The Breeders Talk Last Splash 20th Anniversary Tour, Conquering The 'Bulls--t' Charts

Kim Deal has plenty to do before the Breeders' sold-out Last Splash 20th anniversary tour, but instead, she's calling in — four minutes early — for an interview with MTV News. Why?

"Well, the suspense was killing me," she laughed. "I was sitting here with the phone in my hand and I couldn't take it anymore."

We suspect she was kidding; after all, in recent months, Deal has turned her Dayton, Ohio home into Breeders central, gathering the band's Last Splash-era lineup — her, sister Kelley, bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim MacPherson, plus violinist Carrie Bradley — to rehearse for the tour (which kicks off Wednesday night with a warm-up show in Kentucky) and cull through the ample amount of material she's kept from the iconic album's recording sessions for a deluxe twentieth-anniversary reissue, set to hit stores on April 23. Needless to say, she's been busy, which is pretty impressive, considering she wasn't even aware Last Splash was turning 20 until fairly recently.

"I was sitting on the couch with my sister Kelley in Dayton last spring, and she's the one who said to me 'Kim, did you know next year is 2013, it's 20 years for Last Splash,' and I was like 'Oh my God!'" Deal sighed. "So we started imagining what we could do for the anniversary; it certainly wasn't 'Let's get down to business. Let's do this thing.' It was like 'Wouldn't it be cool if we could do some shows?' And then we asked everyone if they would be into it, and it was nice of them to say 'Yes.' I mean, imagine what would have happened if they said 'No!'"

And while the band worked through the songs on Last Splash (they'll play the record in its entirety on the tour), Deal pulled double duty, serving as de facto engineer for the sessions — "I have a nice TASCAM 16-track recorder, so I snaked it down to the basement, from my bathroom, down through the laundry chute," she laughed — and chief archivist for the band. And she's done an admirable job of collecting everything from that period in the Breeders' career, pulling together a reissue that contains the original album, four EPs (Safari and Head To Toe, plus the singles "Cannonball" and "Divine Hammer,") a full live album and a disc that features a BBC live session and demos.