Echo from Normalville, MaCan't believe no one's commented for this! it's a perfect example of the Pixie's amazing way to put something so complex and serious into something so light and seemingly nonsensical.

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

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. Hence the need for 15 songs on the Doolittle album, only three of which make it past the three-minute mark. "We'd usually work on 22 or 23 songs for a Pixies album, and some of them would end up as 'B' sides and others would be scrapped halfway through," Norton states.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. 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. Artist History— Pixies". Billboard.com. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007 . Retrieved 2007-04-20. 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."

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. One thing I do is pay a lot of attention to detail. It's important to me to get these little things right, the things that other people might not think are important, and I think that sort of excites Charles in a certain way. He's got quite a weird mathematical brain and he likes things that excite him. He likes detail and he likes things that sound simple but are not. So, in a working situation we got on well together. I helped him bring out his pop sensibility to a certain extent, and he helped me on a quirky level as to where and how you choose to do things; how to avoid doing the obvious but do what you normally wouldn't do and make things more interesting. 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. 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.