Pre-production took place in a rehearsal room normally used by singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield, with the band set up in a circle. The Doolittle songs had mostly already been demoed with Gary Smith, the producer who had discovered the band in 1986 and taken them into his Fort Apache Studios to record what became the eight-song Come On Pilgrim mini-album. In that sense, I think the band understood more about what they were doing when we did Doolittle, just because we had worked hard in the pre-production area and we had the arrangements sorted out. We never messed around or overdubbed a lot — the band played live, and while certain things such as vocals were overdubbed, pretty much everything was done in that vein." They were from a local orchestra and they were really cool," remarks Norton, who in addition to producing and engineering the Pixies' two subsequent albums, Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde, has since worked with artists such as James, Del Amitri, Counting Crows, Foo Fighters and, most recently, Gomez. "They had just done a show and they were still in their tuxes and gowns. I sang to Arthur what I wanted to be played and he just sketched it out for me. Then we fine-tuned it, because without an arrangement we needed to find out if it was going to work or not, and the musicians began playing, and within two hours we had the bits that we wanted." To The Mix Luiz from PortugalI always tought that the number was a geometric progression: the man is 5 which is the smallest and the devil is 6 which is bigger than 5 but smaller than 7. "Then god is seven..."

Very few Buddy Holly songs were over two minutes, and that was an amazing thing for Charles to do, really, because how could I argue with him? Some of the best, most classic songs that anybody remembers are the Buddy Holly songs, and they were short and sweet, bang-bang-bang. That was very educational for me on so many levels, and it increased Charles's trust in me when he could see I was taking that on board." Portable Pixies Climate change is not a new thing. Ecology had become more of a talking point in the 1970s, but caring for the environment was still seen as a niche, slightly "hippie-ish" pastime.

While Steve Albini had captured the hard edges of the Pixies' sound in a fairly uncompromising way, Gil Norton and Steve Haigler retained some of this edge while using reverb and compression to smooth things out and place a little more emphasis on the band's pop sensibilities. These, after all, were sensibilities that Norton himself shared. The cover art to“Doolittle”features the image of a monkey (with a halo) as well as the numbers six and seven.The artist behind it, Vaughan Oliver, conceptualized the imageryafter listening to“Monkey Gone to Heaven”.Also as originally intended, Frank was going to entitle the album “Whore”.But after seeing the cover art which Oliver put together, he opted not to. Artist History— Pixies". Billboard.com. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007 . Retrieved 2007-04-20. I think within every genre of music the best songs can be played on an acoustic guitar and they've got a great melody. That was the case with Doolittle. It was routined on an acoustic guitar and all of the songs work on an acoustic guitar. I think that's the way to start, and then how you shape things after that is the art of making a record, really, or being a good band. The song has to work on its own, it has to stand up, and you have to be able to play it. You can't rely on bells and whistles to make things work, it has to be already there within the structure of the song, and that was certainly the case with 'Monkey Gone To Heaven'. Monkey Gone To Heaven opens with a tale of an "underwater guy who controlled the sea" who comes a cropper from (presumably) the "Syringe Tide" and the other effluents that were being dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. "The man dying from the sludge in the water in New Jersey is just me getting mythological," said Francis. "It's Neptune that I picture dying from the pollution."

Frank, Josh; Ganz, Caryn. Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies. Virgin Books, 2005. ISBN 0-312-34007-9. The way I work with bands is I do a lot of pre-production, and I make sure everybody knows what they are doing," Norton explains. "I think you've really got to understand how you're recording, why you're recording and what is important about a specific performance in terms of what is good and what isn't. I try to get a band to think about that as much as possible, because I can tell them that something's good or bad, but if they don't understand that then they're not going to do anything different, because they're just thinking that everything's great. So, there's a lot of playing with arrangements during pre-production, and by the time we hit the studio everyone's got an understanding of what they're supposed to be doing. Whether or not we achieve that is a different matter. At least it isn't confusing. I don't like my approach to be confusing to artists.But really, this song isn’t about mythology or anything like that per se.Rather, more to the point is the said figure being depicted as getting “ killed by 10,000,000 pounds of sludge”.So in actuality what the vocalist is alluding to, in a poetic way, is the issue of water pollution, thus setting the tone for the rest of the piece to come. David from Fairfax, VaIf you go to a Baltimore Orioles game, this song gets played for several of the players when they come up to hit. That's a little bizarre if you ask me... except maybe the thing about 10 million pounds of sludge from new york and new jersey during a yankee game. With the rhythm section set up in a live formation, Dave Lovering's kit was positioned at the far end of the studio. Standing nearby, Kim Deal's bass was DI'd and miked with a U47 on the cabinet, while the guitars were amped with Marshalls or Peaveys — sometimes a combination of the two, split and then mixed together — and miked with 57s or 414s.

