"We came up with the name of the band because our drummer [Nick Hook] always called us 'The Kelley Deal Experience,'" Deal says. "Then a friend put the 6000 on the end, and I thought it was great. But the name also made me scared."
Deal learned to play guitar after she was drafted into The Breeders by her sister Kim. The immense popularity of their album, Last Splash, brought them plenty of critical acclaim and national attention.
That attention changed from positive to negative after Kelley's much publicized arrest for heroin possession. But after a family intervention and several months in treatment, Deal emerged from the experience with an album's worth of new material.
The album, Go to the Sugar Altar, has the same types of playful melodies and distorted riffs Deal played with the Breeders. They can be heard on songs like "Canyon" and "How About Hero." But she also departs from the formula with the soulful "Sugar."
While the overall sound is deliberately "unproduced," it certainly isn't unsophisticated. The chords and chord changes in songs like "How About Hero" and "Sugar" do not sound like they came from an amateur guitarist.
"There are people who play by ear and have that desire to sit down and copy every lick of 'Stairway to Heaven.' Maybe I could, but I wouldn't have the desire," she says. "On the one hand, it's really cool because I'm doing all my own stuff, but I can't do anything else. Usually a band can rip into 'Louie, Louie,' but I can't rip into anything unless I wrote it."
Deal says she's had to learn to compose on the fly.
"When I was in treatment, there was this girl who taught me how to play 'The Lemon Song' by Led Zeppelin," she says while hesitantly strumming the chords on an acoustic guitar. "And so I used those chords to compose 'Sugar.' I get ideas for songs from weird places."
And the ideas on Go to the Sugar Altar are almost entirely Deal's. She sees the band as more of a musician collective.
"It's not really a total band or a solo project," she says. "A solo project would imply that I do everything and I don't. But a total band would imply that we all make decisions, and that doesn't happen either. In the beginning, it was only me and another guy who's no longer in the band. I really don't know these guys well yet. We're still exploring and touring together."
--Andrew Cary