Stay True
Kim Deal at the Rio Theater, March 21, 2025
On the afternoon of the evening of the day I saw Kim Deal, I had to take the diving team I’m coaching to a meet at a high school in deepest San Jose. It was in that pre-fab hous-y part of the South Bay that looks like every other part of the South Bay you’ve ever been to, and I could have sworn both that I knew every inch of it and that I’d never been there before in my life and either way I wouldn’t have been lying.
“It’s got the kind of pool with no gutters in it,” one of the kids told me when I asked about the set up at this particular high school, and I thought, ‘that’s too new of a pool for me to have ever swum in, back in the day’. But when we got inside the pool compound, I saw I was wrong, and there was a placard up on the wall with all the school swim records to prove it. Half the names were from my era, and the record for my own event, although made in 1987, was less than a second faster than the time I did at CCS, the year when I made High School All American.
Almost forty years have passed since then, and it sure was nice to see all those old familiar names of the girls I used to swim against and admire. It made me feel like my past is a real nice place that I once existed in, and the same was true of seeing Kim Deal play solo in Santa Cruz. She’s about as close to me as Judy Scovel – i.e not close, just someone I swam alongside and who must have done all the same stuff as me when we were young -- and as with Judy, our roads collided in a few places one or two times; we walked side-by-side together for a while, decades ago, sometime back in the 1990s, and for that I am truly grateful. There are some things I did in my past, and meeting Kim Deal is one of them, that now remind me of that poem by Ernest Dowson:
Say I’m weary, say I’m old
Say that health and wealth have missed me
Say I’m growing old but add…
Jenny kissed me.
Only you could replace the word Jenny with others, too numerous to mention, all of whom may or may not have had something tangential to do with the Pixies.
If you want to know what Kim Deal and I did and said to each other when we met back then, well tough luck, because I don’t even remember myself. She and I are not close friends or anything. All I can recall is that I just love Kim, both as a person and as a singer. She is a special breed of person who is simultaneously extremely charismatic and extremely chill. In my experience, she is true to herself to the point of being almost a void - that is, she is void of the crap that the rest of us live by, and it is a striking way of being.
One external sign of this is that Kim enjoys performing to the top of her bent, and the way she expresses that is, she smiles the whole time she does it. No one else in rock music does that, and as soon as you see it, you realize how much you’re enjoying yourself too. We all are, always, at the rock shows we attend, because that is why we attend them. And yet you wouldn’t think that from how most people act on stage: only Kim Deal has the honesty to exude that enjoyment physically, to beam it out so obviously, from every fibre of her being, to be met by the audience, its collective breast outstretched for the hug of her essence, its collective face now grinning from ear to ear.
It was spring solstice on the night she played in Santa Cruz, and you could feel it in every breath. The air was so soft and mellow it was practically edible and the dusk was the color of blossom. And the Rio Theater was mellow too, indeed, the mental temperature of the audience, the whole tempo of the night’s proceedings, was strangely, coolly, elevated, entirely matching Kim’s low-key terroir. At her best, she is a mood unto herself, completely lacking in pretension, leaving nothing but the music left for us to concentrate on.
I’ve seen Kim perform in the Pixies and in the Breeders, flanked in the one by 3 scowling men and in the other by her identical twin sister, and both of those sights and sounds and situations were compelling and fantastic, every single time. But this was the first time I’ve seen her perform solo. Kim’s new record, “Nobody Loves You More,” came out on 4AD records a few months ago, and I got it on that very day, and I listened to it immediately, and I liked it a lot, but I didn’t really get it until I heard it performed on stage at the Rio. Like a lot of her work, it feels deeply personal, almost secretive in some way, in that the lyrics all refer to stuff that’s going on in her head, but not ours. Unlike with less skilled, less subtle, or just plain more boring songwriters, you have to make an effort to follow her train of thought.
“Nobody Loves You More” is also a labor of love in that it was written and recorded over a number of years and therefore features a ton of different musicians and styles. But what was amazing about this show, is that she had made such an incredible effort to recreate the album exactly: to the point of featuring ten other musicians. TEN! Vocalists, horns, strings, you name it – if the track needed it, there it was, and my god, what a difference that makes to the sound of hearing a band live. A cello. A violin. A trombone. A french horn. Backing vocalists (including Kelley, meaning a vocalist whose voice doubles the singers exactly). It was just this big huge giant band, all crowded on to the stage at once, and exploding the sound all over the theater, like magma or something. And you don’t really realize what you’re missing until it appears in your ears…honestly, it was almost holy, how good it sounded, live.
Of course, it sounds ridiculous to talk in such superlatives about anyone; no one really deserves that kind of reverence, even Kim Deal, so I wish I could articulate better what makes her so special on stage. I mean, sure, she has a pretty voice, yeah, but so do a lot of people. Susannah Hoff for instance. And Chrissie Hynde. The gaspy-ness of the timbre of all their voices is very affecting, but Kim’s particular musical talents are different from almost any other woman in music…without being even remotely like a man’s.
The thing about Kim Deal is that I don’t think she could have emerged from any musical era but the 90s. Her entire career was nurtured by the grunge-ethos, and while there’s much to look askance at in that time period, maybe one thing that still seems OK about it that Kim Deal was allowed to exist and thrive and even beyond that, be revered, and that would never happen now. Shorn of gender, shorn of artifice, shorn of every possible detriment that encumbers all the rest of us women…she exists in some in-between space, almost like she has those two vertical bars around her, the ones that in mathematics indicate absolute value. The absolute value of Kim Deal is Kim Deal, and that is something we should all aspire to.
