Here's something you don't expect to stumble upon in a Pixies album: a folky little ditty with mossy banks, St. Brigid's bells, and a whiff of Shirley Collins. But that's precisely what "Primrose," the opening track of the band's ninth album,
The Night The Zombies Came, delivers. If it feels like a detour into pastoral serenity, blame (or thank) songwriter
Black Francis (aka Frank Black), the band's frontman, who told
The Sun he spent COVID listening to the late English folk guitarist Davey Graham.
Folk music has always been an ambient hum in Black Francis' his life. "When I was 9 or 10," he told The Sun, "I hung out with the Boston Folk Song Society. I learned about Woody Guthrie from them, but I never became a real folk musician. I didn't go deep, but it touched me."
Listening to Davey Graham during the pandemic led him to Shirley Collins, an English folk singer whose unvarnished delivery Francis found both spellbinding and oddly liberating.
"Shirley's delivery is so... non-emotive," he explained. "I hate to say neutral because that sounds like I'm calling her boring, but she relies on the story, not the inflection."
What struck Francis most about these old folk tunes is how relentlessly bleak they are. "Super f---ing dark," he marveled. "Scary stuff! It's all 'this happened, then this happened, and now we're all dead.'"
"Rock and roll is the opposite," he added. "It's more snarky but since hearing Shirley, I realized it's OK if I do a folky song."
Inspired by Collins, Francis gave himself permission to dive into folk territory with this song. The titular primroses grow near a stream in the Vermont woods where he spent time during COVID gathering firewood for his pit. "There's moss along the bank, like a bed," he recalled. "During the pandemic, I'd lie down there and hang my hand in the water."
Francis admitted, with a nod to folk tradition, that water and drowning creep into the song's lyrics. "I guess you could call it a death song," he shrugged. "Much thanks to Shirley Collins!"
The song's opening line, "Good morning Brigid, I can hear the bell," is a direct nod to St. Brigid's Church near Francis's home. "The bell rings every morning at eight," he said. "Sometimes I go to the service. It's very Catholic, very ritualistic."
The song's atmospheric blend of the sacred and the earthy seems to have seeped into the entire album, which has a loose zombie theme. The undead may feel like an odd bedfellow to Shirley Collins, mossy stream beds, and firewood, but Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago says it wasn't a conscious choice. "We were recording in the fall, when the leaves are dying in a spectacular way,"
he told NME. "Before they go, they're saying, 'Bye, bye,' going out in a blaze of glory. That affects you."
The Night The Zombies Came, recorded in just three weeks at Guilford Sound in Vermont, benefited from its eco-friendly studio's pristine acoustics. "The power is really, really clean over there - you can hear it," Santiago commented to Mojo magazine.
The band worked on the album with producer Tom Dalgety, a collaborator since their 2016 Head Carrier album. Dalgety, Santiago noted, isn't shy about calling the shots. "We're done with the honeymoon phase of tiptoeing around," he said. "Tom knows how to dish advice in a way that doesn't ruffle feathers."
