Doolittle (album) - Background

Background

Following their highly regarded but commercially unsuccessful 1988 album Surfer Rosa, the band embarked on a European tour with fellow Bostonians Throwing Muses, before beginning a tour of North American states. During this time Black Francis, the group's frontman and principal songwriter, began to write new material for a future album, with songs such as "Dead", "Hey", "Tame", and "There Goes My Gun" emerging through the course of the year. Versions of the newly composed songs were recorded during several sessions for John Peel's radio show in 1988, while a live recording of "Hey" appeared on a free EP circulated with a 1988 edition of Sounds.

In mid-1988, the Pixies began to record demo sessions while on breaks from touring. The band headed to the Boston recording studio Eden Sound, which at the time comprised a small room in the basement of a hair salon. They recorded at the studio for a week, in circumstances similar to the previous year's the Purple Tape sessions. Francis gave the demo tape and upcoming album the provisional title of Whore, though he later claimed his natural father had originally suggested the name. Francis has clarified that he was thinking of the word "in the more traditional sense the operatic, biblical sense, as in the great whore of Babylon." After completing the demo tape, band manager Ken Goes suggested two producers for the album; Liverpudlian Gil Norton and American Ed Stasium. The band had previously worked with Norton while recording the single version of "Gigantic" in May 1988. Francis had no preference, although Ivo Watts-Russell, head of the band's label 4AD, wanted Norton to produce the Pixies' next album. He was hired as producer, with Stasium not even approached for the position.

Norton arrived in Boston on October 31, 1988, and first visited Francis' apartment in to review the album's demos. The two talked about arrangements, and spent two days intensively analyzing the album's songs. Norton learned to gauge Francis’ reaction to changing arrangements, and later observed that the frontman "doesn't like to do anything twice." Norton spent a further two weeks in pre-production to familiarise himself with the Pixies' sound.