60 Songs That Explain the '90s - The Breeders—“Cannonball”

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Rob explores alternative rock darlings The Breeders’ breakout hit “Cannonball” by discussing the band’s predecessor, The Pixies; Kim Deal’s uniquely captivating voice; and the song’s charming disregard for music norms. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Open Mike Eagle Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-m-f-M-C-H-O-R-M-S-U-S-I-S-M-U-S-I-S-I-C-A-L-L-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. The breeders are better. than the pixies. The breeders, colon, better than the pixies. Discuss. We can't discuss. This is just

me talking. Who am I? Am I serious? Am I trolling? Do you believe that I believe what I'm saying? I believe it. Put it like this. Whose voice do you prefer? Here we have Pixies frontman Charles Thompson, then known as Black Francis, harmonizing with Pixie's bassist Kim Deal. This is Bone Machine, the first track on 1988's Surfer Rosa, their official debut studio album. They are harmonizing abrasively.

Abration being their thing, the band's thing, but also their personal thing. Let's summarize the Black Francis Kim Deal personal dynamic via the opening seconds of the Pixie's most famous song, Where is My Mind? Stop. Yeah, they got along great.

Actually, for a while, maybe they did. Here we have Kim in the opening seconds of another Surferosa song called I'm Amazed, regaling her bandmates with an amusing anecdote about an old teacher she knew who got fired for having sex with field hockey players. Maybe that's the story. Who cares about the story? What is that voice? Who is this person? And how does she pack an entire galaxy into just the word quiet?

It was like so hush-hush. They were so... quiet about it. And then the next thing you know. The pixies formed in Boston in 86. Joey Santiago played guitar. Dave Lovering played drums. And Kim Deal had never played bass before.

When in her mid-20s, she answered a Boston Phoenix ad, seeking someone who was into both Husker Doe and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The ad also stipulated, no chops. This is maybe common knowledge. The pixies sound is most definitely common knowledge. Abrasion, surrealism, uneasie. disgust, but also hooks, but also

arena-sized bombast, but also pop music at its sharpest, shiniest, stickiest, and sweetest, too, when Kim Deal's voice gets involved. Every song by anyone in recorded history should begin with Kim Deal announcing what the song's

about and what it's called. This song is about how much Taylor Swift hates John Mayer. It's called Dear John, etc. Did the pixies, quote unquote, invent quote unquote alternative rock who cares but probably yes quiet verses loud choruses ecstatic distortion bone crushing intimacy you want to get super reductive you can trace it all back to one song it's the surferosa song that kim gets to sing lead on of course this song is about that cissy space act movie crimes of the heart where she falls in love with a black teenager it's called gigantic

The Pixie's classic lineup put out four full-length albums. Is Come On Pilgrim from 1987 an album or an EP or a demo or what? Let's not discuss this on the internet. Do Little is the best. Bossanova is the worst and Trompleman gets ten times better every time I hear it. They broke up in 93, by which time they had defined, quote-unquote, alternative rock, if only by inspiring young Nirvana frontman Kirk Cobain to write an abrasive and ecstatic little quiet verse, loud chorus tune called Smells Like Teen Spirit.

This, too, is common knowledge. By then Kim Deal had already formed her own band. And in 93, thanks to the alt-rock gold rush, Kirklobain, triggered, that band, The Breeders, got an alt-rock hit of their very own. My name is Rob Harvilla. I'm a music critic at The Ringer, and this is 60 songs that explain the 90s. Today, Cannonball, by the Breeders. Kim Deal's voice, her physical singing and speaking,

voice is one of my favorite musical instruments on this planet. She is from Dayton, Ohio, as are the Breeders by extension, and I'm from Cleveland, so maybe partly this is Midwestern bias, but not entirely. There is a dark allure. There is a giddy and sinister sort of children's librarian warmth to Kim Deals' voice, even at its coldest. The first Breeders' album, Pod, came out in 1990, back when the band was still perceived as the Pixies bassist's side project. album was produced by Steve Albini, Prince of Harshness, who handled Surfer Rosa as well, despite not liking the Pixies very much. He seemed to like Kim Deal by herself a little more. Pot is harsh and murky and eerie and fairly terrifying. Kim sounds like Little Red Riding Hood

describing everything in the forest that wants to eat her. She sounds like there's blood on her own teeth, too. This is a Beatle song about John Lennon working out some stuff. It's called Happiness is a Warm Gun. I don't not find this sort of thing comforting. So recently it was Christmas Eve and that morning I got some unpleasant family news. It's fine. But now I found myself driving around desolate, wintery Ohio on Christmas Eve running suddenly pointless errands with a blinding headache. So I couldn't listen to the radio or anything.

