INTERVIEW: The Road to Solid Sound: The Breeders
06/26 @ Mass MoCA, North Adams MA
Photo by James Ridling
“Everybody wants to be a current person. I want to stay current! I like weird music and new music… but it is okay not to follow everything.”
“In my insular world of picking up a guitar and writing, playing with a band, doing a show… nothing much has changed,” Kelley Deal tells me. And despite there being some considerable blocks of time between album releases over the past three decades, the Last Splash-era line-up of The Breeders — including Kelley, twin sister Kim Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim Macpherson — have all been back steadily making music together again since 2012.
Later this month, the group plays Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, MA amidst their US summer tour dates, shows with Team Dresch, and opening for My Chemical Romance at the end of August (this last one seems an odd pairing, maybe, but I think a lot of millennials wouldn’t bat an eye if they revisited their old high school iPods — those two names together sound like an average school bus ride in 2006 to me).
“It's been a real gift to be able to start writing and doing music [for this],” Kelley adds. “Like right now, we're doing stuff in Kim's basement and, you know, it's easy to get together there and do that.” It’s a nostalgic picture she paints: the two Deal sisters still rehearsing together in this kind of homespun space makes things feel a little less rockstar and a little more warm and fuzzy in some ways.
I last caught The Breeders when they swung through Albany during their tour for 2018’s All Nerve, ten years after 2008’s Mountain Battles. But make no mistake, their early ’90s piss-and-vinegar attitude was, and still is, firmly intact. After all this time, I was eager to find out how both Kelley and Josephine feel about how the landscape of music has evolved.
“The one really positive change that has happened has been in digital recording. Digital sounds, especially drums, were so bad in the early 2000s. It was just tonally awful,” Kelley says. “I remember, Kim and I would be walking across some festival grounds, and you would hear music coming from whatever tent or stage and it would be like, ‘What is that sound?’ Because [during that time] everybody went to digital boards or modeling instead of actually using a guitar and an amp to create the sound of a Marshall versus an actual Marshall, or whatever it is. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that… unless it sucks.”
The Breeders — especially the Deal sisters — have always had a penchant for analogue, which naturally takes longer to record. Working through the minutiae of whether certain notes or chords are working is part of any band’s process, and Kelley and Josephine describe how feeling the music out live on stage can often help in fleshing the overall song out. It’s easier than ever to take technological shortcuts, but the group eschews this.
Kelley and I cut our way through a discussion around the scourge of AI and social media’s omnipotent presence within today’s music scenes. “Everybody wants to be a current person. I want to stay current! I want to know what's going on. I like weird music and new music… but it is okay not to follow everything. First of all, it's impossible.”
In anticipation of Solid Sound, I asked what attendees might expect. Kelley is effervescent and spunky in her answers, while Josephine, a bit more reserved in demeanor, fills in with measured tones.
“We may be working on some new things and we had been talking about how fun it would be to play a couple new songs, and I immediately said to Josephine…” Kelley pauses and Josephine jumps in.
“Back in the day, when we were working on the songs that became Last Splash, we played them live before we went into the studio and recorded them.” Kelley adds a little color to this detail stating, “It's funny because there weren't any lyrics. There was the idea of lyrics, or Kim just said to sing the first verse over and over again… just to hear how it sounds, and what it feels like to play it live.”
Josephine continues: “Or [to see] whether there are dead spots in the song, which, if you're playing in front of other people, becomes really obvious. The more you play it and [there’s] the pressure of it being a show, it really helps you hone the songs. It's one thing singing it at home under a blanket; it’s another singing them in front of 2,000 people. I said to Kelley, ‘We should try and aim to put some new songs into the set and see if we can knock them into shape in a month's time.’”
The jury’s still out on if that new material will see the light of Solid Sound Fest. I joked that I’d be there listening for it.
Photo by Pooneh Ghana
Outside of Breeders-world, the two are busy with other projects: Kelley with her band R. Ring (with bandmate Mike Montgomery, also of Ampline) as well as playing as an auxiliary member of Protomartyr during their tour.
“Anytime I get an opportunity to play with any other person, I learn so much and I take it with me,” she says. “Like with Greg Ahee (of Protomartyr), the choices he makes are so interesting as a guitar player, how he sculpts a sound. And then, of course, Joe (Casey) is the main singer, and it's so interesting how they put together songs because it's not verse-chorus-verse. I mean, they don't nod to any of that. All of them are incredible musicians.”
Josephine also has her hands full, including crafting a new project with English drummer Jon Mattock (of Spacemen 3, Spiritualized, Massive Attack, and more).
“I'm trying to put a record together. I had all this instrumental music that I had been working on. So, I asked [Jon] if he wanted to try singing on them, and I was blown away by how good it was.
“I’m also trying to finish writing a book about being on tour. It's based on Breeders Digest, which is like our own fan zine that we make — and by that I mean, I make it — and it's just little stories. Me, making fun of things, basically,” she laughs. Aiming to release it next year, Josephine tells me its fitting Gen X title: “It's called What Happened While Nothing Was Happening.”
Wanting to respect the time of two clearly busy women, I asked them what advice they might offer today’s young musicians. Kelley pauses a beat in consideration.
“A lot of times when we look for support acts and stuff, we choose who we want to go out with. It's important to us, because we're shitty music snobs and because we're providing an evening of entertainment. So, we want to represent something that is interesting or cool or different somehow, you know? So whenever somebody recommends something, we immediately have to go scrub YouTube and find out if there's anything live from this person at all. Because you have to see a band live.”
She stresses the importance of playing music with others, even when you don’t feel polished in your abilities, or 100% ready. She also is quick to acknowledge the resources and time that playing live and touring demands.
“Find somebody to play with. I mean, it can be your little sister. It could be your friend who doesn't know how to play.” With a wink of playful encouragement, she references their hit “Cannonball” and their unforgettable and happily accidental intro: “Famously, maybe that person goes to the wrong bass note!”
For more information on the festival, visit www.solidsoundfestival.com
For more of our pre-festival interviews, visit https://www.themetroland.com/blog-main/tag/solid+sound+festival
