Week of August 7, 2008, Issue #668
MUSIC
Black Francis
The artist formerly known as Frank Black embraces weirdness
BRYAN BIRTLES / bryan@vueweekly.com
Black Francis has always been a difficult artist to pigeonhole. From his days leading the Pixies, to his time spent as Frank Black producing mostly rootsy solo records with his band the Catholics, to his re-emergence as Black Francis and his almost spontaneous new records, he’s not the kind of guy you can put your finger on and say he’s this kind of artist or that kind of artist. He’s whatever kind of artist he wants to be on that particular day.
And so it is with Francis’s newest album, Svn Fngrs. Recorded over the course of only a few days, and named after Irish mythological hero Cúchulainn, who had seven fingers and seven toes, the mini-album started out as a single B-side for a greatest hits package, but became an entire album when Black Francis felt he had more to say.
“I get tired of all this B-side bonus track bullshit—I’ve never been on the radio in my friggin’ life,” he says. “The Pixies maybe after the fact we got a little airplay because Kurt Cobain dropped our name, but let’s get something straight: the Pixies had a good run of success the first time around and an even bigger run of success the second time around, but have you ever heard me on the radio the way you’ve heard Oasis on the radio or the Foo Fighters or whatever?”
Recording an album instead of just a B-side also gave Francis a chance to stretch his creative wings a bit, something he’s been doing less of since he had children. In fact, Francis barely even has time to write the songs he’s going to record anymore.
Podcast
Black Francis tells Vue Wave all about how he wrote his newest album Svn Fngrs, Why he likes mythology, and what he thinks about music videos and MTV.
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Recording an album instead of just a B-side also gave Francis a chance to stretch his creative wings a bit, something he’s been doing less of since he had children. In fact, Francis barely even has time to write the songs he’s going to record anymore.
“I didn’t even show up to the studio with songs for that, and more and more that’s the way I do it. I don’t have time sometimes now because at home I’ve got five kids and, God love ‘em, but I totally can’t sit at home and strum the guitar at home these days,” he laughs. “I would just tell the drummer to go smoke a cigarette and I would write a song while he was burning that cigarette and he’d come back and I’d say, ‘Ok lets do it,’ and I wrote the lyrics just as fast—y’know it’s kind of a risk when you do it like that because you can come up with a bad result, but I think I’ve done it like that so many times in my life that if I’m in the zone, if I’m feeling good, I can write halfway decent stuff in the moment and not totally blow it.”
Naming his album after a mythological Irish hero treads familiar ground for Francis, who has used the power of myth as inspiration on a number of songs in the past. He says that when he was younger and just getting into rock ‘n’ roll, he was attracted to the songs that had double meanings, especially the ones that used mythology to illuminate their true intentions.
“I’m not going to sing ‘Oobie doobie doo, I love you’—there’s people that are into that and satisfied by that as an artistic staement and I’ve got nothing against that as an artistic statement because sometimes it can be said very well; but there’s this whole other group of people out here, that when we discover rock music we’re listening to the Beatles or Bob Dylan or something like that where you go, ‘Oh, did you know it’s actually about this?’ So when the people from that group embark on starting our own bands or writing our own records, we go back to that—whatever kind of mythologies or crypticisms that was in that album that we were listening to. It’s fun to go back to those things.
“I think there’s so many, ‘Oobie doobie doo, I love you,’ straight up songs with no mystery in them whatsoever,” he continues. “Especially now because—and I don’t when it started, maybe 15 years ago with the rise of the diary rocker—that became such a huge popular standard for people to adhere to there’s this whole group of music out there and that’s what people think music is about, and they say to me, ‘Whoa, you write weird songs man!’“ V
Fri, Aug 8 (8 pm)
Black Francis
With guests
Starlite Room, $20
www.blackfrancis.net/
www.myspace.com/officialblackfrancis
www.blackfrancis.net/
www.myspace.com/officialblackfrancis
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