There’s this poignant bit in Gigantic: The Story of Frank Black & the Pixies that details how the Pixies broke up in the early ’90s, effectively ending the band’s stint with Kim Deal, bass player and lead singer of The Breeders, as a member. Pixies singer Black Francis (also known as Frank Black, Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV and God knows what else) tells Deal that the Pixies are going on a sabbatical. Deal asks how long the break from action will last and Francis replies, “I believe a sabbatical is one year,” and then walks away, never to speak to her again.
The book then furnishes an interview with Deal where she’s venting frustration something along the lines of how big of an a**hole Francis was for offering that snide, sarcastic reply to her question, and then just leaving things to lie, like that. It’s interesting to note, then, that Deal would go on to lead The Breeders to astronomic MTV and radio success with “Cannonball”; while brandishing a copious amount of catchy songs to surround it as well, while Francis would essentially remain a nobody, at least for a while, to anyone outside of the Pixies’ initial cult following of the ’80s. It took an inclusion of Doolittle (1989) on a Rolling Stone top 100 albums readers’ poll in 2002 to propel Francis and the late-’80s indie poppers into any kind of ubiquitous popularity among anybody under 35.
Black Letter Days, without question, is Black Francis’ gut check, an album that also happened to come out in 2002. It encompasses a mature, emotionally robust coming of age in his songwriting, the kind of thing that’s easily relatable to a real-life heartbreak, such as the divorce Francis had undergone just recently.
In fact, Show Me Your Tears is essentially billed as the Catholics’ “divorce album,” sort of like Shellac’s 1000 Hurts, a similarly malady-titled project. Listening to half of the first song on Show Me Your Tears imbues a feeling of extreme unrest and overwhelming angst, as if it’s legitimately possible that Francis is going to do something awful to either himself or his former lover.
Perhaps cathartically, Black Letter Days, Frank Black and the Catholics co-penultimate album (released on the same day as the meandering, pointless Devil’s Workshop), opens with a little bit of eccentricity in subject matter. “The Black Rider” comes in as a cover of the Tom Waits tune [1] and probably earmarks a healthy excursion into fantasy and drama for Francis. The song owns to the mantra of “Come on along with the black rider / We’ll have a gay ol’ time”, this last line repeated ad absurdam toward the end of the song like a tickling mockery of his own current divorced situation in life, the “gay” perhaps, not surely, but perhaps, poking fun at his present lack of a female companion.
“California Bound” follows, the most heavily streamed tune on Black Letter Days, with pert, optimistic pop focus, and the results are catchy and becoming. By and large, Black Letter Days is full of heartbreak, but it’s the way Francis juxtaposes these mourning dirges with a sense of exploration, discovery and renewal, both in the lyrics and also in the music itself, that catapults Black Letter Days into classic status and locks it in as easily the best thing Francis ever did outside of the Pixies, and in any band since maybe Bossanova (1990).
All over the album, gorgeous, delicate steel guitar runs infuse the mix with a galvinizing, lonesome twang, coming to piercing fruition on the mid-album showstopper “Valentine and Garuda.” The song is a rich, multifaceted masterpiece which takes the complex shape of acknowledging the unflagging heartbreak (“I had a love / And she called me ‘Valentine’”); (“Oh pity me Garuda”) and also fomenting a distinct and hard-won resolution. This resolution comes in the form of the poetic and memorable mission statement of life that is “My eyes are small and dark / My pigeon heart / Is pumping blood so fast / I fly above the earth / For what it’s worth / I search for love lost in the past”. So much seems woven implicitly into these lines, which is what I like about them: it’s apparent from the rhetoric here and Francis has found true, vivid meaning and purpose in his everyday life, and the fact of it being interesting is obviated by his flying heart rate. It’s like an epiphany he has about his own identity manifest beautifully in the physiological toward commanding the emotional and sociological.
Black Letter Days is a pop album and it works for that very reason. Let’s be crystal clear on this. The Pixies, for that matter, were more or less always a pretty poppy entity, save for a few caustic fringe earmarks like a maniacal set of vocals here and there or the twisted rodeo-rocker “Vamos” that has to be heard to be understood. That is, at least in my opinion, the best song they ever did was “Here Comes Your Man,” which probably could have been an entry on Top of the Pops given better marketing and celebrity hawking on the part of the label.
In this same vein, Black Letter Days is packed to the tape with catchiness and concise songs that turn on a dime and will break your heart with their expedited roundness. The geographical is worshipped and exalted on “California Bound” and also on “End of Miles,” another ode to Francis’ present home of the West Coast [2]. Perhaps most importantly, it’s an album that features a title track that’s both good musically and also central to the album’s overall message, which simply regards the challenge of facing each ensuing day in these times keeping your head up. Toward the end of the song “Black Letter Days” Francis offers a fictitious account of meeting a stranger and asking “Excuse me sir / Do you have the time? / And can you tell me what’s the matter anyway?” It must be this conscious immersion within an overall human malaise that made Francis’ own personal problems in his mind seem smaller, and drove him to upgrade the tapestry of life into something comparatively broad and digestible, which, you might say, great artists intrinsically do.
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[1] Actually there seems to have been a running joke between Francis and the West Coast honky-tonk-barker Tom Waits of stealing each other’s material, as Tom Waits named one of his albums “Bone Machine” after the Pixies tune of the same name.
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[2] He’s originally a “Mass-hole,” as I think will be corroborated by the above detailed exchange with Deal.