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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
 Posted - 07/19/2005 : 07:53:34
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http://theedge.bostonherald.com/musicNews/view.bg?articleid=94244
Has this been posted yet?
Pixies' frontman shows a sweeter side
By Larry Katz
Monday, July 18, 2005 - Updated: 10:03 AM EST
Frank Black's music can be described as freaky, futuristic and furious.
But mellow?
Never. Until now.
Black, frontman of the reunited Pixies, recorded his new solo album, ``Honeycomb,'' with a collection of legendary Southern session musicians. It's not country music. But ``Honeycomb,'' in stores tomorrow, is an unlikely set of easygoing roots music.
``It was probably a function of the guys I was playing with,'' Black says of his backup squad, which included guitarist Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, bassist David Hood and guitarist Reggie Young of Muscle Shoals Studios fame, and country guitar ace Buddy Miller. ``My current theory is that the singer-songwriter-front guy is very affected by the musicians he's playing with.
``Getting back with the Pixies,'' he says from his home in central Oregon, ``I realize certain groups of musicians cause you to sing a certain way. The Pixies are not laid-back. The Catholics (Black's pre-Pixies reunion band) are not laid-back, but they're more laid-back than the Pixies. But these guys in Nashville, well, they know how to do laid-back.''
Black, known as Black Francis in his early Pixies days, explains that he went to Nashville with producer Jon Tiven looking for his own version of the Bob Dylan-in-Nashville experience that resulted in Dylan's landmark 1966 album ``Blonde on Blonde.'' Black even considered calling his CD ``Black on Blonde.''
Tiven, who has produced recent CDs by veteran soul stars such as Wilson Pickett, gathered the cast of famous session men for Black.
``I had no idea who was going to be in the band,'' Black says. ``I just knew they were going to be hot.''
And the band, it seems, knew just as little about Black.
``Maybe they checked me out with their children,'' Black says. ``Maybe they googled me. I don't know. They didn't let on if they knew me or didn't know me.''
Backed by musicians playing with egoless restraint, Black's original songs on ``Honeycomb'' spill forth with deceptive gentleness, even when the lyrics speak of murder and debauchery (``I puked it up with liquor and I slept right where I lay'').
The three cover songs he does are as unexpected as the sweet sound of ``Honeycomb.'' Black displays a surprisingly sensitive croon doing the Southern soul standard ``Dark End of the Street,'' goes hippie with ``Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day'' and unearths ``Song of the Shrimp,'' a bizarre song from the Elvis Presley movie ``Girls! Girls! Girls!'' that Black says he learned from a record by the late Texas singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt.
Black has no plans so far to tour in support of ``Honeycomb.'' Instead he'll continue to perform with the Boston-bred Pixies, who recently placed twice on Spin magazine's 100 Greatest Albums 1985-Now list with 1988's ``Surfer Rosa'' (No. 6) and 1989's ``Doolittle'' (No. 36).
The Pixies' next New England gig?
Aug. 6 at the Newport Folk Festival.
Huh? What are the Pixies doing at a folk fest, where they'll play their first-ever acoustic show?.
``Playing Newport makes sense because to me the Pixies are kind of folkie,'' Black says. ``Not in a Kingston Trio way. In a Violent Femmes way. We're raw. We're like an amplified folkie band when you analyze the music.
Has the mellow Black of ``Honeycomb'' rubbed off on his rambunctious rock mates?
Black laughs. ``We're still the Pixies. We're not going to reinvent ourselves. We're just going to be quieter.''
Mellow gold: Frank Black, frontman
of the reunited Pixies, explores
roots music on 'Honeycomb,' out
tomorrow.
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Edited by - Carl on 07/19/2005 07:56:17 |
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kathryn
~ Selkie Bride ~
Belgium
15320 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2005 : 10:10:33
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I haven't see this before, Carl. Thanks for posting. Dunno how I feel about quieter Pixies...
Sometimes, no matter how shitty things get, you have to just do a little dance. - Frank
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2005 : 10:48:41
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| Yeah, that sounds a little iffy!! |
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PsychicTwin
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1772 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2005 : 11:36:32
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| yeah, if quieter Pixies songs will constitute this much-talked-about "new album" that may be coming out, please shoot me. It's already disheartening enough that we may never hear Frank-punk/Teenager material or the Catholics stuff live ever again... |
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billgoodman
>> Denizen of the Citizens Band <<
Netherlands
6196 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2005 : 12:18:27
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let the man do what he wants
if you said to a regular fan in 1993 that Frank wanted to be more country and embrace cliches musically
he would have probably slapped you in the face and said that would be a dumb idea.
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God save the Noisies |
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 07/22/2005 : 15:16:22
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http://www.azcentral.com/ent/music/articles/0722black.html
I'm sure this has been posted before, but what the heck:
Black's sinister sensibility has a sweet new sound
Joan Anderman
Boston Globe
Jul. 21, 2005 11:00 AM
Pixies frontman Frank Black is known for his mammoth howl, brief explosive songs, and impenetrable lyrics about space and mutilation. A spotty, sprawling catalog of solo efforts that touch on most every pop music style, from heavy metal to spaghetti western, has done little to forge a post-Pixies identity for Black. With the band's massively successful reunion tour well into its second year, it would seem that Black is ready to settle into a comfortable career peddling alt-rock nostalgia.
