In April 2019, Okkervil River announced A Dream in the Dark, a series of twelve live albums, digitally recorded from thoughtout the band's history, to be released monthly to subscribers. The title refers to a line from "Unless It's Kicks". Like other Okkervil River albums, the accompanying artwork is the work of artist William Schaff, and references several other Okkervil River album covers. It was released electronically on 18 September 2020. The box set was released by ATO Records on October 30, 2020, composed of 24 tracks (on 4 discs).
For more details, visit their Facebook page.A Dream in the Dark: Two Decades of Okkervil River LiveĪ Dream in the Dark: Two Decades of Okkervil River Live is a live box set by American rock band Okkervil River. Pixies begin their European summer tour on July 7. People were always trying to make a big point out of all of these things, but I felt like: ‘C’mon. I guess people thought of it as weird or ballsy that we had these songs with bad Spanish in them. But I got a lot of credit for putting it into songs like Debaser. “I’d spent six months down in San Juan, Puerto Rico, so I had a lot of Spanish,” he explains. It’s a song that continues to inspire debate, not least for Francis’s brand of bastardised Spanish. It was finally issued as a seven-inch nearly a decade later, as a taster for the 1997 ‘best of’ Death To The Pixies. Kurt Cobain later acknowledged the debt he owed the Pixies.ĭebaser wasn’t released as a single from Doolittle – the band opted instead for Here Comes Your Man and Monkey Gone To Heaven – but it remains one of the most incendiary opening shots of any album before or since. Listen closely and you can hear Francis’s guitar underneath, chopping away at a rhythm that sounds like a speeded-up precursor to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. “That was the only part that stressed me out. “I remember having quite a tough time filling those bars at the end,” he recalls.
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Santiago’s frenzied riffage, at full tilt as the song hurtles to its climax, took some working out, but the result is extraordinary. We wanted the most exciting rock’n’roll arrangement.” You move things around and work on the transitions. It’s not just A-B-C, it can be A-C-B-B, whatever. And when you have three chunks of music like that, you don’t necessarily have to put them in a straight order. “There are three chunks of music in it,” Francis says. I don’t think it took that long to do at all.”įrancis and producer Gil Norton were intent on making the structure of the song as unpredictable and abrasive as the lyrics. It was a pretty easy song to play for all of us. As for the music, Debaser, according to drummer David Lovering, “just kinda clicked. With the lyrics, Francis’s chief interest seemed to lie in the construction and impact of the words themselves.
It’s all very slippy-slidey and more surrealist.”
There’s no art to it in terms of the meaning of it all. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I’m just doing it. “In psychotherapy sessions, the patient will just blab on about all kinds of stuff,” says Francis, “then it’s left to the therapist to extract the important things. It was all part of the lyrical weirdness that characterised Doolittle itself. Some accounts even claim that, in the first version of Debaser, ‘un chien Andalusia’ was actually ‘Shed, Appolonia!’, an oblique reference to the Amazonian co-star of the 1984 Prince flick Purple Rain. Francis accentuates the ‘chien’, before things subside with: ‘Wanna grow up to be/Be a debaser.’ Deal’s faint backing vocal acts as a nervy echo of Francis’s. The simple, side-swiping chorus is one of the most treasured of the Pixies’ career. Know what I mean? It’s almost an Americanism to change a word that way.” I am debasing the norm, I am breaking down the societal norm and cutting it up to come up with something surreal and jarring.’ That was the sentiment of the people who were making those films: I am a debaser. It doesn’t make sense and it might be shocking, but to me it’s normal. Which was: ‘Hey, we’re just doing what we wanna do. It’s all real fast, a case of: ‘Let’s quickly show you what’s going on here – boom-boom-boom.’”īut was he out to say anything pressing in particular? “I guess the only thing I put in the lyric that could be considered an original concept was that I just echoed the sentiment of the filmmakers. To me the song is my version of study clip-notes for Un Chien Andalou. “I’d say I probably wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes,” he offers, explaining their meaning. Francis, these days trading as Frank Black, took a similarly Buñuel-like approach to the lyrics.
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