It was a rare day off for Kelley Deal, whose last couple years have been spent mostly on the road, touring the world as lead guitarist of The Breeders. She was back home in Dayton Ohio, where she and her twin sister Kim were both in June of 1961. She was on the phone at her mother’s house, talking about their long-awaited swing through the southeast, which includes a show at The Ritz Ybor on Thursday, October 18. But her mind was elsewhere—specifically, on the mid-Atlantic coast, where Hurricane Florence was about to bear down on the Charleston area.
“As a mid-westerner, all of this is so exotic to me,” she says. “In the spring, we’re around the area of Tornado Alley, but the tornados have not been coming up this far north, like they used to. They kinda veer off in different ways.” She’s a believer in climate change, which has altered weather patterns in her region, just as much as it has down south. “We have snow. It doesn’t happen, really, until January. February is going to be our worst of it, but it used to be November.”
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The Breeders' Florida tour stops at The Ritz Ybor City on October 18
As one might expect from a working-class band with Midwestern roots, The Breeders don’t like to make a fuss. When off the road, they eschew the rock and roll lifestyle in favor of more rustic pursuits like crafts. Kelley Deal, for example, has been running her own eponymous knitwear label for over a decade now, through Big Cartel, selling hand-made $90 scarves that she upcycles from vintage sweaters.
“I’ll go to thrift stores and find stuff that I think has really interesting patterns, then I’ll take them home and wash them with really hot water and agitation with soap,” she says. “You know how if you do that to a wool sweater, you’ll ruin it? Well, I do that on purpose. So then I’m able to cut them and sew it.”
Despite having lived in places like New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, the sisters remain Midwest ladies at their core, and that vibe permeates all of their music. They were just teenagers when they first worked around Dayton as a folk duo called The Breeders, but the name didn’t stick until the late 1980s. By that point, Kim was already alt-rock royalty as bassist for The Pixies, one of the most influential bands of all-time, and she wanted a vehicle to showcase her own material.
The Breeders' debut album, Pod, was released in 1990 on 4AD Records, which has issued every Breeders album since. The Safari EP dropped in 1992, followed quickly by their second full-length. Last Splash, released in 1993, put the Breeders on the global music map, driven by the hit single “Cannonball”, which remains a indie favorite to this day. It also marked the arrival of the classic Breeders lineup of Kim Deal on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, Kelley Deal on lead guitar and backing vocals, Josephine Wiggs on bass and Jim McPherson on drums. Their mature sound is built around Wiggs’ propulsive low-end theoretics and the twins’ telepathic two-part harmonies.
Everything was going perfectly, but personal issues derailed the band right at their commercial peak, back in 1995, and the core group splintered. After five years in separate creative orbits, the Deal sisters reunited for what might be the best Breeders album to date, 2002’s Title TK, which marked not only a return to form, but a return to prominence. The classic quartet returned for Mountain Battles in in 2008, and they have essentially been a full-time band from that point. The Breeders haven’t been to Florida in 25 years.
“We’re so excited,” she says, “because we never go. It’s kind of off the beaten path for us.”
The Breeders were the opening act on Nirvana’s last American tour, back in 1993. A show in Jacksonville ended abruptly after a fan threw shoes at Kelley, a moment she remembers fondly.
“I tried to hide behind my amp,” she says, “but I had to sing. Somebody ended up throwing a pair of really cute size seven-and-a-half Doc Martens, and they were adorable. I ended up keeping them, and I gave them to a girlfriend of mine for Christmas. She loved them!” She also remembers being accidentally stranded in Miami.
“My band left me,” she recalls with a laugh. “They thought I was on the bus, but I had overslept, so I had to hitch a ride in Nirvana’s tour bus. They were very nice about it.”
It has been a long, long road from Pod to All Nerve, The Breeders' fifth studio album, released in March 2. Driven by the lead single, “WaitIn the Car”, its 11 tracks feel like a guidebook to the evolution of the band’s sound, from the frenetic swing of “Nervous Mary” to the blissful menace of “Walking With a Killer.” The band's recording style is built around analog components with no studio trickery, creating a dense, textured sound that seems ideal for vinyl. The sound recapitulates easily on-stage, with no frills and a minimum of gear. Kelley only brings two guitars on the road with her.
“I don’t want to take any more! Because we’ve had such a long career, each album kind of has a sound of its own. You can go crazy trying to reproduce specific “stunt” sounds, and I don’t want to do that. When you’re doing a show, there’s a rhythm and an arc. You don’t want the audience to wait while you change guitars every song.”
“I have a Fender and a [Stratocaster],” she says. “Kim uses three. She has a Strat, a Gibson and an acoustic. The Gibson is a Goldtop. It was made in the ‘70s as a reissue of, I think, the ’57. That’s the guitar that Joey Santiago played in The Pixies for years, and then he got his own goldtop.” Kelley takes special pride in her a cherry-red Les Paul.
“An old guitar tech knew I was looking for one, and he found it in Philadelphia,” she says. “It’s a custom job that nobody picked up, and it’s really beautiful. I actually think that my guitar sounds better than Kim’s guitar.”
She pauses to weigh the implications of her words, and then she doubles down. “My guitar sounds better than Kim’s. And you can put that in print!” So we did.
Shelton Hull is a freelance journalist who contributes to Folio Weekly. He can be reached via Twitter (@SheltonHull).
This article appears in Oct 11-18, 2018.