On the contrary. Black's 11th solo album, "Honeycomb," comes out Tuesday on Narada's Back Porch imprint, and it's a carefully conceived, supremely focused Southern soul surprise - one of those midcareer swerves that forces you to reconsider a known musical quantity.
On paper, "Honeycomb" reads like a giant step back in time. The disc's producer, Jon Tiven, has worked with Wilson Pickett and B.B. King. Black's new labelmates include John Hammond and the Neville Brothers. A who's who of session aces - grizzled veterans of the famed Muscle Shoals, Stax, and American studios - gathered for four days in Nashville to help Black realize a decade-old dream inspired by the 1966 Bob Dylan album "Blonde on Blonde."
So unabashed is Black's affection for Dylan's country-rock opus - the album is filled with the sort of inventive structures and bizarre imagery that would later become Black's calling card - publicity materials for "Honeycomb" winkingly refer to the project as "Black on Blonde."
"I took my cue from another record that I really like a lot," says Black, on the phone from a Pixies tour stop in Milwaukee. "I don't know how much is myth, but I've read accounts of how it was made and you get a picture of this hot young kid composing couplets while the other guys are playing cards, and then they bang out a record. While I'm certainly not as popular as Dylan, and I'm a lot older now than he was when he made it, I feel a similar thing happened. My muse was present, and these heavy hitters, with all of their restraint and groove and prowess, supported it. Magic happened."
Black may be an icon among the alt-rock set, but his reputation hardly preceded him in Nashville. Producer Tiven says that's precisely why the Dylan comparison is apt.
"He came down here with stuff that was so far beyond what these guys were used to playing for a living. It was such a joy to play some new chord changes and hear lyrics about falling in love with a half-sea-creature. It's different from Dolly Parton."
Black isn't the first midlife musician to confront the future by plumbing the past. The natural impulse to slow down and settle down has driven many a rocker to discover his kinder, gentler roots.
The first song Black wrote for the album - the icebreaker, as he refers to it - is a waltz called "Violet," named after Violet Clark, his girlfriend and the mother of his 6-month-old son, Jack. He worked his affection for blood into the first verse, but Black's fans will still find this tender love song exceedingly weird. Which proves, in a backwards sort of way, that the call of Southern soul hasn't entirely subsumed Black's weirdness. His cover of the classic "Dark End of the Street" - crooned in the soft, pained reaches of his falsetto - is, considering the source, truly shocking.
In fact, Black believes that this mellow mash of dulcet country sounds and sinister sensibilities is as radical in its rejection of all things hip as the Pixies were for their groundbreaking dynamics.
"People like to say you can't do that or sound like that or try to be that because you're not being real," he says. "But rock 'n' roll is not about what's happening right now in 2005, nor is it about what was happening in 1989 when I was first successful with the Pixies. It's about the '50s and '60s and jazz and folk. There's nothing wrong with being really in tune with what's going on or inventing a new sound. I just don't like it when that's all you're supposed do."
This warm, muted record involved some serious risk taking. It was written during a chaotic period marking the end of the musician's marriage to Jean Black - who performs a surreal duet with her ex on "Strange Goodbye" - and the beginning of Black's current relationship with Clark. The Pixies, which had come to an antagonistic finish a decade prior, were in the tentative first throes of a reunion. While the sadness and exhilaration that colored those days came as no surprise to Black, the ease with which formerly well-concealed feelings made it into the songs did. "A lot was going on, not just in romantic relationships but in professional relationships, too, and suddenly I was getting ready to put on my leather jacket and fly to Nashville and record with Steve Cropper 1/8soul guitarist and founding member of Booker T. & the MGs 3/8. All of it combined to up the ante, and I touched on things that maybe I would have been afraid to touch on in the past. I think my audience when I was writing this album became those guys in the band. I didn't know them personally, but I kept imagining these bearded older guys with long careers who are used to working with Neil Young, and I really had to deliver for them. ... Yes, I was a little nervous. You have to stand tall."
Black and his bandmates in the Pixies may have to wear shoe lifts next month when they headline the legendary Newport Folk Festival.
"I have this fantasy of showing up and Pete Seeger socks me," Black says. "But I listen to a lot of Burl Ives, and some of those songs are just totally psycho, dark, weird songs about murder and heavy stuff. Folk music isn't only Peter, Paul and Mary doing 'Lemon Tree.' I love that song, but a lot of great folk music is also quirky and kind of raw. I think that if you remove the amplification, the Pixies are pretty folky."
If you remove the rules - something Frank Black's been doing for years - the past leads to the future, where a rock 'n' roll screamer can make something as unlikely and lovely as "Honeycomb."
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