Kim Deal On How Steve Albini, George Jones, Florida, & More Shaped Her Debut Solo Album 'Nobody Loves You More'

Kim Deal doesn’t care much for the beach.“I don’t like hot weather,” she tells me over Zoom.

“I’m from Ohio.I don’t go into the ocean.

I don’t do water sports.But then again, I do like the view.” And yet, the Breeders bandleader has been to the Florida Keys more times than she can count, spending numerous winters tagging along with her parents there as part of a longstanding family tradition.

After her mother and father both passed away, however, her initial reluctance subsided, and she began visiting the Keys on her own.She was there in early 2020 just as the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns began, and suddenly, she was trapped in a place with which she had a particularly complicated relationship.

So Deal coped the best way she knew how: She stayed inside and started to write an album.What materialized were the inklings of her debut solo album Nobody Loves You More — out this Friday — a tragicomic reflection on love in numerous forms.

“I’m not even tired/ This world’s for me/ I won’t even try to stop this,” she sings from her beach house on the radiant orchestral ballad “Summerland”; you can almost feel the wash of relief as the strings swell.While Nobody Loves You More is the first album Deal has released under her own name, it’s not the first time she’s put out solo music: Early iterations of album highlights “Are You Mine” and “Wish I Was” appeared in a 10-song 7” vinyl series she self-released in 2013.

Similarly, seeds of other songs like the single “Coast” date back as far as 2000.But Nobody Loves You More isn’t just a stream of career outtakes — it’s a culmination of decades past through a present-tense lens: “We are what we’re waiting for,” she muses on the gritty “Big Bean Beat.” For an album that encapsulates so many years of Deal’s life, there was no better choice of producer than underground rock legend Steve Albini, with whom she’d previously recorded as a member of ...