Tracks 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 from Doolittle (1989)

Tracks 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 from Bossanova (1990)

Track 30 from Doggerel (2022)

Pixies is one of those big canonical alt-rock bands that I was slow to get into during the years when I was obsessing over Sonic Youth or The Minutemen. For a while I was buying a lot of singles and EPs at The Sound Garden in Fells Point and thought maybe that was a good way to test drive new bands, but this principle didn't work out well when I bought the "Here Comes Your Man" single as a Pixies test drive when I was in middle school. The A-side is their most unrepresentative classic, and of the three b-sides, the only particularly good one is "Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)," a slower alternate version of their most played live track. I once saw the great Baltimore band Lake Trout cover the 'UK Surf' version, so maybe one of those guys picked up the same single at The Sound Garden. I think I would've gotten into the Pixies quicker if I'd just bought an album. 

But a few years later, in high school, a friend gave me a cassette of Come On Pilgrim, and that thing rocked my world. I was still slow to check out the other records and even Doolittle may never dethrone Pilgrim as my favorite (and I might like Frank Blank's Teenager of the Year and the Breeders' Last Splash as much as any Pixies full-length). It still kind of appalls me that "I've Been Tired" and "The Holday Song" aren't considered canonical top 10 Pixies songs. 

In my Bangles post I praised Chris O'Leary's 64 Quartets blog for giving me deeper appreciation of that band. And O'Leary's Pixies post is also a great read and delves into some of the structural quirks that make their songs work, like the 3-bars-over-4-bars tension in the "I've Been Tired" chorus, and the cultural context and interpersonal dynamics that made them such an effortlessly unique and beloved band. 

Ordinarily, if a non-single experienced an uptick in popularity after appearing in a movie, I'd absolutely include it in one of these playlists. But since "Where Is My Mind?" soundtracked the end of 1999's Fight Club, 7 years after the band's breakup, it's basically become the Pixies song, featured in countless other films and TV shows, with 3 times as many streams as "Here Comes Your Man" or any other song by the band. As far as I can tell, the song had no particular significance in the Pixies catalog before Fight Club -- it was never one of the 10 most played songs in the band's live repertoire in any given year in their original run, and they played it only 3 times in 1992 on their last run of tours before breaking up (it's become their 2nd-biggest live staple on the reunion tours). Great song, though. I don't begrudge its ascent to ubiquity, David Fincher or whoever picked that one out had a good ear. 

After singing lead on Surfer Rosa's single "Gigantic" and the Doolittle deep cut "Silver," Kim Deal didn't get much of a hand in the writing or vocals until the reunion single "Bam Thwok." Deal participated in the first 9 years of reunion tours, but bailed around the time they started releasing EPs and albums again. And it definitely feels like late period Pixies albums are greeted with about as much enthusiasm as late '90s Frank Black & The Catholics albums, which is to say not much at all. The music on the reunion albums isn't bad, but Indie Cindy may be one of the worst album titles ever. 

Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, Zwan, The Entrance Band) has been the Pixies' bassist for 3 of the 4 reunion albums. And Lenchantin's only lead vocal, "All I Think About Now," is sort of her thank you note to Kim Deal. And in a parallel with "Gigantic"'s status as the band's first single, "All I Think About Now" is by far the most streamed song from those 21st century Pixies albums. David Lovering also got a lead vocal moment in on the entertaining Doolittle track "La La Love You."