Here Comes Your Man

Infobox Single
Name = Here Comes Your Man

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Artist = Pixies
from Album = Doolittle
Released = June 01, 1989
Format = Vinyl record (7"), CD
Recorded = October/November 1988
Genre = Alternative rock
Length = 3:21
Label = 4AD/Elektra
Producer = Gil Norton
Last single = "Monkey Gone to Heaven"
(1989)
This single = "Here Comes Your Man"
(1989)
Next single = "Velouria"
(1990)
Misc = Extra tracklisting
Album = Doolittle
Type = studio
prev_track = "I Bleed"
prev_no = 4
this_track = "Here Comes Your Man"
track_no = 5
next_track = "Dead"
next_no = 6"Here Comes Your Man" is a song by the American alternative rock band Pixies, and is the fifth track on their 1989 album "Doolittle". "Here Comes Your Man" was written and sung by the band's frontman Black Francis, and produced by Gil Norton. The song was released as a single in June 1989 in the United Kingdom and the United States, and reached #3 on the U.S. Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.

Written by Francis as a teenager, "Here Comes Your Man" was recorded for the band's 1987 demo tape, but not included on either "Come On Pilgrim" or "Surfer Rosa"; it was seen as an anomaly in the band's repertoire by their producers. Critics saw "Here Comes Your Man" as the Pixies' breakthrough song; Jon Dolan of "Spin" magazine commented that it was "the most accessible song ever by an underground-type band." [Frank, Ganz, 2005. p. 118]

Background and music

From the very beginning, the band members and their early producers (Gary Smith on "Come On Pilgrim" and Steve Albini on "Surfer Rosa") saw "Here Comes Your Man" as "pop" material. The song, originally recorded for the Purple Tape (an acoustic version of the song), was not included on either "Come On Pilgrim" or "Surfer Rosa". For a post-"Surfer Rosa" single, the band's label, 4AD, rejected another recording of the song; they later chose "Gigantic" and "River Euphrates" as a B-side. [Sisario, p. 88-9]

The song opens with the Hendrix chord, favored by Santiago and used on "Tame", reminiscent of the opening to "A Hard Day's Night" [Sisario, pp. 82, 90.] .

Lyrics and meaning

In an interview with NME, Francis commented on the meaning of the song: [cite web | url=http://aleceiffel.free.fr/titles.html | title=Pixies Titles/Names | accessdate=2007-02-26 | author=Biel, Jean-Michel; Gourraud,Christophe | publisher=Alec Eiffel]

cquote|It's about winos and hobos traveling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake. Before earthquakes, everything gets very calm—animals stop talking and birds stop chirping and there's no wind. It's very ominous.

I've been through a few earthquakes, actually, 'cause I grew up in California. I was only in one big one, in 1971. I was very young and I slept through it. I've been awake through lots of small ones at school and at home. It's very exciting actually—a very comical thing. It's like the earth is shaking, and what can you do? Nothing.

The word "boxcar" was apparently a starting point for the song's lyrics, and Francis has suggested that this was in part inspired by the song "Carnival of Sorts (Box Car)" by R.E.M.: "I probably liked the word 'boxcar' because I heard it on the R.E.M. song, from their first record." [Sisario, p. 88.] R.E.M. also used the same chords as "Here Comes Your Man" in their 2008 single "Supernatural Superserious."

Video and imagery

A music video, filmed by local students, to promote the single shows the band playing their instruments through a distorted fish-eye lens, the camera variously panning horizontally across the performance space and vertically over the individual band members. Keeping in the spirit of the mimed performance, Francis and Deal open and shut their mouths in time with their prerecorded vocals, yet make no attempt to articulate their lips in synch with the words that they are supposed to be singing. Instead, they simply keep their mouths wide open with blank expressions for the duration of each verse. [cite web | url=http://aleceiffel.free.fr/hereand.html | title=Here And There And Everywhere | accessdate=2006-01-21]

Reception

Despite releasing the song as a single and as a video that received regular play on MTV, the Pixies rarely played it at concerts or at promotional events. Music writer Ben Sisario described this stance as "vintage college-rock 'tude--the hit, the pop song, should be avoided as inauthentic, while the aggro, anticommercial song represents legitimacy." [Sisario, p. 91.]

Joey Santiago later recalled: "The tour manager asked, 'Hey, Arsenio Hall wants you to come on the show.' We said, 'Well, what do they want to hear?' He said, 'Here Comes Your Man.' No way. We told them we would love to go on, only if we did the song 'Tame'. And they said, 'No, thank you.'" [Sisario, p. 91.]

Track listing

# Here Comes Your Man (Francis) - 3:00
# Wave of Mutilation [UK Surf] (Francis) - 3:00
# Into the White - (Francis/Deal) - 4:42
# Bailey's Walk - (Francis) - 2:23

ample

References

*Frank, Josh; Ganz, Caryn. (2005). "". Virgin Books. ISBN 0-312-34007-9.
*Sisario, Ben. (2006). "Doolittle". Continuum, 33⅓ series. ISBN 0-8264-1774-4.

Notes

External links