The information regarding accolades attributed to "Monkey Gone to Heaven" is adapted from Acclaimed Music. [19] Publication And then as far as the title goes, as reported by Rolling Stone the reason Frank decided to name the song so is because the titular phrase, to him, “sounds neat”. So there’s really no need to dive into what “ monkey gone to heaven” is supposed to mean since, according to the author himself, it isn’t meant to actually point to anything. I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th." Francis explained to Alternative Press. "I didn't go to the library and figure it out." Charles would have all of these little ditties — minute-and-a-half songs consisting of verse, chorus, verse, beat-beat-beat-bang, out, we're finished. I would go 'Uh, this is really short. Can we double this bit and can we do this again?' and he'd say 'Why? Within that minute and a half I've said everything I'm gonna say.' We had this ongoing thing when we first worked together, where I'd be trying to transform the raw material into song arrangements and he'd just go 'Look, I'm not going to play that twice.'" I love a hook. I'm a glutton for it, and I love '60s pop music. I just think some of the best songs ever were in so many different genres of music during that era. It's what I grew up with, and at the end of the day I'm a pop producer. That's what I want to do, and that term 'alternative producer' always used to freak me out, really, because I never set myself up to be an alternative record producer. I just want to produce good records, and I never knew what it meant to be alternative to whatever. All I wanted was for the Pixies to be the biggest band in the universe. I don't think we went into any of the stuff that we did thinking 'We want to be quirky and arty and not have anyone like us.'

By the following decade, however, it was becoming clear from research and data analysis that the world was hotting up. Issues such as the destruction of rainforests and the use of ozone layer-damaging CFC gases (chlorofluorocarbons) in industrial and commercial use became more commonplace and many celebrities and musicians began to bring wider attention to the problems the planet faced. Strings recorded on December 4, 1988, at Carriage House Studios, Stamford, Connecticut, United States As the Pixies' chief songwriter, Charles Thompson was very insistent that their songs should not outstay their welcome, a point which led to much discussion with their producer. "As a producer, the whole [ pre-production] process with Charles was very educational for me," says Gil Norton. "It made me think about why you want an artist to do things — if you do something twice, can you make it different? Can it grow? What can we do with it? How can we approach the whole element of dynamics, and what can we introduce to make it better and not have it sound like we're just doing the same thing over and over? I think things should develop, and that's an approach I've taken throughout the rest of my career up until now — 'OK, I've done that on the first verse. What's going to happen on the second verse? What's going to happen in the middle? Is a harmony going to come in or should it remain the same?' I think there are a lot of questions you have to ask yourself to make sure you come up with the right result, and in that pre-production area there are lots of things that you can try out as well.

Carriage House Studios in Connecticut, where the Doolittle album was mixed. Photo: Gil Norton"When I began working with the Pixies, I was never really given much information as to what they were looking for in terms of the sound or the direction. After I'd seen them live, they just wanted me to reproduce what they'd do to the best of my ability, and that's part of the job of a producer. It's a very ambiguous role, really, but it's definitely to bring out the best in a band, and on 'Monkey Gone To Heaven' I just wanted to capture the song's innocence and angelic beauty. That's why I wanted to use the strings — it had to be quite powerful, but there also had to be a purity to the power. What with the guitars and the dynamics, the song started with a mood and an impact, and then the guitars dropped out on the verses to make lots of room for Charles to start telling his story. Mynamemyway from Not Tellin', VaIn biology class, we were talking about the pollution of the ozone layer and I was dissppointed to find that I was one of the few who believed in it. After the discussion, we took a test and, after I was done, I wrote down the 2nd verse of this song on the front and turned it in to my teacher. I thought it was witty. Monkey Gone to Heaven" includes references to numerology in the lyrics "If man is five/then the Devil is six/and God is seven". Francis later expanded on the significance of the lyrics in an interview to Alternative Press, saying "It's a reference from what I understand to be Hebrew numerology, and I don't know a lot about it or any of it really. I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th. [...] I didn't go to the library and figure it out". [5] The song's numerology is alluded to on the single's cover, which features figures of five, six and seven, and also a monkey with a halo.The connotationbehind it all is that the devil is superior to man, with God trumping both.And needless to say, such terminology can lead to a number of speculations as to why the Pixies would include such an idea in a song which appears to be primarily about the environment in the first place. Having engineered the whole record, towards the end I just thought it would be great to get a fresh pair of ears on this as well, because sometimes when you're producing and engineering it's nice to get a fresh perspective on the mix. So, I asked Steven Haigler to come in and help me with it, using the SSL at the Carriage House. At that point, I was used to mixing on SSL — I didn't mind what we recorded on, although I still don't really like recording on SSLs. I'd much rather be on a Neve or a Trident... or an MCI, or whatever, just to get another character in there, and then I do like mixing on SSL. To me, it's just like driving a car. It's very easy, you sort of know where you are, and I also quite like that sort of sound it gives at the end of it. If you've got all the bottom end and you've got what you want, it finishes it off nicely." Gil Norton and engineer Al Clay with Theremin player Robert Brunner, in a photo taken during the recording of the Pixies' later Bossanova album. Photo: Gil Norton Rolling Stone: Monkey Gone to Heaven". Rolling Stone. 2004-11-04. Archived from the original on October 1, 2007 . Retrieved 2007-04-21. Some of the songs on Doolittle were newish and others they'd had for a while," Norton says. "For instance, they'd had 'Here Comes Your Man' for quite some time, and the version that appeared on the album was the third time they had recorded it. I listened to the different versions and came up with that arrangement of the song.