Happy 35th Anniversary to The Breeders’ debut album Pod, originally released in the UK May 28, 1990 and in the US May 29, 1990.
When the Breeders first formally formed, the idea—rather crazy-seeming now in hindsight—was that they were going to make dance music. At that time, the Pixies and Throwing Muses had just come off a 1988 tour of the UK, where Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly had seriously bonded. “Kim and I hit it off immediately when we met, but it was on that tour that we started really becoming inseparable,” recalls Donelly. “I never had girlfriends like her in high school. She was my first ‘I’m gonna braid your hair!’ kind of friend. ‘Let’s paint our nails!’ I’d never had that before.”
Long before joining the Pixies and the Breeders, when Deal was 11, her father began taking guitar lessons and his acoustic guitar sat in a corner of the living room, next to a stack of tablature sheets. Eventually, Kim taught herself to play “King of the Road” by Roger Miller. And then she just kept going, teaching herself more and more. Prior to that, the Deals had a two-track, quarter-inch tape reel-to-reel, and Mrs. Deal would often encourage Kim and her twin sister Kelley to sing into it when they were as young as 4 or 5 years old.
By the time she was in high school, Kim had written close to 100 songs. “I just wanted to be a songwriter, and I wanted to be a guitar player in a rock band,” she says. But Dayton, Ohio, wasn’t exactly a happening place if you wanted to be a rockstar. Bands rarely stopped there on tour, but fortunately the twins had a friend who knew people on one of the coasts, and the guy would give them tapes full of obscure alternative rock.
Meanwhile, Kim and Kelley set up a whole recording studio in their bedroom. “We had our room, and we had our mics and our eight-track tape player, our mixing board, effects, we had speakers, and amps—we had this whole thing set up when we were 17. Kim made the cords,” says Kelley. Their dad, proud and supportive of their musical endeavors, showed her how. “I’m making my own cords on the kitchen table, my dad’s helping, splicing the end of the cables and soldering the chips to save money for cords,” Kim remembers. And whenever they had a birthday, the twins would ask for new recording gear. You know, just your typical teen girl type of thing.
Many years later, while filming a 2002 Dutch documentary titled The Real Deal about their then-decades old band the Breeders, Kelley proudly showed the filmmakers the custom purses she made using amp cords for handles, while Kim chattered non-stop.
Kim: I don’t think I get in bands just to socialize. I’ve thought about that before, do I get in bands just to socialize? But I don’t think so. But I end up hanging out with really cool, really funny people. It’s good.
Kelley: Maybe, too, there’s a part of—living in Dayton, we were always weird. We were weird. Our sense of humor was weird. What we did for fun was weird. The music we liked was weird. We did not fit in. And so to finally meet people that are from Boston or from California…
Kim: I was a cheerleader, man. I fit in.
Kelley: Yeah. Whatever. Cheerleader from hell is what you were.
It was likely the cheerleader thing—a notable curveball in the history of Kim Deal—that attracted Tanya Donelly to Kim on that fated Throwing Muses/Pixies tour. “The not shutting up was great, we loved that about Kim,” recalls Kristin Hersh, Donelly’s stepsister and frontwoman of Throwing Muses. “She was a cheerleader, you know, and she was still a cheerleader. I also remember that her ponytail got higher and higher as the tour went on. It started in the back of her head and gradually rose up the back until it was, like, cheerleader height.”
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The refreshing truth that Kim Deal seemed to embody just by being who she was is that there are weird cheerleaders—and they are (maybe) everywhere. After all, it was Deal’s signature mixture of bubbly and bizarre that inspired the Dandy Warhols to write the song “Cool As Kim Deal.” And it’s definitely what initially drew me to the Breeders, because I was a weird cheerleader. Well, not a cheerleader, but I was on the dance/drill team, which at my school was cooler than being a cheerleader (ha!). The two were somewhat interchangeable; the Lionettes primarily wore cheerleading outfits, but we also had a bunch of other costumes we wore based on the themes of the dance routines we did during halftime at the football games. (We also went to sleepaway cheerleading camp each year, which is a horror story for another time.)
The early ’90s, when I first started high school, still had that residual ’80s Heathers spillover—cliques, bullying, preppiness as the ultimate cool. And so as much as I loved the creativity involved in dancing on that team, it came with the typical cheerleader baggage. However, like the Deal twins who were splicing cords together and building a recording studio in their spare time, I was the kind of kid who went home and wrote plays, painted watercolors, and read three books in a week. At heart, I was an artsy, bookish introvert; I did not have big cheerleader energy—which meant I always felt like an impostor. So when Nirvana managed to capture that heady outsider energy with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” toppling ’80s conformity with one song and one pep rally from hell, it was inspiring and electrifying. But it was still a distinctly male energy—an anthem for the weirdo dudes. The Breeders, on the other hand, were a band for the female weirdos.
