If Frank Black's solo work isn't as beloved as that of his former band, the Pixies, it might just be because there's so much of it. Pixies' output is easy to think of in terms of five convenient studio packages, but since the band's 1993 breakup, Black has released an unwieldy sprawl of 11 solo albums. (He's currently touring behind 2006's 27-song double album Fast Man Raider Man, much of which he recorded on a day off during one of Pixies' recent reunion tours.) For that album and 2005's Honeycomb, Black traveled to Nashville to record with a cast of veteran session players that included Steve Cropper, Spooner Oldham, and Al Kooper—which sounds like a recipe for an all-star genre exercise, but actually yielded some of Black's most distinctive songs. Black recently spoke with The A.V. Club about rock nostalgia, why he hates Subway and Cracker Barrel, and why that rumor about a Pixies reunion album kept changing.
The A.V. Club: You're touring with a four-piece rock band right now—without any of the horns or slide guitar of your last two albums. Are you trying to replicate those album's sounds in concert at all?
Frank Black: I wish I could, but I haven't checked my Billboard today, but I don't think I've made it into the top four yet, or even the top 100. Or even the top 500, probably. I'm not complaining. I just could not afford to tour with an entourage like that. No, we're just trying to find our own sound, whatever this band is. I think we're starting to do that.
AVC: What's it like?
FB: Kind of loud. Songs that are slow, we play them even slower. It's loud and muscular. We're not going to try and sound like a Nashville record that had 10 guys playing on it, including pedal steel and Hammond organ and everything else. So it didn't seem worth it to go there. I don't think the audiences that I'm playing to right now are expecting that. I'm still playing the same nightclubs to the same crowd. It's not like I have the alt-country crowd coming out to see us now.
AVC: You didn't expect any crossover interest from alt-country fans?
FB: I didn't know. Like I said, I have a sense of how many records I'm selling out there, so no. [Laughs.] I don't have a whole new audience. I've got a small, loyal audience, which is great. And I appreciate that. They're there for me every time.
AVC: How do you feel about people who show up to your solo shows expecting to hear Pixies songs?
FB: I was a fool once or twice in my life and went to a show thinking, "Hey, when's he going to play those songs?" [Laughs.] I think I went to a Van Morrison show, just ignorantly. Knowing less about him than I do now, feeling a small sense of, not disappointment, but why I did I think he was going to roll into "Brown Eyed Girl?" [Laughs.] Am I a fool? It's fucking Van Morrison. I mean, he's going to do exactly what the hell he wants. So I'm sure there are people who are like, "When is he going to play 'Monkey Gone To Heaven' or 'Here Comes Your Man'? I love that song."
AVC: Do you play those songs on solo dates?
FB: Depends on the situation. Right now we're not doing any.
AVC: Writers often use Pixies as a point of reference for your new albums, instead of discussing them in terms of your other solo work, which seems strange. How do you react to that?
FB: It's not weird, because Pixies are a big reference point, and writers assume they have a stupid audience that isn't going to understand the article unless there's some catchphrase they're going to recognize. And that's okay. It's something I'll probably never escape unless I have a hit record. Until I write my "Walk On The Wild Side," I'm not really going to escape "Here Comes Your Man" or "Monkey Gone To Heaven."
AVC: Do you consciously try to escape those songs in your solo work?
FB: I don't make records that way, where I'm trying to please the marketplace or anything. Not because I have anything against that, it's just never been a part of my aesthetic, even when I was with the Pixies. When you're starting out, you might have some fresh new ideas that no one's ever heard before. It can be an exciting time for everybody. But after you've been around for a while, it's kind of hard to get that back, no matter how hard you try. Some of it is because audiences don't really care anymore, or sometimes it's because your own perspective is off. You think you've made something really great, but there's a reason why it's not resonating the way some previous work did. But it's not that easy to just replicate. Some people think, "Oh, just go do that thing you used to do before." But it just doesn't work like that. It's a lot more mysterious or slippery. [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you think your songwriting has grown more personal over the years?
FB: No, but it seems more personal to an outsider, to a listener. My most cryptic, strange songs might be my most personal, but that isn't how people are going to receive them, because they don't know the code. To rephrase the question, I would say I decode a lot more.
AVC: Some of the musicians you've worked with say your song structures puzzled them at first. Do you like the idea that you were able to write songs that challenged them as musicians?
FB: I'm an untrained musician. Untrained musicians don't really have any music theory, they don't have a lot of rules. We break the rules, but it's mostly because we don't know what the rules are. It's easy for us to go to certain places, so I'm not surprised that a lot of people were amused by my songwriting style. That's just the difference between two different kinds of writers or players. The Pixies were composed entirely of people like that. Except for the drummer, David Lovering, but I think that's kind of what gives us our sound too. He doesn't have a lot of quirk in his drumming style, which is great, because there's already enough quirk going on. [Laughs.] So that made it lock in a lot better. If we had a quirky drummer, it might have been blurrier, a lot messier, even more difficult to digest.
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