Frank Black
Frank Black
Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IVis an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as the frontman of the influential alternative rock band Pixies, with whom he performs under the stage name Black Francis. Following the band's breakup in 1993, he embarked on a solo career under the name Frank Black. After releasing two albums with record label 4AD and one with American Recordings, he left the label and formed a new band, Frank Black and the Catholics. He re-adopted...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth6 April 1965
CountryUnited States of America
I drive a lot. Just for pleasure. Sometimes I'll get in the Cadillac and drive around the city or the country, kind of trying to get lost basically. Y'know, just see where roads lead.
People go back to the stuff that doesn't cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don't have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library.
If you're going to exude naivete, you can't really... walk out there like it's a Sting show. You can't be that well put together and then have this kind of innocent bravado.
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.
The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.
For some artists the live performance is the chicken before the egg of writing or recording of repertoire. For other artists the writing or recording of repertoire is the chicken before the egg of live performance.
I'm not saying that people have to listen to rock music. It's a great, cool thing and it can really be liberating for a lot of people but, hey, so can Charles Dickens so I'm not going to judge.
It's sour grapes, I admit, I want to be more famous so people are examining my work couplet by couplet, you know what I mean? That's the level where I want to go.
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.
I certainly have gotten caught up in the music business at various times in my life, mostly because you want to get along with whatever record company you're dealing with. I don't want to be flaky. I don't want to be some temperamental, hard-to-work-with musician.
They're a different generation, those kids; kids that are under the age of twelve. They're not that impressed by rock music, you know what I mean? They're like, it's cool and everything, but whatever. They're just as impressed by YouTube.
You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
The dumber half of the audience - whether they're male or female, and a lot of them are male - for some reason responds very quickly to the feminine voice. How can I put it? They kind of instantly react to the female voice in a positive way quicker than they would the male voice.
But the truth is that critics are by definition critical. That's their job.