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Frank Black, also known as Black Francis (real name Charles Michael Kitridge Thompson IV, born April 6, 1965), is an American musician. He was one of the founding members of the alt-rock band the Pixies, along with Filipino guitarist Joey Santiago.
Thompson studied in the University of Massachusetts, before taking off to Puerto Rico as part of an exchange program. It was here where he reportedly spent six months in an apartment with a
"weird, psycho, gay room mate." His insufficient grasp of the local language (which meant he couldn't even open a bank account to cash his checks) forced him to make a decision whilst slumped in a local bar. He would either go to New Zealand to observe the passing of Halley's Comet or form a rock band.
After the split (due to internal tensions between Black Francis and Kim Deal) of the Pixies, he went on to record solo material with Eric Drew Feldman. His first solo release was the self-titled Frank Black (1993), which included the song "Los Angeles" (about different places named Los Angeles—"not the one in south California / they got one in south Patagonia"), and this was followed in the next year by Teenager of the Year, which included the song "Headache". These two albums were critically well-received and remain fan favorites, although they enjoyed little commercial success. 1996 saw the release of The Cult of Ray, which is generally considered to be worse than Black's preceding solo albums and a low point in his career. Following this album, Black formed a new band, Frank Black and the Catholics, and a new album, the self-titled Frank Black and the Catholics, was released in 1998. It was followed by Pistolero in 1999 and then by Dog in the Sand, which is often considered a high-point of Black's career, in 2000. Two separate albums, Black Letter Days (the title refers to the opposite of "red letter days", which are holidays—a "black letter day" being an ordinary day
http://www.splendidezine.com/features/frankblack/) and Devil's Workshop, were released simultaneously in 2002; this was considered to be a somewhat unusual move. A sixth album with the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, was released in 2003.
Show Me Your Tears's title and many of the songs in it were inspired by Frank Black's recent divorce.
His lyrics are noted for their sometimes obscure references to unusual topics like outer space, unexplained phenomena such as UFOs, and even The Three Stooges (the last of these being the subject of "Two Reelers", a song from
Teenager of the Year). Lyrics with a focus on science fiction were particularly prominent on his three solo albums of the mid-1990s (
Frank Black, Teenager of the Year, and The Cult of Ray). With the Catholics, his lyrics have more often tended towards historical topics; for example, on Dog in the Sand, there is a song called "St. Francis Dam Disaster", which is about the catastrophic collapse of the St. Francis Dam in California in March 1928.
In late 2003, rumors were spreading again that the Pixies were reuniting. The official announcements were made that the band was, in fact, practicing for a reunion tour. They played publicly again for the first time in April 2004, after a break of 12 years, and went on to tour extensively in the USA, Canada and Europe in the same year.
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