PIXIES Poll: The best track on Doolittle

It's definitely a song I remember latching onto almost immediately

Saw them in Boston on the Doolittle tour when I was a freshman in high school. It was loud as shit. Yes, I'll be bragging about this until my dying day.

I still think it's their best album and "Hey" is a dope track.

cute girl i was really into back in the day told me she thought "Hey" was sexy! there was no going back after that

There's a kind of anguished lovelorn quality to it that hits on an emotional level that's sometimes missing from their other songs, where his typical yelpy weirdness creates more distance.

xpost, saw them on that tour as well, this show:
TAAAAAME
and yes, I still occasionally brag about it, too ;)

I'm kind of impressed at how enthusiastic the crowd is in that video, considering that it's an overseas festival. I pretty much thought of them as a "local" band at the time, and they were still at the club level in their hometown.

They were very popular quite early in the Netherlands - Surfer Rosa was in the top 10 of the major music mag in 1988

HEY was also #1 on a RS reader’s poll from 2013.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-the-10-best-pixies-songs-10588/1-hey-227479/

I'd probably vote for 'Hey'.

Moodles is right. It taps into some sort of soul and vulnerability that is constantly hiding in their other songs. I can hear why some people find it sexy, it’s about lust and shame, self-destruction through sex addiction. Kind of mirrors the angst of being a horny teenager but contrasts it with adult world consequences like divorce and being a father/mother.

Also the song itself captures the band at the top of their game, the performance feels very effortless. the album version is even a live take iirc.

'Hey' is incredible. There's about 2 or 3 songs on this that I'm less keen on that the others, but 'Hey' isn't one of 'em.

Still prefer Trompe le Monde overall.

The 2013 RS poll was the one I linked.

(and the writer of that one did attribute the recent popularity of "Hey" to the viral video)

Are you all talking about this video? The one of two girls in their bedroom? This one with... *checks notes*....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_CSo1gOd48

... 34.4 million views?

setlist.fm suggests the band were fond of performing it too. Seems to be the earliest Doolittle song they played and they did so pretty consistently from about the time Surfer Rosa was released.

I'm not surprised because I think it unworthy. I've just virtually never heard anyone mention or play it. I certainly didn't hear it on radio or see it appear in listener polls locally at the time. (In contrast to the likes of "Debaser", "HCYM", "Monkey", "WoM", "#13 Baby" and "Gouge Away".) I'm likely just stuck with a parochial view by failing to give the band much thought since the pre-internet era, despite this possibly being my most played record as a 15-year-old.

didn't realize it was bigger than WoM or debaser (once used diagetically on the o.c. to denote a Cool But Juvenile Man) and was unaware of the youtube vid, but "hey" was def a cd-r staple and frequent jam attempt amongst pixies kids (who were mostly girls actually) at my high school c.2003.

I never knew about the "Hey" viral video, but in the notes below it turns out Pixies invited them to actually star in the official video for "Ring The Bell" in 2014. I don't like any of the nu-Pixies stuff, but it's cool of them to do that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCRZrfonyZU

They directed the video too!

Nice!

I asked my wife (a big Pixies fan) — she voted “Gouge Away.”

your wife has good taste (comedy timing pause) in music

Thank you! You all are great. Stay all day if you want to.

I like "Gouge Away" a lot. I would probably pick "No. 13 Baby" myself, with "Monkey" and "Debaser" close.

Gouge Away and No. 13 Baby are my favourites but honestly this album blew my mind when I was 14 and I pretty much love all of it. Apart from There Goes My Gun and La La Love You. I don't hate those just not v good. I can still remember walking around Worcester city centre listening to this on my walkman for the first time, RIP Midlands Educational

Haha No. 13 Baby is my favorite, with I Bleed & Here Comes Your Man taking silver & bronze

At "indie discos" in the uk in the late 90s/early 00s, if you requested something off doolittle nine times out of ten they played debaser. So that's what I was dancing to at midnight on my 30th birthday.

I think this might be more because I’m a Breeders fan but the idea that “Silver” is worse than those with 5 votes or fewer floors me. That darker back half album stretch from “No. 13 Baby” to “Gouge Away” desperately needs that eerie Deal track!

