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
thumb|upright=1.4|Pixies' classic line-up during a 2009 reunion. L-R: Santiago, Francis, Lovering, Deal
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 (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.
Recording and production
Recording sessions for Doolittle began on October 31, 1988, in Boston at Downtown Recorders, which was then a 24-track studio. 4AD gave Pixies a budget of $40,000 (approximately $ today), excluding producer fees. This was a relatively modest sum for a large, late-1980s independent record label but four times the amount spent on their debut Surfer Rosa. Principal recording was completed on November 23, 1988, followed by two weeks of mixing sessions which began on November 28 at Carriage House Studios, a residential studio in Stamford, Connecticut. Norton worked with two assistant recording engineers and two second assistants. He hired Steven Haigler as mixing engineer, with whom he had earlier worked at Fort Apache Studios.
Francis took a mixture of newly written and older tracks to the recording sessions. Many of the newer tracks were underdeveloped and, according to Norton, were minute or minute-and-a-half "ditties" consisting of short bursts of "verse, chorus, verse, beat-beat-beat-bang ... finished".
Two of the album's songs are based on Old Testament stories of sex and death: the story of David and Bathsheba in "Dead", and the story of Samson and Delilah in "Gouge Away". Francis's fascination with Biblical themes began in his teenage years; when he was twelve, he and his parents joined the Pentecostal church.
Side one
Doolittle opens with "Debaser", which is described as a "noisy surf-punk" song and widely considered important in Pixies' crossover to the mainstream. It begins with Deal's bass guitar pattern, which breaks into the first chorus when joined by Santiago's guitar riff and Black's shouted vocal. The track, which is a live favorite, contains an extended coda in which, according to the music critic Rob Hughes, the bassline is overlain with Santiago's "frenzied guitar riffage ... at full tilt as the song hurtles to its climax". According to the music writer Mark Beaumont, "Tame" and "Gouge Away" were among the Pixies' tracks Kurt Cobain had in mind when writing "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which Cobain said was his attempt at "writing a Pixies song". The same influence can be heard in the Nirvana tracks "In Bloom" and "Heart-Shaped Box". The track ends with Francis and Deal repeatedly grunting, a sound that suggests two people having sex.
The lyrics of "Wave of Mutilation" are based on contemporaneous newspaper reports of Japanese men committing murder–suicide after unsuccessful business ventures in a scene Francis describes as these men being forced to drive "off a pier into the ocean". Imagery of drowning and oceans also appears in "Mr. Grieves" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven".
"Here Comes Your Man" was written when Francis was a teenager; along with "Monkey Gone to Heaven", Rolling Stone critic Chris Mundy described the song as a melodic and "outright pop song". It was first recorded for the Purple tapes sessions, a version the music writer Phil Udell described as rough "around the edges". Norton arranged the album version. The lyrics take the idea of destruction further, suggesting the human race is doomed to extinction. The following track "Crackity Jones" is sung partly in Spanish, and incorporates G and A triads over a C pedal. Francis's rhythm guitar starts with an eighth-note downstroke that is reminiscent of early 1980s second-wave punk rock. The lyrics of "Crackity Jones" were inspired by Francis's one-month stay in Puerto Rico as a student, when he shared a "seedy" high-rise apartment with a "weirdo, psycho, gay roommate". Musically the track is the fastest-played and most-aggressive track on the album.
The whimsical track "La La Love You" is sung by the band's drummer David Lovering in a baritone voice that was intended as a satire of the 1950s crooning style. Francis asked Lovering to sing it in a voice resembling Ringo Starr's 1960s tongue-in-cheek vocals.
The lyrics of the closing song "Gouge Away" are based on the Old Testament story of Samson's betrayal by Delilah. Although the music follows the quiet/loud formula, the build-up to the loud part is more gradual and nuanced than in tracks such as "Debaser" and "Tame". "Gouge Away" is built on Deal's three-note bass part (G/B/E) and a tight Lovering drum pattern, which Sisario has described as a "kind of gothic dance groove". Deal, who also contributed backing vocals, is accompanied in the bridge by Santiago playing B and C notes before ending on G as the chorus begins. The "loud part" occurs in the verses, when both Santiago and Francis follow the bass progression using heavily distorted guitar chords.
Artwork and title
thumb|"As Loud as Hell" by [[Simon Larbalestier, from the Doolittle booklet. The image alludes to lyrics in "I Bleed".|alt= A black-and-white photograph of a bell attached to a machine by a hose.]]
