Dayton, Ohio.
“If your goal is to be famous, then take your clothes off and get on the internet. There. Done. Famous. Don’t spend all of the time doing the music, just go get famous. That’s way easier. And cheaper.”
Deal knows about the costs of fame, too. As a founding member of supergroup The Breeders, Deal’s seen (and lived through) a lot: their first two albums, Pod and Last Splash, were pivotal to the alt-rock explosion of the early ’90s.
Pick her brain, and you’ll hear backstage stories about Lollapalooza and touring with Nirvana that’d make you shiver with FOMO, though Deal herself isn’t too nostalgic — her early ’90s were marked with drug addiction, which in part fostered The Breeders’ hiatus for the latter part of the decade.
Speaking to Noisey in 2013 ahead of Last Splash‘s 20 year anniversary, Deal dismantled the myth of a ‘rockstar’, speaking mostly about her side-hustles and the reality that no one really makes a living off their art. Sure, she’s played some of the biggest stages in the world, but she also sells her hand-knitted scarves and takes catering shifts serving hors d’oeuvres at funeral homes. But isn’t a case of living across two lives: for Deal, they’re one and the same.
Which has meant when The Breeders have returned, Kelley and co. have been eager to make music, rather than motivated by money. After Deal was sober, the band released two acclaimed albums in the ’00s — Title Tk and Mountain Battles. But it wasn’t the ‘full’ band: Kelley and her twin Kim Deal (of The Pixies) had returned, but bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim Macpherson were off with side-projects, living lives.
All Nerve, released earlier this year, marks a return to this Last Splash lineup, when the band where at their most monumental. Chatting to Music Junkee ahead of The Breeders’ tour of Australia over the next two weeks, Deal touched upon returning to the past, how audiences have and haven’t changed, and the odd sensation of realising you’re someone’s rockstar.
All Nerve marks the return for the band to its Last Splash lineup. When you were beginning to write music together again, did you feel any pressure to make some sort of spiritual or sonic success to that album?
No, I think our goal was just to be able to work together. We were all taking it kinda slow, and just kinda… “okay, here, we’ll do this, okay”.
Because we’re using guitars, bass and drums in a basement, through the same amps that we used when we did Last Splash — and we were gonna be recording it at a recording studio, we’re not gonna do it on a laptop — we knew the process was gonna be a certain way. And when the process is a certain way, the results are gonna be a certain thing.
So we knew it wasn’t gonna be a radical deviation: we’re not gonna start a disco album, it’s not gonna be a rock-off, or something.
And just knowing each other’s taste and stuff that it was gonna be something that was going to sit well within the Pod / Last Splash dynamics. You know, the same people. Well, kinda. The same club.
Like you just said, you rehearsed in the same basement that you spent a lot of time in the ’90s. Did that feel like a bit of a time warp?
It did, having Jim and Josephine in there. But I spent a lot of time… We practiced and rehearsed all that stuff for [Kim and Kelley Deal’s side band] The Amps and for [The Breeders’ albums] Title TK, and Mountain Battles.
So I’ve been down in that basement a while, because I live in Dayton and had been working with Kim.
But to have Joe and Jim down there… especially Josephine, because she’s so exotic of a creature, and just have her walking around with her English accent and drinking tea and talking, being smart. It was really neat having her down there, it was a real thrill.
Obviously, 2018 is very different from 1993. How is the dynamic between the four of you: did it feel like you were returning home to something?
Since we had lives in-between — full lives, with other bands and other music and other experiences — it was very familiar and both kinda different too.
I think [there] was a richness to our getting together that we were able to take advantage of. We had all been super active and doing other things and decided to come together to do this recording because of the Last Splash anniversary. It didn’t feel like…
You were more all ready to come back together rather than feeling forced to?
Yeah! There was a feeling of that: we were all fully into it. Fully willing to make whatever [and] fully ready to commit to it.
What does touring now look like to you? How has it changed?
Well, all of the external stuff is the same for us. We still have all the gear, we drive from place to place, take our gear in and out. We play through guitars and amps, they get mic’d and they get sent through the front of house. So that part’s not changed.
[But] for me, I actually remember what we’re doing that day, and get up during the day without being hungover, ’cause I don’t drink or use drugs now. It makes touring a lot easier, that’s the main thing.
Also, I feel like, now, it’s not harder to go out, but it’s more of a commitment for people to come to a show instead of just watching it [online].
There’s so many other things for people to do that if you actually leave your house to go see a show at a club? It’s ’cause you wanna see the band. And you’re stoked to see the band. There’s a lot of people [in the audience] that are really happy to see us. It took me a while to understand that — it wasn’t until I met Exene Cervenka from [’90s punk band] X.
If I’m part of somebody’s memory cache, someone’s sonic memory playlist, I’m super stoked. I feel lucky.
I remember being backstage at one of their shows — some people went into the dressing room and I went in too, and I kinda hugged the wall. And I didn’t stare too long at Exene. I didn’t wanna lock eyes with her, but I knew exactly — I clocked exactly where she was at every second. I knew where she was.
I since met her, she’s super nice and doesn’t care at all. But that feeling that I had with her, I understand that people have with this band — because we have this history with Nirvana, and Lollapalooza and The Pixies and all this other stuff — that other people feel like that. And I never understood that, and now I get that because I’ve had those experiences too.
Which must be bolstering to realise that people feel that about you and your music, right?
Oh yeah! Oh, it feels great. And a lot of it has to do with just us and music. I’m the biggest fan of our band, you know?
But a lot of it, I have to be fair, has to do with [whether] this is the music that was around while you were growing up… music has an indelible [quality], it’s like sense memory. It’s sonic memory of a time. And it will forever be linked with that.
There are songs that I hear that take me way back to a day, or a time, or an age, or a season. If I’m part of somebody’s memory cache, someone’s sonic memory playlist, I’m super stoked. I feel lucky.
Do you have fans coming up being like, “This song reminds me of this time when I was in high school” or-
They do.
The main thing people wanna talk about is what the music means to them: how it got them through a breakup, and they’ll look at in my eyes to tell me that, [or] how them and their girlfriends, “We would listen to your album every day” or share a story about what it meant to them. And it’s awesome. It’s something else.
I mean, I can remember what Exene was wearing when I saw her at Bogart’s and they finally came to Cincinnati. She had her hair in a ponytail, it was so cute.
The Breeders All Nerve is out now. They are currently on a national Australian tour, including a show at the Sydney Opera House this Friday 30 November.
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Jared Richards is a Staff Writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.