3. Here Comes Your Man - Pixies
I was introduced to this song through the karaoke scene in (500) Days Of Summer and I fell in love with it immediately. As soon as the movie ended, I was off to my computer to look up the tune, which I promptly listened to ten times in a row. Like most people when they first come upon this song, I thought it was a simple love song about a guy hooking up with his girlfriend, which is apparently not the case at all. "Here Comes Your Man" has been called "the most accessible song by an underground-type band" by Jon Dolan, a critic for Spin magazine. Ironic, seeing as how the song relies primarily on symbolism to get its message across. Dolan's statement becomes even funnier when one considers the hordes of people going around thinking this song is a romantic ditty, as I did. However, the most important symbols only make sense in comparison to other songs, so maybe Dolan, being a music critic, did find it accessible. For the rest of us, Black Francis, The Pixies' front man, made it explicitly clear, in an interview with MME magazine, what he was trying to convey through "Man:"
It's about winos and hobos traveling on the trains who die in the California Earthquake. Before earthquakes, everything gets very calm animals stop talking and birds stop chirping and there's no wind. It's very ominous. I've been through a few earthquakes, actually, 'cause I grew up in California. I was only in one big one, in 1971. I was very young and I slept through it. I've been awake through lots of small ones at school and at home. It's very exciting actually a very comical thing. It's like the earth is shaking, and what can you do? Nothing.
Once one reads Francis' explanation, the song's lyrics make a lot more sense. For instance, I always wondered what Francis' constant references to boxcars were doing in a "love song;" were the guy and his girlfriend going to get it on in an abandoned boxcar? The fact that the song's about a bunch of bums riding the rails makes the train references seem less out-of-place. Francis' statement about the pause before an earthquake gives meaning to the lines about there being "a wait so long; you'll never wait so long." The line about being taken away to "nowhere plains" is a unique way of saying that the bums on the train are dying and therefore being taken away to other "plains" of existence. The song's title and only recurring line provides a strong connection between death and trains; up until World War II, soldiers who had been killed in action were sent home by train. It was common for engineers of such trains, particularly those with dark senses of humor, to announce to the mourners, "Here come your men." The line is also a reference to the classic Velvet Underground tune "I'm Waiting For My Man." Some might argue that the two songs don't fit together, since that one's about waiting for a drug pusher while the other's about a bunch of bums meeting their demise, but I would say that the two songs actually make good companion pieces; one's about a guy waiting for his fix while the other's about a bunch of guys getting permanently "fixed."