Photographer Simon Larbalestier and graphic artist Vaughan Oliver, who had worked on the Pixies' previous albums Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa, designed the artwork of Doolittle. According to Larbalestier, Doolittle was the first album for which he and Oliver had access to lyrics, which "made a fundamental difference". Oliver and Francis wanted macabre, surreal images with which to illustrate the album. The images are placed in pairs, with each image juxtaposing two principle elements such as a monkey and a halo for "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (as well as the numbers 5, 6 and 7 in reference to the lyrics "if man is five/then the devil is six/and if the devil is six/then God is seven"); a pelvic bone and a stiletto for "Tame"; and a spoon containing hair laid across a woman's torso for "Gouge Away".
Around the time Oliver decided on the cover art, Francis discarded the album's working title Whore, worrying "people were going to think I was some kind of anti-Catholic or that I'd been raised Catholic and trying to get into this Catholic naughty-boy stuff ... A monkey with a halo, calling it Whore, that would bring all kinds of shit that wouldn't be true. So I said I'd change the title."
Release
The American label Elektra Records began to take interest in Pixies around October 1988 and signed the band following a bidding war. The label then negotiated with Pixies' British label 4AD, which held the band's worldwide distribution rights. Elektra released a promotional live album containing the album tracks "Debaser" and "Gouge Away" along with earlier material.
| rev2 = Los Angeles Times
| rev2score =
| rev3 = NME
| rev3score = 10/10
| rev4 = Q
| rev4score =
| rev5 = Record Mirror
| rev5score = 4/5
| rev6 = Rolling Stone
| rev6score =
| rev7 = Sounds
| rev7score =
| rev8 = The Village Voice
| rev8score = B+
Following the critically acclaimed album Surfer Rosa, Doolittle was highly anticipated; it received near-universal positive reviews, especially from the UK and European music press.
{|class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+Accolades for Doolittle
! scope="col" | Publication
! scope="col" | Country
! scope="col" | Accolade
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Rank
|-
! scope="row" | Hot Press
| Ireland
| Top 100 Albums
| 2006
| 34
|-
! scope="row" rowspan=2 | NME
|rowspan=2| UK
| 100 Best Albums
| 2013
| 8
|-
! scope="row" | Pitchfork
| US
| Top 100 Albums of the 1980s
| 2002
| 4
|-
! scope="row" rowspan=3| Rolling Stone
|rowspan=3| US
|rowspan=3| The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
| 2003
| 226
|-
| 2012
| 227
|-
| 2020
| 141
|-
! scope="row" | Spin
| US
| 100 Greatest Albums, 1985–2005
| 2005
| 36
|-
! scope="row" |Slant Magazine
| US
| Best Albums of the 1980s
| 2012
| 34
|}
Legacy
Doolittle is widely regarded as one of the key alternative rock albums of the 1980s. A 2002 Rolling Stone review gave it the maximum score of five stars, writing it laid the "groundwork for Nineties rock". In a 2017 survey, Pitchfork ranked it as the fourth-best album of the 1980s; a 2003 poll of NME writers ranked Doolittle as the second-greatest album of all time; and Rolling Stone placed it at number 141 on its 2020 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
Doolittle established Pixies' loud/quiet dynamic, which became highly influential on alternative rock. The English musician PJ Harvey said she was "in awe" of "I Bleed" and "Tame", and described Francis's writing as "amazing". British band Slowdive have also noted Doolittle as a significant influence on their sound.
Ten years after Pixies' breakup, Doolittle continued to sell between 500 and 1,000 copies a week, and following their 2004 reunion tour, sales reached 1,200 copies per week. At the end of 2005, best estimates put total US sales at between 800,000 and 1,000,000 copies. As of 2015, sales in the United States have exceeded 834,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Pixies released several singles from Doolittle after their initial breakup. In 1997, "Debaser" was released to promote the compilation Death to the Pixies. In June 1989, 4AD released "Here Comes Your Man" as the album's second single. It reached number three on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart and number 54 in the UK Singles Chart. On May 6, 2019, "Here Comes Your Man" was certified gold in Canada, and "Hey" was certified gold in Canada on September 20, 2021.
In 2020, Jennifer Makowsky of PopMatters said: "Doolittle remains a solid disc in the spine of ’80s alternative rock."
Track listing
All tracks were written by Black Francis, except "Silver", written by Black Francis and Kim Deal.
Reissues
To mark the 25th anniversary of Doolittle, 4AD released Doolittle 25, which includes unreleased B-sides, demos, and two full Peel sessions Pixies recorded for the BBC. On December 9, 2016, a Pure Audio Blu-Ray version of the album, containing a 5.1 surround sound mix by Kevin Vanbergen and a high-definition stereo mix by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, was released. In 2022, Doolittle was formatted for Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos and released on Apple Music.
Personnel
Credits adapted from the liner notes of Doolittle.
Pixies
- Black Francis – vocals, rhythm guitar, acoustic guitar
- Kim Deal – bass guitar, vocals, acoustic slide guitar ("Silver"), plucked piano strings ("Monkey Gone to Heaven")
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| 27
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