And what I got stuck in my head was a breeder song off the 1992 Safari EP called Don't Call Home. Ash register, quarter in your pocket. It's a song about how you shouldn't call home because Kim Deal doesn't like you anymore. And I couldn't decide at that moment if that was my brain generating maximum shrieking anxiety or if that was my brain attempting to soothe my shrieking anxiety via one of my favorite musical instruments on this planet. Early breeders worked like that. This music combated your deepest, darkest fears by conjuring up. even darker ones. The band's early lineup included Tanya Donnelly, herself, then a second fiddle in the

college rock band Throwing Muses. Tanya would soon leave the breeders to form her own group, Belly. Belly's big hit was Feed the Tree off 1993 Star, which Pound for Pound was the scariest album I listened to constantly in high school. You know that Scarlett Johansson movie Under the Skin, where she's an alien murderer bumming around Scotland and like liquefying random dudes? Anyway, the pixies finally break up in 93. The previous year, they'd spent a grueling couple months opening for you two on their zoo TV tour promoting Akhtung Baby. Consequently, one of the coolest things about me in junior high was that I'd seen the pixies. One of the great many uncool things about me in junior high is that I did not care for the pixies.

I found them to be atonal and about five times louder than strictly necessary. I have this memory of standing on the concourse in the concession area of a Cleveland sports arena. and being afraid to walk into the arena itself, toward the courts, toward the stage, toward the pixies, they frightened me, they physically hurt me. I imagine this was the idea. Anyway, a year later, they broke up. A fax machine was reportedly involved.

Black Francis changed his name to Frank Black and embarked on a quite strange and lengthy and impressive solo career that has its moments, including this one. Rob, you might ask, How many fantasy baseball teams have you named Kicked in the Taco? Several. Anyway, by 1993, pretty much everybody gets a big Alt Rock hit,

and this is largely thanks to Kirk Cobain, to Nirvana, to 1991's Epacal smells like teen spirit. The Alt Rock gold rush is on. But the breeders especially are primed for big things this year because Kirk Cobain likes the breeders. In interviews, he praises Pod in particular. Nirvana took the breeders out on tour, in 92. The bands that opened for Nirvana, the music Kirk Cobain liked, the artists he shouted

out in various sucky corporate magazines, now comprised their own canon of bulletproof coolness. Young marble giants, the shags, the stooges, the Melvins, Daniel Johnston, half Japanese, the raincoats, the Vaseline, Shonen knife. One of the various throughlines here is a childlike, but also vaguely malevolent sort of feminine energy designed to liquefy anybody who would even use the term feminine energy. For a while, pop music, or at least popular rock music, was partially remolded in this one man's furiously warped image. The breeders could play pop music too. They could crank out a couple of radio-friendly unit shifters, but someone as cheerfully warped as Kim Deal could only make pop music her own way, chaotically. The second full-length Breeders album, Last

Splash, came out on August 31, 1993. It would eventually go platinum. Track two is called Cannonball and would become improbably a huge radio and MTV hit. I say improbably because the way this song starts is hilarious. This song takes forever to start. This is Kim physically going a woo-oo into a distorted microphone. She does this for nearly 20 seconds, even when the breeders play cannonball on late-night shows. You can watch her do it on MTV's The John Stewart Show in 93, way, way, way before the daily show. Tonight on the John Stewart show, David Cassidy, the jerky boys, and the breeders.

That was a real half hour of television. It's a wonder anybody made it out of this decade alive. Next up, we got newish drummer Jim McPherson goofing around. Seems like a chill guy. Jim was disconcertingly muscular, I thought, based on the photos and the last splash CD booklet, that we didn't always sound like it. This is bassist Josephine Wiggs playing the wrong bass note twice, nearly 30, seconds have transpired.

