Kim Deal once admitted there are a few lyrics she wrote that still cause instant embarrassment, even 25 years after the fact. Not even time can erase those things that make us cringe at ourselves, it seems.
Deal has spoken about a few particular lines from the song “Hellbound”, which she wrote on The Breeders’ 1990 album Pod. In a print interview with Melody Maker soon after the album’s release, Deal described “Hellbound” as “kinda like a heavy metal hymnal.” Specifically, she added, the notion that “‘We’re all hellbound.’”
But in a 2015 conversation with Courtney Barnett on The Talkhouse Music Podcast, Deal revealed the lines that still caused her such anguished embarrassment.
“It lives / Despite the knives internal” appears in the second verse of “Hellbound”. It’s a pretty straightforward image for a song about a failed abortion. But while Deal’s bandmates allegedly teased her about the maudlin lines, she couldn’t think of anything better to replace them. So, they stayed, although Deal tried to mumble her way through them as a way of concealing their melodrama.
‘Hellbound’ Makes up for Kim Deal’s Embarrassing Lyric With Surprising Composition
“I guess it’s not so cringey as it’s just not good,” Deal explained in 2015. However, even if Kim Deal thinks those lines aren’t any good, “Hellbound” has its own saving grace. The contradiction of energetic instrumentation and bright vocals with dark, suggestive lyrics creates a camouflage for those lines. You almost don’t realize that you’re listening to a song about abortion until it’s already over.
So, maybe Kim Deal would have liked to write a better line there. But the complete elements that make up “Hellbound” are strong enough to gloss over a less-than-stellar lyric. And in any case, there’s more to love on Pod than there is to be embarrassed about.
The entire album was made with an air of immediacy. There’s space between every song, every note, that opens it all up to curious ears. Pod was an album ready and willing to be consumed, and that’s exactly how The Breeders made it, with assistance from Steve Albini.
“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,” Albini said of Pod in 2006. “It had this sort of girlish fascination with things that were pretty, but it was also kind of horny. That was a juxtaposition that, at the time, was unusual. You didn’t get a lot of knowing winks from female artists at the time.”
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
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