On September 30th, Pixies will return with Head Carrier, their first full-length effort since 1991’sTrompe Le Monde and the follow-up to 2014’s triple-EP collection Indie Cindy. It’ll also be their first recorded material to feature Paz Lenchantin on bass now that she’s been upgraded from touring member to full-time participant in the band. What’s more, Lenchantin will sing lead vocals on one track, and as Frank Black revealed in a new interview with BBC 6 Music, it’s not just any tune.
In the short discussion, Black revealed how Lenchantin accidentally came up with a new song after misunderstanding the bass part she was meant to write for a different track. Black agreed to turn it into an album track only if Lenchantin sang on it, which she agreed to do only if he wrote the lyrics, which he agreed to do only if she gave him the topic. “She said, ‘Okay, you have to write about Kim Deal… Just like a letter, a little thank-you letter, that kind of thing.”
That’s right: The song, apparently titled “All I Think About Now”, is Pixies’ thank-you letter to founding bassist Kim Deal. Deal departed the band in 2013, and was replaced initially with Kim Shattuck before Lenchantin stepped into the bassist role. Black went on to say the lyrics are “open-ended” enough that “the song is not really intended for the listener to be thinking about the characters in our band’s history,” but now that we know the truth, it’ll be hard to hear it any other way.
Elsewhere in the discussion Black said Head Carrier will lean more towards the “early-Pixies slosh” of Doolittle than any of the Boston band’s later material, and talked about working with producer Tom Dalgety. Check out the full interview below.