We got the right baseline, finally. It's a killer baseline. If we're honest, a lot of dufous teenagers butchering it at various guitar centers nationwide, I imagine. No personal experience with that whatsoever. Still no guitars, though. On lead guitar, Kelly Deal, Kim's identical

twin sister. Yes, now there's two of them. Kim joins in with a super distorted acoustic guitar, and then, finally, 50 seconds in. You get what you want, which is, as always, Kim Deal's voice. Spitting in a wishing well is a fine way to sum up this whole era, really.

The vocal harmony there, the way the words wishing well flutter, let's just say that startling effect is magnified by the sight of Kim and Kelly Deal, identical twins, Midwestern brunettes with switchblade smiles, standing right next to each other, especially in the cannonball video where they're standing way too close to each other. The cannonball video is co-directed by Spike Jones, not yet widely known if you weren't a skateboarder or whatever, and Sonic Views Kim Gordon, which is also quite hilarious, this confluence of pulverizingly cool alt-rock bassists who long ago started branching out. It's like recently when Phoebe Waller Bridge directed a Phoebe Bridger's video, it's like, come on.

Skipping into the second verse, and the second time they sing these lines, because the deal sisters also managed to drop in a radio, unfriendly three-second pause at the end. Love that pause. Radio, as a verse as radio typically is to dead air, loved that pause. Also, no offense to Kim Diel's voice, but it's tough to underestimate the appeal of that at the end. For a couple years there, a palm-muted guitar was basically the national anthem. For a couple of years there, a song is noisy and chaotic and indulgent and cryptic as

cannonball could be the national anthem. Is cryptic the right word? What is cannonball about? What is Kim Deal ever singing about? What does it mean to be the bong in this reggae song? Is it any more complicated than I'll be the good part? I was all prepared to tell you at this point that last splash as a whole is entirely baffling and mysterious or whatever, but then I listened to it again for the 3,000th time and realize that a great deal of it is very much not.

There's a degree to which this person is impossibly cool and unknowable. There's a degree to which Kim couldn't possibly be more direct. What the hell else do you think a song called Divine Hammer is about? In that video, Kim plays a flying nun. Saints is a song about how Kim likes going to the fair. In the video, The Breeders Go to the Fair. I just want to get along. I just want to get along.

I just want to get along is a song about how Kim just wants to get along, and yet you're not. Kim is displeased. don't call home That's out on the wall Motherhood meets mental freeze That's from No Aloha Kim Deal gets asked sometimes

In interviews about kids Only the verb tense changes over time If she ever wants kids If she wanted kids If she regrets not having kids In 94 the breeders Covered the song Shocker in Gloom Town

By Guided by voices Speaking of beloved Dayton rock bands Kim was engaged for a while to Jim Greer a writer for Spin Magazine who then joined Guided by Voices for a while, back when those were both viable careers. The shocker in Gloomtown video is just the breeders playing the song in a garage, while the actual members of Guided By Voices lear at them through the windows.

And this is really all the commentary on being a woman in rock that you should really need the breeders to provide. Though it's always fun when Kim does elaborate, she did a really long and rad and combative interview with Spin Magazine's Charles Aaron for a 1995 cover story where she complained about this notion that all women in rock could really do is imitate men

or be protected by men like Fugazi frontman Ian Mackay. Quote, now you've got guys like Ian Mackay saving girls from the Mosh pit. Hey man, fuck you. Girls know what they're doing when they get in the pit.

They don't need you to save them. Another way to read the breeders is as Kim's attempt to save her sister. What makes Breeders interview so fun is that Kim and Kelly are usually bickering the whole time, fighting because they're both trying to read an issue of People magazine with Tanya Harding on the cover, or fighting over how hungover and or crabby Kelly usually is in daytime interview situations. At one point in the spin interview, Kim describes her sister like this. She was high, and not only was she high, she was really high, dropping her bagel high. It was rude. Kelly, roughly speaking, is Kim's id, wilder, freer, sillier maybe, but definitely more self-destructive.

