How would you describe your creative philosophy?
I probably have a couple of dozen dad-isms or whatever that I tend to repeat. If I collected them into a little booklet, we could call it the Little Black Book or whatever, the Black Francis Book of Thoughts. But I can’t say that it boils down to a single cliché kind of statement. Although I did just think of one very cliched statement, which might help a little bit here. How do you put it? There’s more than one way to skin a cat. I suppose that a lot of creative roads to me are served well by that statement—that there’s more than one way to do this.
Do you write songs differently today than you did when you were starting out?
No, not really. I’m sure there are lots of exceptions to this, but one of the methods that I might employ is a kind of reliance on the moment. It’s just a little moment, like the way that you hit a chord even. It can be as small as that. But it’s usually a couple of chords or it’s a word over a particular part of a chord progression or something. It’s the little way that you strum a riff. There’s some little thing that you like and maybe you even quickly develop a more fully fleshed out arrangement around that little nugget of an idea. It might appear very quickly just because you’re so excited about the little thing that you want it to live. So, you create a little universe for it to coexist with all of its friends to help it along and make it into a song.
Do songs usually come together quickly for you?
Not always. Sometimes those extra bits that you come up with to flesh it all out with end up not working. And it’s still like, “Oh, but I still have the little nugget. I better keep working at this.” Here’s a method that I might employ, and I don’t know if I recommend it, but I do think there might be some validity in it: I don’t write anything down or record it or anything, which is terrible. And then sometimes it’s late at night and I’m doing the little strum or that little nugget of an idea that I came up with, and I think, “Well, I better add a couple of other ideas to it and see what happens.” And then suddenly one of those little ideas somehow supersedes all of them. And you’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” One rabbit hole leads to another one.
Why don’t you record those ideas on your phone?
Sometimes it’s late and you think, “I don’t want to turn on my phone and do a voice memo and all that. I mean, I have to hit two or three buttons to do that. I just want to fall asleep here on the couch. And I’m never going to forget this. This is like “Aqualung” or something, it’s just really memorable.”
Sure enough, next morning, it’s gone. I forgot it. I’m so stupid. Why did I do that? Keith Richards has his tape recorder at his bedside, and he gets everything down. I refuse to do that. And what I tell myself is, if it’s worth remembering, it’ll come back to me. And I have to say, eight times out of 10, they do come back. Usually about a week later, unexpectedly. I’ll be playing and there it is, the thing that I thought was lost.
Another musician told me that as well: If the idea is worth remembering, it’ll come back. But it seems like a risky way to do things.
Yeah, but I do a lot of lazy things like that, as opposed to really doing it the prescribed way. Writing songs is fun, and, as I said, there’s just so many ways to do it that I’m not intimidated about losing ideas. But do I feel bad when I make people go into the studio and I don’t have shit for ideas, and it doesn’t work out. You end up with these long days in the studio with a half-baked idea and nothing really good happens. It’s like, “Oh, man—maybe I should have had my big number ready to go.” And sometimes I do. But sometimes I don’t. I just enjoy the process so much that I don’t even need a song, really. I mean, you can make up a song pretty fast, you know what I mean? It may not be a good song, but something weird will happen and you might get a good idea out of it. Before you know it, you’re writing a fucking opera.
Do you approach lyrics the same way?
I don’t fool around with doing lyrics spontaneously too much. I don’t rely on that anymore because I did that a lot when I was younger and then in hindsight, it’s always like, “That could’ve been better.” So, I don’t trust myself in that area.
In the past, you’ve said that making mistakes is important in songwriting. Why do you feel that way?
In a sense, that’s a little bit of what I’ve been talking about already. You have to have the ear for happy accidents, listening for things that you were not trying to do, that you weren’t planning on doing, it was wrong, but if you have a good ear for it, you’ll go, “Oh!” Other people will have it too, to varying degrees. A record producer might hear something and go, “That thing that just happened there, that was magical.”
The more you do that, the better you get at finding those moments. You’re pushing the boulder up the hill trying to figure out how to make the thing into a good song, and it’s the thing you stumble upon, maybe, that makes it. If you were to do a background check on the top 50 rock n’ roll songs of all time and how they came together, I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of them fell into place because of accidental occurrences, things that were unplanned. Those things happened and people went, “Ooh, isn’t this charming?” That’s my guess. You’d be a fool not to seek those moments. And then maybe you end up with a new thing that you’ve never done before. I guess that’s a long way of saying that it’s good not to get too caught up in a lot of rules.