With its slippery basslines, off-kilter harmonies, crashing discord, risqué yet religious lyrics (I’m just looking for one divine hammer), and strange videos with wayward bowling balls, the Breeders’ 1993 album Last Splash was a revelation. It was breezy, sunny bizarreness and I listened to that record every day on the school bus like it was a lifeline. When the Breeders finally came to Germany, I was in the front row to see them perform at Rock Am Ring in ’94. But back then in the mid-’90s when the Breeders were a Kim and Kelley Deal thing, I had no idea about the preceding, ultimate weirdness that was 1990’s Pod.
After they had gotten back from their European tour back in 1988, Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly went to see the Sugarcubes at Axis in Boston, and the music in between sets was dance music. The two women were already always going out dancing, mostly to music they’d fallen in love with in England, like Black Box and Neneh Cherry. So at that Sugarcubes concert they decided they were going to do something totally different from the bands they were currently in and create a concept project of sorts—a dance album.
“We started writing songs,” Donelly recalls. “There was no clear goal for it, we were just sort of doing it, and then the songs really started to come together. We're both big fans of the disco and originally we were going to try to make dance music. We quickly found out that we were incapable of doing so.”
Both women were in bands where they were playing secondary, supportive roles to a frontperson—Kim to Black Francis in the Pixies, and Tanya to Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses. They decided they’d call their new band the Breeders after a band Kim and Kelley had half-formed as teenagers and eventually named in solidarity with gay liberation. (“Back in the late ’80s, there was so much shit given to gay people,” Deal says, “but at the same time gay people thought heterosexuality was disgusting, and I loved that.”) Ultimately, the Breeders would end up being a way for Deal and Donelly to claim their own agency.
At the time, Kim’s twin Kelley wasn’t able to join the Breeders due to her demanding job as a government contractor. That allowed Donelly and Deal a deeper, more sister-like connection. “[Making Pod] was a wonderful experience,” Donelly told me when I interviewed her for Albumism in 2022. “That was such a bubble—everything about it, the writing of it, the recording of it, the pre-production of it. [… ] It was a singular recording experience in my life. Kim and I really supported each other in moving on from where we were [by making the album]. I think of it as really a watermark in my life for that reason. It was a gift that we gave to each other.”
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Because the Breeders were technically a side project and both women were still respectively in the Pixies and Throwing Muses, they had to do some finagling so as not to breach their existing contracts. They agreed that Deal would write the first record and it would come out on her label, and then Donelly would write the second record, which would come out on Reprise. That actually didn’t end up happening, as Donelly would use the writing she did for the second album to form Belly and release Star (1993), while Deal joined the Pixies as the opening act on U2’s Zoo TV tour. However, there was no drama on parting, and Deal would even good-naturedly try to entice Donelly back to the Breeders from time to time. (Soon, though, Kelley was finally able to join the Breeders, and Kim and her twin fell into their own way of doing things, eventually releasing Last Splash in 1993.)
Having worked with Steve Albini on the Pixies’ 1988 album Surfer Rosa, Deal decided to hire the cantankerous engineer to work on Pod. (Though most of her bandmates wound up thinking Albini was a dick, Deal and Albini got along famously.)
“I instantly preferred it [The Breeders] to the Pixies,” Albini said. “I instantly could tell that it was a unique perspective. And that there was a simultaneous charm to Kim’s presentation to her music that’s both childlike and giddy and also completely mature and kind of dirty. It had this sort of girlish fascination with things that were pretty but it was also kind of horny. You didn’t get a lot of knowing winks from female artists at the time. But I also think that musically it was quite distinct from everything else that was around at the time.”
Although Albini was famous for his abrasiveness in his younger years, he’s said to have mellowed as he got older, his dickishness morphing into simple acerbic wit. I’d witness this firsthand during my last year of college, when my friend Dave and I drove to Princeton for an all-day festival with Albini’s band Shellac headlining. There was a heckler in the crowd, a self-satisfied Ivy Leaguer who wouldn’t shut up between songs and kept calling Albini “Steve-o.” Eventually, Albini calmly put his mouth against the mic and said, “A genuinely funny heckler is always appreciated. This lame collegiate shit you’ve been throwing at us is not. And No. 1, do not call me Steve-o.” The crowd cheered, and the heckler finally shut up.
Tanya Donelly has nothing but good things to say about Albini and their work together on Pod. “He was great. It was great to watch him work because when we came in with the songs, there were harmonies all over the place, and he basically said, ‘I don’t want to hear that,’” she recalls, laughing. “And his argument was that it folkified everything—I’m paraphrasing him. We pushed back for a couple of days, and as we included him, we realized that he was right. He’s such a team player, he’s a great producer because of that.”