By 1995, it's clear that Last Splash is going to be a tough act to follow, though its influence only grows. In 1996, Prodigy, the English electronic band, sample some wah-wah guitar from the last splash track, SOS, on their gigantic hit fire starter. But also in the mid-90s, Kelly was dealing with an unfortunate legal situation that involved her receiving heroin in the mail. In 1995, Kim puts out a solo albumish record called Pacer, credited to the band The Amps. It's stark and noisy, more of a pod thing. I like to imagine she's singing to her sister on this song, hovering. We do every day if you plan to stick around. Don't do it if you plan to stick around.

Way better than Nancy Reagan's version. Would we have won the war on drugs if Kim Deal had been in charge of the war on drugs? No. As Kim explained to Rolling Stone about her and Kelly's high school years, quote, I knew I wanted to experiment with drugs. Absolutely, definitely. I can't imagine not wanting to experiment with drugs. Drugs were always going to win the war on drugs.

So it's a question of doing it in moderation. It's a question of leaving you wanting more. The breeders are quite good at leaving you wanting more. It took Kim nine years to make another. Breeders record. Title TK. in 2002. Only Kelly was still around by that point. Even the album title as a placeholder. In the immediate future, the Pixies reunion in 2003, not the first beloved rock band reunion maybe, but the first major beloved rock band reunion of the extra lucrative let's reunite for Coichella era. The Pixies made a fortune in cultural capital and actual capital.

then Kim quit and Frank Black and the boys struggle to replace her a couple times now and even now they're making shaky new Pixies albums unworthy of their legacy. The breeders by contrast are moving slower but steadier. Another new album, The Extra Gloomy Mountain Battles in 2008, plus a full reunion of the last splash lineup for the great and surprisingly spry 2018 album All Nerve. They played festivals back when festivals were still a thing. They cashed in and their last year. own modest, idiosyncratic, headstrong, hey man, fuck you, sort of way. From cannonball forward,

from the very beginning, really, what makes this band great is the way this band slides in and out of the frame and in and out of focus. Its noise pop calibrated so perfectly that the noise becomes the signal. But if what you need is it just a pure dose of Kim Deal's physical voice, that's title TK. That's a song called Off You, which sounds like when you sleep for too long and you wake up even more tired. Like you fell asleep when Nirvana was huge and woke up when like the strokes were huge. There is upright bass,

there is shaky acoustic guitar, and there is her. This is one of my favorite lines in the history of popular song, and what I love is that it doesn't mean much to me as language. The only thing I enjoy more than understanding what Kim Dio is singing is not understanding. what Kim Deal is singing.

It's enough for me to know that she's serious. It's enough for me to believe that she believes it. We are thrilled to have Open Mike Eagle here today. Rapper, podcaster, personal hero to many people here at The Ringer. His latest album is called Anime, Trauma, and Divorce. My favorite podcaster, recent memory, is what had happened was a series of conversations between Mike and the great rapper producer, Prince Paul. Thank you so much for being here, Mike.

Thanks for having me. And thanks for saying super nice stuff before you brought me on, man. Of course. I'm all disarmed with charm and stuff. That was my intent. So that was that was worth. You actually proposed the breeders, proposed cannonball, you know, and we asked you if you wanted to do one of these. What does this song mean to you?

It kind of represents the time of my life. Like, I grew up in the black American ghetto in the south side of Chicago. And hip hop was just all around me. It was just like at my school, you know, family. everything was rap all the time. But I at some point in my childhood stumbled upon a little program called 120 minutes on MTV.

Circa 1990 had to be when I stumbled upon it. And like my mind was really blown by like the melodies and the even just like the imagery, like all that stuff that was happening in like college rock and alt rock and i really fell in love with a lot of that stuff so you know readers pixies they might be giants king missile x tc uh and then you know not to mention all of the grun stuff r em like this stuff was like magical to me so you know it It wasn't uncommon for me to be on a city bus with a Walkman and a tape playing something like Blast, Splash from the Breeders.

