Doolittle (album) - Lyrics

Lyrics

The lyrical themes explored on Doolittle range from the surrealism of "Debaser", to the environmental catastrophe of "Monkey Gone to Heaven". The women and whores of "Mr. Grieves", "Tame", and "Hey" share space with the Biblical analogies of "Dead" and "Gouge Away". Black Francis often claimed that Doolittle's lyrics were words which just "fit together nicely", and that "the point is to experience it, to enjoy it, to be entertained by it." Francis wrote all the material for the album with the exception of "Silver", which he co-wrote with Kim Deal.

The album's opening track "Debaser" references surrealism, a theme that runs throughout the album. "Debaser" alludes to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, and the lyric "slicing up eyeballs" refers to an early scene in the film. Surrealism heavily influenced Francis in his college years and throughout his career with the Pixies. In 1989, Francis expressed his interest in surrealism and its influence on his songwriting method to the New York Times by stating "I got into avant-garde movies and Surrealism as an escape from reality. To me, Surrealism is totally artificial. I recently read an interview with the director David Lynch who said he had ideas and images but that he didn't know exactly what they meant. That's how I write."

Another of the album's main themes is environmental catastrophe. "Monkey Gone to Heaven" deals with man's destruction of the ocean and "confusion of man's place in the universe". As Francis put it: "On one hand, it's this big organic toilet. Things get flushed and repurified or decomposed and it's this big, dark, mysterious place. It's also a very mythological place where there are octopus's gardens, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and mermaids." "Monkey Gone to Heaven" is concerned with man's relationship to the divine, a theme shared with "Mr. Grieves".

Two songs on Doolittle are fashioned after Biblical stories: the story of David and Bathsheba in "Dead", and Samson and Delilah in "Gouge Away". Francis' fascination with Biblical themes can be traced back to his teenage years; when he was twelve, he and his parents joined an evangelical church linked to the Assemblies of God. This background was to be an influence in Doolittle, where he referred to the Devil being "six" and God being "seven" in "Monkey Gone to Heaven".

Other songs explored eccentric subjects, such as in "Wave of Mutilation", which Francis described as being about "Japanese businessmen doing murder-suicides with their families because they'd failed in business, and they're driving off a pier into the ocean." The song's opening phrase, "Cease to resist", is a reference to The Beach Boys' 1968 song "Never Learn Not to Love", their rewritten version of Charles Manson's composition "Cease to Exist."

"Wave of Mutilation"'s sea and underwater themes, which also feature in "Mr. Grieves" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven", are explorations of one arena for man's death and destruction. Ben Sisario points out that the album begins ("Debaser") and ends ("Gouge Away") with songs about violence being done to eyes. "Crackity Jones" covers another offbeat subject; Francis' roommate in his student exchange trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, who he described as a "weird psycho gay roommate."

Doolittle also references more ostensibly conventional subjects. "La La Love You", sung by the band's drummer David Lovering, is a love song—though with its "first base, second base, third base, home run" break, it's been referred to as "a dig at the very idea of a love song". Francis gave it to Lovering as a song to sing, "like a Ringo thing"; Lovering at first refused to sing, but Norton said that soon he was unable to "get him away from the microphone." As well as lead vocals on "La La Love You", Lovering played bass guitar on "Silver", with Deal playing slide guitar; this arrangement did not occur again.