Kim Deal

Gigantic Heart: From Dayton basements to MTV and beyond: The definitive story of Kim Deal, The Breeders, and the architecture of alternative rock.

De: Caius D. Merrow

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Kim Deal has always been more than a bassist or harmony singer—she is the quiet architect of alternative rock. Gigantic Heart: Kim Deal is the first full-length biography to trace her journey with forensic detail and cultural scope, from the twin harmonies of her Dayton childhood to the global stages of the Pixies and the Breeders.

This definitive narrative follows Deal’s trajectory across three decades of upheaval and reinvention. Readers step into smoky Ohio bars where she learned the discipline of four-track recording, into Boston rehearsal rooms where a classifieds ad paired her with Black Francis and Joey Santiago, and into the raw Albini sessions that produced Surfer Rosa. The book captures the detonation of Cannonball in 1993, when Deal’s bass hook became currency across MTV, festivals, and record labels, as well as the fragile moments when survival outweighed momentum.

Far from nostalgia, the biography emphasizes process: the tape machines Kim calibrated at home, the soundchecks she turned into notebooks, the meticulous negotiations over catalog rights that safeguarded her independence. Each chapter situates her story inside larger currents—4AD’s visual aesthetic, the rise of MTV, the collapse of CD-era economics, and the streaming era’s pressure on catalogs.

Richly researched and vividly written, Gigantic Heart humanizes Kim Deal without mythologizing her. It is a book about discipline as much as it is about riffs, about the rooms where songs are made as much as the arenas where they are performed. For fans of the Pixies, the Breeders, or anyone interested in the machinery behind alternative music, this biography reveals why Deal’s work endures: steady, inventive, fiercely independent, and still humming with authority.