But when asked what I was listening to, I would lie. What would you say? I would say, this is the Wu-Tang claim. Or this is, like, you know, something, something that I thought would save me from persecution. Sure. Because, you know, the environments that I. I grew up in weren't as forgiving about listening to quote-unquote weird stuff as I enjoyed listening to it.

Did they believe you? Did that ruse work generally? Yeah. Yeah. Usually. It did. See, what would happen sometimes, though, is that I would tell somebody what I was really listening to, and then they would tell everybody else.

Oh, no. So that would ruin my ruse is me trusting another fellow human being. And it varies too because I love they might be giants. You know, I play them for my kids now and I'm indoctrinating them. But there's a difference between the breeders and they might be giants. I think in terms of coolness, the first thing that popped into my head when you said 120 minutes was Faith No More's Epic, which was maybe that might be too popular. That might have been like mainstream. Yeah, that might have been on alternative nation.

There we go. That could have even been on headbangers. I think so. I think you're right about that. Yeah. That's too popular. But the cannonball video was a different. I can picture the bowling ball for some.

That's the dominant image in my head, having not seen the video itself in a while. So you were a Pixies guy. Yeah. And the funny thing for me is my entry into it was really via Frank Black as a solo artist first. Because one of the first albums in that ilk that I became aware of as it came out was Teenager of the Year. Yes, that's a great album. So that song, Headache was just like my jam.

And actually, I think I found out later. I think John Flansberg from They Might Be Giants. I think he directed that video. I think that's right. Or Frank Black directed one of his or both. Probably both, honestly. But yes. Yeah, they probably did.

So did you listen to any hip-hop at this point? Were those sort of separate universes in terms of your musical interests? Or were you mostly alternative rock? I was mostly alternative rock, but I used to do this thing where I'd go like heavily back and forth between genres. It's like now I kind of treat it all like a smorgasbord and I take what I will when I want. But then it was much more segmented. Right. And in some ways it was also more wrapped up in my identity.

So when I was really into hip hop, then like I was like putting my weird alternative leanings kind of behind me for a while and trying to be amongst the people. Yeah. Your work in this new album in particular, they're so personal. It's so personal in. Whereas I think for a lot of people, Kim Deal's appeal is that you have no idea what she's talking about. Like she's cryptic and she's unknowable and she's cool. Is that the way that you hear her? Yeah, you know, it's funny.

And I think about this often. If you look at the pixies, Frank Black, breeders, you know, that whole circle of people, they have many of my favorite songs that I could not tell you one lyric to. Like not one. And I don't even know like why it was. these songs touched me. So I guess, I mean, I have learned in my own musical kind of theory journey that, like, they would take odd angles into things. And I think that's something that always caught me, that they would, like, sneak in minor chords where your brain would expect

major ones and stuff like that. And I do think that stuff was really touching for me. But lyrically, I had zero idea, and I still don't, for the most part. And I think it's just down to the tone of her voice. Like, you're a rapper and a podcaster. Like, you're big into wrestling, anime, like from a bunch of different directions, you understand the power of just someone's voice, like the physical singing, but also her voice is a character. And like, Kim Dio for me has always had one of the most powerful voices in music. Like, she expresses so much without really telling you anything. Like, do you have any insight into how she does that? Or is that something you do or something you just are? Yeah, I guess it feels like more like something you are. Because I wonder

about that too, because, you know, in hip-hop, it is so much about what you're saying. And I know there's a new generation of rappers now where it's not so much about that. And it's more about just how their voices sound and how they're playing against the track to the point where their fans don't even expect them to say words in some instances. But I don't understand the avenue to how you get there, I guess. Like, I don't know, just because of my own journey, I don't know where you find the confidence to like walk into a studio and pay money to use the booth and get in there and just make some sounds or in

Kim Diel's case you know it's a poetry to it you know and the other thing too I guess in terms of readers I mean there's just damn good musicians too and I feel like that carries a lot of weight like

the moods that they used to create you know with the guitar bass drums like they used to be able to kind of just sit in that vocally and kind of express things that I didn't necessarily need to be able to visualize or comprehend.

I could just feel it. Right. Is Cannonball your favorite song on Last Splash or your favorite Breeders song? It's their biggest song, but it might not necessarily be their best among fans. I can't say it's my favorite. I love that song, though.

