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Frank Black Talks About The Pixies' Present And Future
Friday July 08, 2005 @ 12:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff


The Pixies

Considering the epic early-'90s demise of The Pixies, it comes as a bit of a surprise that not only is the band's reunion still going strong, but they're actually having a great time.

To hear Frank Black tell it, the reformed group are having more fun now than ever before. And why not? They're making tons of cash and winning new fans around the globe. But to Black, it's more than that. To him, The Pixies really are back.

"It feels really natural," he says during a short break in the band's summer tour schedule. "It feels like, yeah, this is who I am. This is my band. This is the way that it should be. It doesn't feel awkward. There's a lot more camaraderie in the band than I realized and it's a mysterious camaraderie.

"It's not like we sit around high-fiving each other in the dressing room and we sit around and talk endlessly. It's more mysterious. It's all about the music we made in our little band one day that worked out. That's what it all revolves around. It doesn't feel fake."

Not that the money thing hurts. It took years of clamouring and rumours to get Black and Kim Deal to talk to one another again. When they finally made the plunge in early 2004, the response was deafening.

They sold out shows from Winnipeg to Slovenia, sold out live recordings of the shows at every stop and were properly celebrated for their influence on the alternative bands who followed in their footsteps.

Then came year two. Realizing that it had all been pretty good, The Pixies just kept going.

"I would say that the reunion, per se, is over, that we're in another phase," Black says. "We're in a phase where the audience is giving us a little more grace time — so we can go out and make a few more bucks — without saying, 'Alright guys, c'mon. This reunion thing is getting a little old.' So we're being somewhat selective. We're not going out and playing everywhere."

The Pixies play Toronto and Montreal this weekend with Weezer. If you're going to see this tour, expect few changes from their last batch of Canadian shows, though there have been some setlist additions, notably fan favourites "Alex Eiffel" and "Stormy Weather."

The question on everybody's lips, both this year and last, has been whether or not the band will go back into the studio and try to recreate their late-'80s brilliance. There hasn't been a solid decision on whether or not it will happen, but the members have obviously talked about the issue and seem to be leaning toward it.

"I think the only concept that we have is that we don't want to spend too much money on it," Black says. "We want to be confident with our material. So it's just a matter of saying, 'Should we go practise and make some new songs for the people?' It doesn't really get any bigger than that, other than, who is going to be the producer.

"It'll probably get recorded in L.A. because two of the guys live in L.A., Kim works a lot in L.A., I work a lot in L.A. We're not going to go record in the Bahamas. We don't really generate the kinds of sales where we all have millions and millions of dollars in our bank account where we can go, 'Sure, let's spend a couple million!' We're successful, but we don't want to piss money away. That's not very rock 'n' roll to us, pissing money away on extravagance. It doesn't really go with our aesthetic.

"A new album will really be determined by the tour. We'll be like, 'We've played there and there and over there, there's nowhere left to play. Better make a record.'"

If you want to hear new material by Black, you're in luck — his new solo record, Honeycomb, is out on Back Porch (EMI) this Tuesday.

The album was recorded just before The Pixies got back together last year. Black recorded in Nashville with a handful of Music City's legendary session musicians, including Spooner Oldham.

Considering Black usually has at least one, if not two records out every year, why did it take so long to get this one into stores?

"I think mostly because we wanted to release it through a different record label," he says. "Not to say anything negative about our other label, SpinArt, because we enjoy a nice relationship with them. We just felt like we'd released a lot of records over the last few years and we wanted to, you know, sometimes you just don't want to put all your eggs in one basket."

After planning to do a recording like this for about 10 years, Black enjoyed the process so much he's already recorded another record that could see the light of day as soon as January.

"I went back when I was on tour," he says. "I had a day off in Nashville and it was sort of a one day session. We did an album's worth of material on the second session, we're just trying to decide if it's THE record or if it needs more work, more songs."

Here are The Pixies Canadian tour dates, with Weezer:

July 9 Toronto, ON @ Molson Amphitheatre
July 10 Montreal, QC @ Stade Uniprix
—Noah Love

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Originally posted by dayanara

http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2005/07/0801.cfm

[quote]Frank Black Talks About The Pixies' Present And Future
Friday July 08, 2005 @ 12:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff


The Pixies


"It feels like, yeah, this is who I am. This is my band. This is the way that it should be.

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i am sitting here observing my emotional discomfort.

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ll be like, 'We've played there and there and over there, there's nowhere left to play. Better make a record.'"

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