At the end of the day, I like to quote my old tour manager, Chas Banks. When I was a young guy, he was kind of our fearless leader when we were on the road. Whenever I would be having some sort of dilemma with the music business world, he’d be like, “Charles, the artist is always right.” So, I learned that the artist is always right—even though sometimes you’re not. You might be full of shit, but when it’s all said and done, you made the decision. At least you can own it, like, “Yeah, it wasn’t my best moment, but nobody told me what to do.”
What do you see as the pros and cons of collaboration versus the total control of writing a song by yourself?
I like collaborating. I find it to be kind of difficult and challenging, but I do it from time to time, even just to learn a little bit. Everybody does it differently, but whether you’re writing the music or even if you’re just reacting to it and playing along to somebody’s music as a quote-unquote “side person” or whatever, you’re bringing extra life to the track. You’re responding to it, going, “Hey, how about with this on top of it?”
It’s satisfying to play with people who are good, but it doesn’t matter how good you are. Sometimes I really enjoy the parameters of not everybody in the room is an amazing musician if you’re all there for the same reason and you understand what the final goal is. And the final goal is that we’ve got to come up with something cool. That’s the most important thing.
And you should at least be frenemies with the people that you work with. You don’t want to be hanging out with people you despise. That’s no fun. If you like the people you’re with and you all understand the goal, that’s all that matters. The prowess part, I don’t know that I believe in that. I believe it in the sense that it’s a beautiful thing that can be applied in a lot of amazing ways, but it’s not required. I hate to get all goofy and say it’s just about having fun, but on some level, it kind of is. Even if your subject matter is somber, or you’re playing so-called somber music.
I’ve always considered you one of the masters of the very short, very effective song. Some of the early Pixies tunes are less than two minutes long but there’s a whole world contained in each one. And keeping it short and sweet promotes the instant repeat factor: I wanna hear it again, right away. Was that done on purpose?
Sure, sure. Short Beatles songs always kept me coming back: Play it again because I didn’t get quite enough of that good feeling I got. Buddy Holly was another one. [Early Pixies producer] Gil Norton tried really hard to get us to expand our arrangements, but I took him to the record store and I was like, “Look at this Buddy Holly record here.” The songs are like 1:29, 1:15—super short. And he was like, “All right, fine.” He didn’t fight me on it anymore.
It allowed us to employ minimalism the way you can hear it on the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” or something like that. There’s kind of an art concept going on there, whether it’s conscious or they’re just representing culturally what’s going on. But it’s accepting minimalism. It’s okay if it’s just three words said over and over again and it’s real simple. And I feel validated all these years later because I watched Randy Newman play some Austin City Limits thing one night, and he did all the big songs from his repertoire—and they’re all like that: Verse/chorus/verse/chorus, done. They’re really compact arrangements. But lately I’ve been feeling like I could add more because of an interview I read with the guitar player from Toto … what’s his name?
Steve Lukather?
Yeah, that’s him. I kind of hung out with him at breakfast at a hotel in Luxembourg when we were both going through the same shitty divorce shit. Somehow, my phone knew that and has thrown me every interview and article about him for the last 30 years. So, finally I read one to see what he was all about. He played on Thriller, and he was talking about writing hit songs with Michael Jackson. He basically went through this huge checklist you need to write a hit song, like, “Well, you got to have your intro and the big chorus and the big middle eight and …” It was like a grocery list, like six or eight things. And I thought, “Well, the guy’s got a hell of a lot more hits than I do. Maybe he’s onto something.” So lately I’ve been thinking I can add just one more part to each song because of that fucking interview. Like if I put one more happy little lick right here that we’re going to come back to, I’ll be more in Toto territory.
You don’t use your real name on your records. It’s Black Francis with the Pixies and Frank Black on your solo records, but never Charles Thompson. Why?
In my earliest examples of rock n’ roll, it seemed like a lot of people had stage names. If you get into history, then really what you’re talking about is most of the early rock n’ roll and blues people, people that were Black, they wanted to get rid of the white slave owner names they had. So, they came up with a whole new identity. I wouldn’t have known that as a younger man, but I certainly picked up on the whiff of showbiz and went, “Oh yeah, these guys gave themselves a new identity.” That seemed kind of fun to me. It seems like a club that doesn’t require any particular membership card—the society of bohemian artists or whatever, where you can christen yourself with a new name and identity. For sure I’m going to do that because “Charles Thompson” on the marquee, I mean… I don’t know. I don’t mind my name, but it doesn’t have the same ring as “Black Francis.” And people respond to that name in a nice way, I think.
It’s part of creating the world you want to inhabit, isn’t it?
