Pixies – Here Comes Your Man
Description
“Here Comes Your Man” is a song by the American alternative rock band Pixies, written and sung by the band’s frontman Black Francis. Produced by Gil Norton, it was released as the second single from the group’s second album Doolittle in June 1989.
Written by Black 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, as the songwriter was reluctant to release the song. 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.” The song reached number three on the U.S. Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. In 2019, the single was certified Gold in Canada.
Background and recording
Black Francis recalled that he wrote “Here Comes Your Man” around the time he was age 14 or 15. Years later after the Pixies were formed, producer Paul Kolderie noted the group did not want to record “Here Comes Your Man” for its demo “The Purple Tape“. The group referred to it as “the Tom Petty song”, according to Kolderie. Producer Gary Smith stated that, “There was some reluctance to do ‘Here Comes Your Man’ because it was too pop, there was something too straight about it.” When 4AD label head Ivo Watts-Russell handpicked the track listing for the group’s debut release Come on Pilgrim, he intentionally left out “Here Comes Your Man”. Watts-Russell stated that he liked the song, but “it felt just too obviously commercial and I didn’t know what we were doing with [the band]”. Watts-Russell also felt it was too reminiscent of Mink DeVille‘s “Spanish Stroll“. For a post-Surfer Rosa single, 4AD rejected another recording of the song; they later chose “Gigantic“, with “River Euphrates” on the B-side.
Francis reflected in 2004 that, during the recording of the group’s second album Doolittle, he felt embarrassed by “Here Comes Your Man”, but since producer Gil Norton really liked the song, the songwriter “threw him a bone”. Norton recorded the band performing the song’s backing track when Black Francis was not available. The song featured a different arrangement from previous recordings of the track, and Black Francis added another verse to it.
Composition
“Here Comes Your Man” opens with the Hendrix chord, favored by Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago and was used on “Tame”. The acoustic guitar plays a D–G–A chord progression, while Santiago plays a guitar riff which is the result of him double-tracking a 12-string Rickenbacker and a Telecaster.
In an interview with NME, Francis commented on the meaning of the song:
It’s about winos and hobos traveling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake, peeing their pants. 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.”
Video and imagery
A music video to promote the single, co-directed by Neil Pollock and Jonathan Bekemeier, shows the band playing its 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 bassist Kim Deal open and shut their mouths in time with their prerecorded vocals, yet make no attempt to articulate their lips in sync 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. Francis stated that “Water on the brain” was the theme of the clip.