Albini even helped bring together the Pod iteration of the Breeders, suggesting Britt Walford of the band Slint as their drummer. He introduced Deal and Walford when they were both visiting Chicago, and they immediately hit it off. (Walford is listed on the album under the pseudonym Shannon Doughton, because he didn’t want the gig to detract from his commitment to Slint.) Josephine Wiggs, who Deal had met in London when her band Perfect Disaster supported the Pixies, was recruited to play bass. The slapdash band rehearsed at Wiggs’ house in Bedfordshire for a week, prior to moving on to the Palladium recording studio in Edinburgh. “We made it in a studio that was a big house in Scotland, and we were in our pajamas for most of the production of that—it felt like a sleepover,” says Donelly. They even ventured to the pub a couple times in their PJs, and ended up finishing the album a week early.
Although I missed Pod when it came out in 1990, I bought it during the fall semester of my freshman year of college. My friend Joseph took me to Kim’s Video and Music, where I went crazy stocking up on all the records that had been hard to find when I was an American army brat in Germany. I was achingly homesick that year, and something about the dank, claustrophobic peculiarity of Pod matched my longing. It was like stagnating in the fuzzy green water of a week-old bouquet, and that was just sublime. (For her part, Deal has described the album as a compendium of “ugly, stinking, gross songs.”)
Designed by Vaughn Oliver, Pod’s blurry, watercolor-like cover fuses plant and mammal so that you’re not sure whether you’re looking at a flower stamen or a man with an enormous hard-on (the model was Oliver himself, wearing a belted contraption around his waist.) The album opens druggily with “Glorious,” a slogging strut of off-kilter beats and sludgy bass while Deal describes rain through a bedroom window, spending Saturdays alone, and a nearly endless sleep. It’s depression—curling up in sweat and crumbs—grittily glamorized.
The energy picks up with “Doe,” but the sunniness of Last Splash is notably absent here, the pace cramped and urgent, punctuated by harmonized moans. Next up is one of the best covers of the Beatles’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” ever. You hear the fumbling flip of a lighter, and Deal ignites her cigarette. Lyin’ with his eyes while his hands are busy workin’ overtime—there’s a sleazy sexiness that’s entirely absent in the original version and Deal’s husky delivery and Walford’s decisive drumming build the seductive tension. Donelly’s ethereal harmonies add another silky layer, and then the song hammers with punk urgency before it suddenly flutters away like a plastic bag in the wind.
“Oh!” is simultaneously sludgy and sweet, and elegant with its addition of sorrowful violin. It’s also orgasmic with Deal’s throaty moans of “Oh!”—that is, until she screeches off-key and sings about a rotten log. It’s a bonkers track that’s also very beautiful, and it’s followed by the rocker “Hellbound,” which is allegedly about a fetus that survives an abortion. “When I Was A Painter” takes us back to the dirty-room malaise, albeit with energy, with Deal telling sordid tales of “bad sex and bad TV.” “Fortunately Gone” is in the vein of what most people think of when they think of the Breeders—rollicking surf-guitar, and that airy ease of riding in a convertible.
“Iris” is one of my favorite songs on Pod, and that’s mostly because it sounds evil and angry and urgent, even though Deal once told Melody Maker that it’s “about a peapod flowering and getting ripe and stinky.” “Opened” is maybe the most eerie song on the album, about a woman with Barbie doll hair in a dingy basement. Meanwhile, “Only In 3’s” is about a menage-a-trois, while “Lime House” is rumored to be written from the perspective of Sherlock Holmes laid up in an opium den in London—it’s raucous and rocking, however, and the total opposite of lazy. The album ends with the introspective “Metal Man” whereby Josephine Wiggs boredly and repeatedly says “That’s hot” in a haughty English accent before the song builds to a clamor while Walford chatters in the background.
Though Kurt Cobain very publicly paid homage to the Pixies as his inspiration, it would eventually become known that Pod was one of his all-time favorite albums. So just maybe there was always a seedling—or a flowering bud—of female weirdo energy in that ’90s revolution. And even though the early-’90s iteration of the Breeders eventually splintered and dissolved, Tanya Donelly believes that because Pod was made by loose, disparate musicians coming together for a singular purpose, that’s what makes it so special.
“I never listen to anything I’ve made usually, I won’t usually go back,” she says. “But I can listen to Pod and it just puts me in such a lovely mood. I think what’s cool to me is that it doesn’t sound like a band album; I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Britt [Walford] on drums, or oh that’s Josephine [Wiggs] doing her thing right there.’ I like that, when you’re in a moment and you can say, ‘This is what’s happening.’”
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