WAIT IN THE CAR! Kim’s got business. She’s the cool babysitter who’ll give you a puff of her Newport as long as you DON’T TELL YOUR MOM. How does she sound like she NEVER GREW UP but has SEEN IT ALL? Why does her guitar sound like MODERN WAR as heard from inside the womb, but with hooks that go down like CHUNKS OF RAINBOW POPSICLE? How does she still seem like an outsider artist but also a curated A.I. containing the 0’s and 1’s of her weirdo rust-belt ancestors: Stooges, Chrissie, Pere Ubu, MC5, Devo? How did she know that I SHOULDN’T HAVE STAGE DIVED the first time I sang with her and Kel? (“Industry Night, you idiot.”) How is this her first solo album and MY FAVOURITE ALBUM OF THE YEAR?
“We stare at the stupid stars / Our love is hard / We are what we’re waiting for” I was always waiting for her and she wrote for ME.
When she was 16, Kim wrote a song on her guitar which she sang into her portable tape recorder. An adored neighbor, going through a high school pregnancy, heard the song. Bawling, hormones surging, she let Kim know how touched she was by the song; how it spoke to her and this tumultuous time in her life.
Kim was surprised to find herself somewhat disgusted for having provoked this response. She had taken standard love song sentiments and moved another person to tears? Huh? This was a formative moment; the music had to mean something to her.
So Kim, maybe you didn’t write for that lonely, knocked-up girl with “adult problems” and maybe you didn’t imagine yourself in her position, but when all news is fake, all stories are true, writing with all the knowledge and feeling you can muster might be the only way we can feel what someone might be going through. Empathy isn’t just pretending to be someone else, sometimes it’s the only way we can see ourselves, like the therapist who asks the kid to name her dolls Mom, Dad and Kim. Kim’s songs are voodoo dolls of herself. Of course, she can’t help but stick another pin in.
When I first heard the 2010 version of “Are You Mine?” – maybe the first-born song on the album – I remember swooning at the haze of unrequited love. But then Kim told me the title is what her mom would ask her when she was in the grip of dementia. Was this song for someone else? Of course, it merges her mom’s loving confusion with a kind of Kim “romance in the abyss.” But she wrote it for me too. My Mom had Alzheimer’s and the song’s ruthless empathy cut clean through the anguish I knew so well: “Are you mine / Have you seen me lately / I have no time / For anything but love.” For all her self-deprecation, Kim has always been the best friend who won’t lie to you, the reluctant doula – for birth, death and love – because all her songs, however harsh, are lullabies. Every sweet straight-ahead melody catches your heart, then she bends it towards the minor key, and slashes you with dissonance. It shouts, “Don’t get too comfortable!” while somehow holding and comforting you.
The album begins with the Rat Pack-on-peyote vibe of “Nobody Loves You More.” Horns and strings on a Kim Deal song? Natch. Thank you to the late, great Steve Albini (though we never met, we were at Northwestern at the same time; he impressed me as the only visible punk on campus) who in his no-nonsense Montana fashion, got a majority of the sounds down on tape. Kim worked out the arrangements of instruments she didn’t know by humming the parts into her phone. The album should be called Kim’s Greatest Unknown Hits but it also reads like a nonlinear autobiography. The songs slip and slide style-wise, as a life does. “Are You Mine” refracts 50’s doo-wop arpeggios through a glass darkly, “Summerland” returns us to the early-60’s Vegas lounge by way of Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl swoonsongs in Popeye: “Crystal Breath,” written and rejected as a theme song for a TV series about an aerobics instructor, is hipper than any 2000’s Berlin electro-meth banger. “A Good Time Pushed” has that 90’s crunch that celebrates the beginning of a relationship that contains the end of it: “We’re having a good time. I’ll see you around.” “Disobedience” is a soaring and timeless ode to her own form of noncompliance – obvi no selling out and no rioting – just “I want a ride on the Ferris wheel / And a pop.” Then in the next breath: “If this is all we are / I’m fucked.” And then, the sublime “Coast” is the sunniest song about kicking drugs on a beach full of “beautiful kids” chasing waves ever made (Anita O’Day agreed that was the best place to go cold turkey). Kim’s gorgeously porous voice holds all the songs together like one of those salad bowls you can eat.
Thank you for your service, Kim. By accident, you made your own Tin Pan Alley, and you wrote songs for all of us.
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