In September 2023, The Breeders received an invitation from US pop star Olivia Rodrigo to join her GUTS tour at a series of shows at New York's Madison Square Garden and the KIA Forum in Los Angeles. The Ohio alt. rock band - fronted by former Pixies bassist Kim Deal and her sister Kelley - were surprised and flattered, but somewhat bemused, with Kelley Deal admitting that she thought the offer might have been made in error.
"I thought, Is she sure?" Deal told the New York Times. "Do they really mean us?"
The invitation was no administrative error as Olivia Rodrigo explained on four separate evenings onstage at Madison Square Garden. The star told her young audience that her life could be divided into two distinct parts" before she heard The Breeders' 1993 single Cannonball, and after.
The 22-year-old Californian first heard the lead single from the group's second album Last Splash as a teenager and remembers “instantly falling in love with the Breeders,” according to an email she sent to the New York Times.
"I thought Kim was coolest girl in the world," Rodrigo wrote. "I’m very inspired by them and everything they stand for. They are absolutely iconic."
"With Cannonball, I remember I just really liked the riff," the song's author Kim Deal told Spin in 2013. "It's fun - it’s super fun. It’s hard to come up with fun things. I’m always coming up with Sabbath things because I’m a metal girl from Ohio."
Part of the fun of the song is the fact that it starts in a totally unorthodox manner, with noise, silliness, and a brilliant mistake.
When Triple J radio DJ Richard Kingsmill asked Deal about the "weird sound" at the beginning of the song, she revealed that her opening vocal was inspired by the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, and specifically the Oompa Loompa's work song. Meanwhile, the opening bass riffs was an error by bassist Josephine Wiggs, which the band thought was "cool" so kept rather than erasing.
"Because I was the only person playing, I didn’t realize I was playing the wrong note until the guitars came in," the bassist told Spin. "So of course on the next riff, I adjusted it. It’s hilariously deceptive."
Lyrically too, Deal took inspiration from an unusual source, a biography of the French writer, political activist and sexual libertine, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, aka the Marquis de Sade, the thinking man/woman's historical pervert of choice.
"My sister was reading a biography of the Marquis de Sade," she explained to interviewer Steve Harris (not that Steve Harris) in 1993. "And I'm making fun of him, I'm saying, Oh you little libertine, you're a real cuckoo! Do you want to go to hell? Come on, let's go to hell don't just jump in, do a cannonball. It's like, I'll be right behind you, I'll be the last fucking splash. It's a commitment to hell I guess."
These diverse influences ensured that Cannonball sounded like nothing else around in 1993.
Interviewed by Spin twenty years later, Janet Billig Rich, who signed Hole and co-managed Nirvana, said, "I think from the beginning Cannonball was just a fucking giant song - it sounded so unique, fun, and amazing. It sounded like the way ice cream on a hot summer day tastes. Perfect and refreshing."
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl were huge fans too, as they proved by taking The Breeders on tour in the US and Europe in 1993. Cobain had previously told UK music magazine Melody Maker, that the band's first album, 1990's Pod changed his life... and it was also the reason that Nirvana chose to make In Utero with Steve Albini, who'd engineered the record.
"The main reason I like them is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric," he said. "I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because Gigantic is the best Pixies song and Kim wrote it.”
Ironically, by the time The Breeders released Last Splash, Pixies had broken up, a decision that Black Francis conveyed to Kim Deal by fax. No matter, with Cannonball, Deal's immortality in alt. rock was assured.
In 2013, Deal was asked by MOJO magazine if she knew she'd written a hit at the time.
"Did we record a song that opened with me saying, 'Check 1-2', and then loads of vocal feedback from my brother’s harmonica mike, and think, This is destined for radio?" she asked rhetorically. "That was the sort of thing that didn’t get you played on the radio then. We thought no one would play it."
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