Musical Style
- See also: Pixies' musical style
Over the course of his career, Thompson's musical style has grown to encompass a large number of genres; however, he is considered to produce rock or alternative rock compositions. Whereas songs such as "Here Comes Your Man" (Doolittle), "Velvety" (Devil's Workshop) and "Headache" (Teenager of the Year) expose a more light rock side, others such as "Something Against You" (Surfer Rosa) and "Thalassocracy" (Teenager of the Year) hint to a more heavy rock influence in his material. A strong country music influence is also increasingly evident in his style, most notably in his Nashville albums, Honeycomb and Fast Man Raider Man.
Thompson has said that he acquired his vocal style as a teenager, when a Thai neighbor asked him to sing "Oh! Darling" by The Beatles (from their album Abbey Road) and to "Scream it like you hate that bitch!" Thompson's powerful screams were a signature of Pixies albums, along with the band's typical song structure of quietly paced verses followed by thundering chorus lines and repetitive guitar staccato.
Read more about this topic: Black Francis
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or style:
“Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
—Anonymous. Popular saying.
Dating from World War I—when it was used by U.S. soldiers—or before, the saying was associated with nightclub hostess Texas Quinan in the 1920s. It was the title of a song recorded by Sophie Tucker in 1927, and of a Cole Porter musical in 1929.
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)