"Silver" is fantastic. I always catch myself singing it in the style of a modern country crossover song.

tbf "Dead" rules but so does "Silver"

I think the weak link on the album is "La La Love You" but I also like that song so 🤷‍♂️

lol @ going back through the thread after posting and seeing that I voted for "Dead", who's vmic now

yeah I think the only songs I'm not that keen on are La La Love You and There Goes My Gun. and Here Comes Your Man to an extent tbh

Deal and Black Francis share writing credits on "Silver" and "Gigantic," so I've always wondered who did what. Re: "Gigantic" specifically, there's a quote from Francis on the wiki:

"A good chord progression, very Lou Reed influenced. I'd had the word 'gigantic' in my mind just because the chord progression seemed very big to me."

Aware that Kim Deal was seeking more creative input, Frank Black set her a challenge using a circular chord sequence he'd developed. "We started doing a bit of their loud quiet loud dynamic, where we would bring things down to bass and drums, the kind of thing you'd hear on a Sisters of Mercy song," he recalled to Uncut. "I wanted to do a song that didn't change chords, like Lou Reed's Sweet Jane. So I just said to Kim, let's do a song called 'Gigantic,' this is the bass riff, quiet in the verses loud in the choruses."

Hey, Silver and Gouge Away is a trio for the ages

from RapGenius.net:

Black Francis told Esquire that “Silver” is,

the only composition that I did with Kim on this session. I think we worked on it a couple of times the previous year or something. I don’t know what it means to her and I don’t know what it means to me. The lyrics are all very vague and vaguely folk-sounding. You can almost hear it’s like a faux-folk song. It’s definitely an abstraction. At least that’s my interpretation of it. It was all about creating a mood I think.

This is a song me and Kim wrote really fast one night sitting around bored in the studio waiting for whatever to happen with the engineers. There were other lyrics that were supposed to have been written for the actual song but all we’d got left were the original phrases that we came up with so that was that.

(Black Francis in the NME, April 1989)

So it's a full music and lyrics collaboration?

That's surprising because "Silver" was also on the Pod Demos. I had always assumed (for some odd reason) that Charles's input regarded elements that were specific to the Doolittle version

Kim wrote the lyrics to Gigantic and it was based on the play/movie, Crimes of the Heart. My memory is fuzzy on this, but a married white woman in the south has an affair with a young black man and in the song the narrator sees them meet up.

Fuck it, let me look it up:

Kim Deal’s ex-husband John Murphy sheds some light on this song’s origin in the 2004 oral history Fool the World:

"Charles came up with the riff, but he wasn’t really sure what the lyrics were going to be, so he goes, “Eh, well, Kim, why don’t you take a shot at it? The only thing I know is that I want to call it ‘Gigantic’,” and she says, “Fine.” So she comes home with it and she’s playing it on the guitar and I said, “Gigantic, okay, maybe it’s about a big mall.” She goes, “Okay, let’s try that for a while,” and I’m like, “The mall, the mall, let’s have a ball.” So I wrote that. It changed to “Hey, Paul”, because it had to rhyme. And then, a couple of days later she had fixated on this Sissy Spacek movie Crimes of the Heart about this farmworker, I think he’s a black guy, and Sissy Spacek and this farmworker get together – so that’s what it’s about. An illicit love affair."

So there are some things to unpack here. His "teeth are white as snow." I assume in contrast to his skin color. And the word "gigantic" in the context of the song?

I tried reading the "Doolittle" 33 1/3 and ... couldn't. Boring subjects, writer not quite up to making something interesting out of them. Which is part of the band's appeal, in a weird way.

So there are some things to unpack here. His "teeth are white as snow." I assume in contrast to his skin color. And the word "gigantic" in the context of the song?

Yeah, after I learned the setting for the song, I no longer loved it in the way I once did (which I really did, because there are almost no songs that include the name Paul).

Palace Brothers - O Paul

Gigantic is cancelled

xxp Big Thief - Paul

a big big pud

uriah hit the crapper
the crapper