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 the Breeders, Pixies, and the criminally under-appreciated Amps. Tragically, Nobody Loves You More would mark the last time Deal ever worked with Albini, who died of a heart attack last May. To achieve the album’s wide-ranging sound — it goes from blown-out noise rock to minimal synth to vocal jazz in a matter of minutes — Albini recruited a hefty team of personnel that also includes Breeders bandmates Jim MacPherson and Deal’s twin sister Kelley. “That was the first time I’d seen him handle so many people,” Deal recalls. “He was just so fucking knowledgable. A consummate professional.”

Below, read more on how Florida, Albini, and more contributed to the making of Nobody Loves You More.

Florida

KIM DEAL: My dad always wanted to take my mother to the Florida Keys. Not Key West, but just to the Keys. It was in the ’80s, so it was a different sort of thing — a bunch of Miller beer cans, Milwaukee Light — she hated it. She hated going, but he really loved it. That’s where they wanted to go. That’s been sort of a thing with him and the fucking Keys. So as I got older, they needed help getting down. We started making it a family trip where we rented a house and drove down together. We kept this going year after year after year. One time, we were there and my mom was like, “I wanna go home.” We had only been there one afternoon. I mean, it takes like, three days to get there, two overnights. I noticed that I hated going down there. But I had this idea that beautiful people live on the coast, and I was having a hard time, taking drugs. It amused me being a big dummy for all these really beautiful coast people.

Have you ever started to write something, and you’re sitting there looking at a wall right in front of you, but then if you have a window your gaze goes farther? It’s nice to sit there and let the thoughts come. I think that’s why I like the view so much. So I began to take my guitars with all their stuff in the boxes to go down to Florida. Even after my parents left, I’d stay and write. Then I got stuck there in the pandemic. You couldn’t get over the bridge from Miami unless you showed the border a long-term rental agreement, and I had two cars full of gear. I stayed there for months waiting for the border to get cleared. I’m sure that influenced the album a lot.

I think a lot of people did a lot of work during that period of time [in 2020]. I wrote a poetry book! Did you do anything like that?

No, no book yet. I was trapped in New York and not very creatively inspired.

DEAL: That would have been fucking intense. Life was easy for me in Florida. Nobody was there because nobody could get in. I really look back at that period of time fondly, even though I felt really bad. It was good for me inside, I think.

Caring For An Ailing Parent

DEAL: I think the most obvious example of my parents’ influence on the album is the song “Are You Mine.” I was in my house, living with my parents. My mother had Alzheimer’s for years, and she had a very slow plateau. She was still walking for a while, and she passed me in the hallway one day, and she stopped me and asked, “Are you mine?” It wasn’t the first time she didn’t recognize me. And I’m not a mother, but I knew that she felt that connection, that this might be her baby. Of course, I just said, “Yes, mom, I’m yours.”

George Jones

DEAL: My dad had this sort of bravado. He always did that thing – “Want to see the fastest gun in the west? Want to see it again?” He was a coal miner from West Virginia. I got into his car one day and there was a cassette called, like, Outlaw Sounds Of The ’70s. And I just love that classic country spirit of living recklessly and then it all comes crashing down, like “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” It’s such a great arc. A part of art that I really love the most is the failure — maybe not the failure itself, but the stories that come from it. It’s very intriguing to me.

Bas Jan Ader

DEAL: This was going on in Boston around the time I got there. Had I ever heard of this Bas guy then? No. Did I ever know there was an art scene going on in Boston? No. I was totally in my own head, completely self-centered. Meanwhile, there’s this really vivid scene of performance artists, and Bas Jan Ader was one of them. He gets on this boat and decides he’s going to sail it to Ireland or something from Cape Cod. There’s this last picture of him that his wife took, In Search Of The Miraculous. Then they find his boat, and he’s disappeared. It reminds me of the George Jones thing. There’s something so comforting about pure failure. Alex [Da Corte, art director] and I started talking about how cool that story was, and so he made me my own little boat for the press photo shoot. I’m dressed up in my little captain outfit. “Here I go! I’m ready to go die!”

One of the lyrics that really stood out to me on the album was “no one blinks because I didn’t sink.” It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite Breeders lyrics: “If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?“

DEAL: Exactly. Absolutely. But also, you threw me in the water in Florida and I didn’t sink because I’m a witch, bitch.

Steve Albini

DEAL: The first thing I ever recorded with Steve was [the Pixies’] “Gigantic.” It was 1987. I did a vocal take, and I thought I did a fantastic job. I took my headphones off and I walked into the control room and they did playback. I was singing entirely out of tune. Surely, someone would’ve told me to check my pitch. But Steve always said to me — and I still don’t know if I believe him — that he cannot tell if somebody’s on pitch. Isn’t that odd? At first, I thought that maybe he just didn’t care enough about the vocalist. But now, I think he really just couldn’t tell if someone was on or off pitch.

The Breeders just did a show in Denver. We were driving back in the van to the hotel, and “Coast” comes on the radio, and so the driver turns it up. We’re all happy. The Breeders are happy! And then Kelley looks at me and says: “That’s the last thing I recorded with Steve.” It’s so weird. He got easier to work with as he got older, for sure.

There’s a lot of people I know because of Steve. The violinist on the album, Susan Voelz. He brought in the trumpet and trombone players. Britt Walford, the first drummer for the Breeders, is a guy Steve knew. For the longest time, I’m like, “Where did I meet Britt?” It never occurred to me, honestly. After Steve passed, a bunch of us went up to his house, and it was full of people. In my mind, I was like, “Aw, look at how many people I know!” And then slowly, I realized, “Oh, my God. I’m not the main character in my own fucking life. Albini is the main character, because he introduced me to every single person here.” He loved me. I know he did. I loved him, too.

Nobody Loves You More is out 11/22 via 4AD.