Doolittle (1989)

Doolittle is the second studio album by the American alternative rock band Pixies, released on April 17, 1989, on 4AD. The album was an instant critical success and became the band's breakthrough album. Doolittle was especially well received in Europe, where the British music weeklies Melody Maker and Sounds named it their album of the year. Pixies' main songwriter and lead vocalist Black Francis wrote the idiosyncratic lyrics, which allude to surrealist imagery, biblical violence, and descriptions of torture and death.

The album is praised for its "quiet/loud" dynamic, which was achieved through subdued verses that are founded on Kim Deal's bass patterns and David Lovering's drums. The peaks in tone and volume were achieved through the addition of distorted guitars by Francis and Joey Santiago. This technique influenced the development of early-1990s grunge music; Kurt Cobain said Doolittle was one of his favorite records and that its songs heavily influenced Nirvana's song "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

Upon its release, Doolittle reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart. It has sold consistently since its release, and numerous music publications have placed it among the top albums of the 1980s. Both singles from the album, "Here Comes Your Man" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven", reached the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks, while many of the album's tracks, including "Debaser" and "Hey", remain favorites of critics and fans.

Background

Pixies' 1988 album Surfer Rosa was better received in the United Kingdom than in the United States. In support of its release, the band toured Europe with fellow Bostonian band Throwing Muses, where according to a critic for the UK weekly music magazine Melody Maker, they were "welcomed like gods, which I felt underestimated them somewhat". Multiple cover photographs of Pixies were published in Melody Maker as the album peaked at number one on New Musical Express's (NME) Indie Chart.

Versions of songs that would later appear on Doolittle—including "Dead", "Hey", "Tame", and "There Goes My Gun"—were recorded in the second half of 1988 during several sessions for the BBC Radio One presenter John Peel's radio show, and "Hey" appeared on a free Extended Play (EP) that circulated with a 1988 edition of Sounds. The first demos for the album were recorded in 1988 in one week at the recording studio Eden Sound in Boston, Massachusetts, during a break from the band's touring schedule. The group's frontman and main songwriter Black Francis gave the upcoming album the provisional title Whore, which he later said was meant "in the more traditional ... operatic ... biblical sense ... as in the great whore of Babylon".

After completing the demo tape, the band's manager Ken Goes suggested two producers: Liverpudlian Gil Norton and American Ed Stasium. The band had worked with Norton on the single version of "Gigantic" in May 1988, and Francis had no preference of producer. Ivo Watts-Russell, head of the band's label 4AD, chose Norton to produce their next album. Norton arrived in Boston in mid–October 1988, when he and Francis met to review the demo recordings. They spent two days analyzing the songs' structures and arrangements, and two weeks in pre-production as Norton familiarized himself with Pixies' sound.