I don’t know. One sort of hopes it’s like, well, if I feel good about my hair or lack of it, then maybe that will add to my performance somehow or some other aspect of the way that I look. And in theory, it seems like maybe that’s true. But then again, maybe it’s not. But if it gives you a little bit of confidence, that’s good. I don’t want to make too much of it because from my point of view, it really was just having a little fun. I never found any of it to be serious. But I seriously like it.
I keep coming back to the Beatles, but they’re a great reference. When you really look at the different type of songs that they did, including all the B-sides and everything, it’s really kind of wacky. It’s not that serious. It’s a little bit flippant. But whatever they do, it’s pretty entertaining. They don’t ever lose me. Some people, I might love them, but I’ll come on to some album that I don’t like of theirs, that I don’t get yet or whatever. And then I’m lost, man. They totally lost me. But the Beatles not taking themselves too seriously, that’s kind of important because I think the best artists are people that aren’t afraid to reveal their personality, and to let that personality be a filter for whatever kind of music they’re doing. If you’re getting a big dose of that personality, the audience likes that. I think that’s true with a lot of Beatles music, and that’s why I cite them for so many examples of why I do what I do.
You’ve talked about the importance of making money on tour. When the Pixies got back together, you were packing venues, which you said made it hard to justify a solo tour at that time. At the end of the day, the need to express yourself doesn’t override the need to put food on the table. Have you always felt that way?
When we were younger, I probably was a little more cavalier about making decisions, but we’re pretty New England—the band and our DNA. We’re like, “What time’s the show? Okay, let’s get there on time. How long are we supposed to play for? Okay, that’s what we’ll do.” We’re not out to break any rules or anything. We just want to play. And we want to get paid whatever we’re supposed to get paid. So, I think we’ve always been kind of aware of that and had the good work ethic to go with it. But then you start having kids and stuff. And there’s a whole bunch of little Pixie kids now. So, yeah, I’m not going to go do some other thing that’s going to be art for art’s sake. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, you know? It’s a cliché, but it’s as simple as that. I’ve got bills to pay. You work because you need to, because you have to, and also because you have the work—which is nice.
Don’t turn down work. As a fellow New Englander, I can totally relate.
A lot of people don’t understand that. Some people think you should retire and not do the thing you used to do when you were younger for whatever reason. But what happens is, you pay a lot of dues when you’re younger, and maybe you create something. Maybe you create a catalog of records or you brand a band or whatever, and that’s your thing. Maybe you move away from it or maybe it falls out of favor or whatever, but maybe it comes back for whatever reason and suddenly you are the expert of that thing. You’re the best representative. And there’s a bunch of people now willing to pay you even more money than they did back in the day to go see you do that. And you’ve earned your right to be there.
When people see an artist doing some gig for a huge amount of money, they get annoyed for some reason. First of all, if they’re making that much money, they’ve got so many fucking people working for them, good luck splitting up that piece of pie because it’s a nightmare. But then how many gigs did they do before that gig? How many gigs did they make no money at compared to gigs that make money? They’re earned their right, even if they have one stupid song and they’re playing at the Ostrich Festival or whatever, you know what I mean? If you’ve got your song and they’ve got some shindig going on in the desert tonight and they’re gonna pay you 5,000 bucks for you to roll in and play your song, it’s like, “Rock on, man.” That’s a lot of positive vibes going out into the world.
That’s why I’m not intimidated by the discussion of “Well, is this too much money? Are the fans getting ripped off?” It all works out because the market decides. The fans, the patrons, can decide, “Nah, we’re not paying for that.” So, you have to be fair but also take into consideration your hard work for finally getting there to that moment.
Black Francis Recommends:
Hak Baker – “This is a London-based artist who’s got a couple records out, and I think he’s great. He’s super interesting, a little bit reggae, a bit folk, a bit punk.’
“I discovered Hak Baker through a collaboration he did with another London guy I love, Baxter Dury, who is the son of Ian Dury from the Blockheads. I’m a big fan of Baxter, and he’s probably got 10 or 11 albums out.”
“I’m obsessed with these folk singers from Northern India, I forget what they’re called, but they do these stories and wear heavy makeup and the microphones are hanging from clotheslines. Everyone looks kind of leathery and hard and they just stay up singing all night. I love it.”
“I’ve been reading Robbie Robertson’s book about The Last Waltz. It’s called Insomnia. It’s pretty interesting so far.”
“This Nick Tosches book, King of the Jews. It’s about Arnold Rothstein, the gangster who fixed the 1919 World Series.”
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J Bennett.