Devlin Lynden

Mr. Grieves – Pixies

Mr. Grieves is one of the songs on the album “Doolittle” By the pixies. Pixies released two singles from Doolittle, “Here Comes Your Man” and “Monkey Gone to Heaven”, both of which were chart successes on the US chart for Modern Rock Tracks. The album itself reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart, an unexpected success for the band. In retrospect, album tracks such as “Debaser”, “Wave of Mutilation”, “Monkey Gone to Heaven”, “Gouge Away”, and “Hey” are highly acclaimed by critics, while the album, along with debut LP Surfer Rosa, is often seen as the band’s strongest work. In the album Doolittle Mr. Grieves is most related to the song “monkey gone to heaven” as they both talk about mythological characters. My best guess to what the song is actually about would be the end of the world. Mr. Grieves is the Death character of mythology, The “Man is the middle” is Dr Doolittle, because if you were able to speak to animals you would be the middle man between the human world and the animal world. Black Francis said this about the song “There’s this theory that if not smarter than us, animals are aware of what’s going on and if we could communicate with them, they could give us the answer of the future and make everything ok. But I’m assuming that a nuclear winter will mean that Mr Grieves is going to win in the end.”

The lyrics of this song don’t relate to me in any way that i can think of, however i have incredibly fond memories of this song, along with the rest of this album from my childhood. When i was living in Auckland we were about a 3 and a half hour drive from our family house in Tongariro National park, Home to Mt Ruapehu and Whakapapa, One of the few ski feilds in the north island. We would often wake up early in the morning so we could be on the ski fields before 8 in the morning. On the trips to Mt Ruapehu from Auckland we this was one of the songs that we would listen too, and my favourite. When i hear it it reminds me of the long winter drives to go and do my favourite sport, Skiing. It also remind me of the hot chocolates the we would stop to get from maccas just south of Hamilton and the endless games of eye spy.

Im not entirely sure what the rest of the world might get from this song , Id hope that other also have great memories of listening to Mr. Grieves.
I love this song, I shear so many great memories with it. For people that haven’t heard it or other songs in this album, i would strongly recommend it.