You know, when it comes to Last Splash, I think about Invisible Man a lot. And I think about no aloha a lot. Like those two are, are always kind of in my mind. But then there's a song on Pod, and I can't remember the dang name of it. But that song, Salty Tammy, I think it might be called.

Something like that. They end up saying that a lot in it. But that's got to be top three for me. And then off you. Off you. Oh, man. Off you is wild. And in rounding out the top five,

I would say like Night of Joy. I think that's on Mountain Battles. Yes. You've talked about that song before. Yeah. You said it had a dark purple, color to you. And I was wondering if that's their unusual color or if that's a departure for them. It felt like a little bit of a departure. Yeah. You're from Chicago originally. Did the

Breeders scan is especially Midwestern to you? I'm an Ohioan and so I sort of claim them, but I don't know if I'm just being, you know, territorial and obnoxious about that. Honestly, other than the grunge bands, I never knew where anybody was from. I knew where the grunge bands were and I knew where R.E.M. was from. I didn't know where anybody else was from at all. Yeah. Did anyone around you, any of your friends come around to alternative rock in general or to the breeders specifically in time? I had a couple of friends who were into that music as well. In fact, part of how I got introduced to all this music was that a friend of mine's older sister would let him use her CDs and he would dub me tapes. and I believe that's how I first got teenager of the year from his sister's CD collection.

Yeah. Do the breeders or Kim Deal influence your work, your albums in any tangible way? Like, I can vividly picture a breeder song called Headass. You know that you're probably right. And I do think that when it comes to stuff like that, bands like them influence me more subconsciously than anything. Sure.

Although in a direct way, shouldn't say this on recorded media. I have sampled them quite a few times throughout my career. And, you know, it's like one of those things where, like, you know, you sample the band you love and you kind of want them to hear it, but you also kind of don't want them to hear it. You don't want them to get mad at you and you don't want their lawyers to come at your face. Well, we're sorry for ruining your career here in this moment. I love your song, Dark Comedy Late Show, which includes the line, fuck you.

I like the spin doctors. I figured I would ask you if that was true. Well, I certainly liked the singles that came out around that time, you know, two princes and what time is it? Yes, yes. There was at least one more really big one. Well, that was Little Miss Campy wrong. Little Miss Campy, of course, Little Miss Campy.

That's the first CD I ever owned, a pocketflip. I put, how could you want him when you know you could have me on a mixtape for a girl once, which gives you some insight into how... little insight I had. I made that mistake over and over again. And those songs are ruined for me. All of those songs that I was like, yeah. Well, you didn't work. Yeah. Yeah. I could never listen to the crystal ship by the doors ever again. Well, I'm shocked. That didn't work. Did you ever make, did you ever put a breeder song on a mixtape for a girl? I think. Maybe not. Maybe not. I think I did learn at some point to not lean so weird on the mixtape. So I don't think,

I mean, and this is all, you know, relative to me being around mostly inner city black people. So the breeders are a little bit far afield. Right. Your son, I think, is nearly a teenager. Are you playing him music from your own teenage years? Does he know who the breeders are? No. He actively hates most music that I like.

Wow. And it wasn't always that way, but now, you know, it's come to that. Sure. His identity is based on music that appeals to his generation. It sounds very different than the stuff I like. And there's pockets, there's times where he'll rock with me on some stuff. But I think it's going to be when he's a lot older that we can have like conversations about music without bias. Yeah.

What will he cop to liking? What are the exceptions as far as terms of 90s stuff? Oh, he's like some Nirvana songs. he's like some Nirvana songs but I don't even know if he still admit that to this day did you play him that they might be Giants kids records no but I played him some of the played him flood right

Apollo I think I played him Lincoln and there was some stuff on there he was he was into a little bit but he's in a rebellious phase he'll grow out of it exactly in his 30s but he'll grow out of it thank you so much Mike this has been awesome yeah man super great

thanks so much to our guest this week open Mike Eagle Thanks to our producers, Isaac Lee and Justin Sales. And thanks, of course, to you for listening. And now, without any further ado, here are the Breeders with Cannonball. We'll see you next week.