Alternately known as Black Francis or Frank Black, he is best known as frontman of the longtime alternative rock band Pixies, but as 2025 begins, Frank Black is playing a series of shows where he and the band will be performing Frank Black’s 1994 album Teenager of the Year in its entirety. It’s part of a handful of dates commemorating the 30th anniversary of Teenager of the Year — an anniversary that will align nicely as The Current celebrates its 20th anniversary at First Avenue in Minneapolis. And it is there, on Friday, Jan. 24, that Frank Black and his band will make a stop on the Teenager of the Year 30th-anniversary tour.

In the run-up to the tour and the show at First Avenue, Frank Black connected with Jill Riley on The Current’s Morning Show to talk about the album and about taking it on the road with the original band. Plus, he shares a few thoughts about what he likes about Minneapolis. Use the audio player above to listen to the interview, and find a transcript below.

Interview Transcript

Jill Riley: I'm honored to have Frank Black on The Current's Morning Show. Hey, how you doing?

Frank Black: Hello. Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Jill Riley: Well, it's really wonderful to meet you, to have you on The Current, and we're looking forward to the show. Teenager of the Year originally released in spring of 1994. It may not have been your first solo record, but it feels like a record that really defined you as a solo artist. Could you talk about maybe the creative energy that you were feeling at that time when Pixies had kind of come to this close and you were really interested in pursuing some solo work. So I wonder if we could kind of go back to that time.

Frank Black: Well, in the early '90s, I broke up the band, so to speak. Being in a band is all fine and dandy, but, you know, it's a dynamic between four or five different people. After a few years, whatever, you get tired of bumping up against the same things or whatever, and you want to fly solo a little bit. You want to be on your own.

Musically, I would say, at that time, see, in about 1990 or so, I have some friends, John [Flansburgh] and John [Linnell], who had this band, They Might Be Giants, and they had this great record called Flood, which I think came out in 1990. And they were not your typical indie band, obviously; they were certainly more mysterious and kind of eclectic, I guess. They would jump genres in two seconds, you know what I mean? They would allow a lot of humor, a lot of silliness, a lot of DIY, a lot of things that were not quote-unquote "cool." They would do things that were more geeky and nerdy — I hate to use those words, but I think that's how a lot of people, especially people who aren't fans of theirs, that's how they kind of perceive them, as kind of, "Oh, that's those two geeky guys with all the saxophones and the weird sh**," you know? But I grew to really like their repertoire, and in particular this record Flood, I thought they really had kind of arrived into their own, because that was not their first effort. They had already been working towards that for some years. And so I listened to that record a lot. I only bring it up now because I think I have been remiss recently in mentioning that record as a kind of influence, and I think that I enjoyed what they did so much on that record, that it kind of gave me a lot of freedom once again.

They're not the first group that ever exemplified that kind of artistic freedom; that does exist in the world. But certainly, I was making a solo record, kind of stripped down to a duo, kind of like they were in working with Eric Feldman, and Eric was a keyboard player who's actually into a lot of what he calls "synthetic," so that would be like synthesizers and that kind of thing, especially old ones. And so that was a different kind of vocabulary that was much more from their world and much more from their vocabulary. And that record was, at the time for them, considered to be fairly successful. I think that Teenager of the Year has a little more of the spirit of that record than, say, the previous record that I'd made the year before, which was just my first debut record called Frank Black. That had a slightly different vibe.

Jill Riley: Well, when you talk about making solo records, I think there can be this thought of, well, it's a solo record, you know, like you're doing it alone, when that couldn't be farther from the truth. I mean, you mentioned Eric Feldman. I wonder if you could talk about some of the players that you brought in to make this record, because it seems as though you really had something that clicked.

Frank Black: Well, certainly the drummer, Nick Vincent, is a known Los Angeles studio musician, and he's quite good. So we had Eric [Drew Feldman], who is a little bit more of a rough-and-ready musician like myself, but he is very accustomed to playing with complex arrangements, given his background, playing with people like Captain Beefheart and PJ Harvey, and then recently Pere Ubu. He's worked with a lot of different people. So you have a very complex Eric, and you have a very, very virtuoso drummer in Nick Vincent.

And then I had met a guitarist named Lyle Workman up in the Bay Area, and suddenly I found myself in need of a guitarist who could work very quickly, and so I called him up, and he flew right down, came right over to the studio, didn't rehearse anything with us, just completely, just jumped in and yeah, Lyle also is a musician you could describe as a person who's a quick-study guitar. People might call him a quote-unquote "shredder." I don't think of him as a shredder, even though he does know how to do that, because his palette is pretty broad and he can do a lot of different things. But anyway, his prowess on guitar is is very good and very fast.

So suddenly I had this band that was very quick, and I could be spontaneous, and I could get up, get an idea together, just on my way to the studio, and show up and say, "Hey guys, look what I got," and they would just do it with feeling. Certainly, I think that allowed me to be the kind of all-over-the-place, variety —which I tend to do even with the Pixies — I was really able to kind of bring that to a head, because I had this super ninja band that could, just like, scale a building in 30 seconds. Here we go! Bbbbrr!

Jill Riley: Right! Yeah.

Frank Black: The effort more came in just kind of keeping it all under kind of control, as opposed to the work to get it played correctly, or the work to get it in tune, or the work — which is all valid work — but a lot of that work just kind of went aside because whatever! What can I say? The guys are good.

Jill Riley: I'm talking with Frank Black about the 1994 album, Teenager of the Year. Now, it sounds to me like all these different musical ideas were just kind of pouring out of you, and that there wasn't necessarily one throughline of a musical sound. I mean, you talked about like, just these ideas are coming in and they're all over the place. But I wonder, did you have an idea, like, lyrically, that you were thinking for the album? Or do you feel like the music just kind of came first?

Frank Black: Yeah, the music coming first, usually, because that's just the way that I write songs. Other people do the opposite. I know my friend John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, he writes songs the opposite way: He writes the words first, and then he writes the music. He can't even — it's hard for him to wrap his head around doing it the other way. I'm the same way, I have a very difficult time writing the words first, although occasionally I do it just to do it, but it's not my inclination. So I can write a lot of musical ideas, if you will, and they're not all good. You know, a pop producer would say to me or or anybody else at some point, what they're going to say to you is, "OK, great, you played a bunch of chords, now you have to turn it into a song." Like it isn't really a song until you step up to the microphone and open your mouth, because that's the format of popular music. Unless you're talking about instrumental music that's specifically designed to be instrumental, popular music requires some kind of a vocal presence at the front of the track. That's when it becomes alive to a lot of the audience. I can't remember if it was on that record or the one right before it, but I had gotten into a little bit of a situation where I was writing a lot of music and showing up, and we're recording, and I think it was on Teenage of the Year because we were doing a lot of music, and Eric and Al Clay, who was another producer that was working with us, because they kept nagging me to write the lyrics. And so they put together some lyrics that they wrote and put it in a nice little folder for me. And they very sheepishly approached me one morning and said, "This doesn't have to be the words. If you just want to, like, use it as something to bounce off of, or just to kind of get your creative juices flowing, or whatever, we just put something together, some fake words for you to to work with."

Jill Riley: And how did that go over? How did you respond to that?

Frank Black: I wasn't angry, but it was like almost anger. I became very snobbish about the whole thing. I was just like, "I cannot sing these words!" Like, "Are you kidding me? I would never say that!" I think I was probably more self-conscious at the idea that they were trying to step inside my head and kind of do a facsimile of me, and I felt like that they were — that it was too corny or too cliché or too ... You know, they were doing the best they could. It's like having someone like pickpocket you or something. It feels very intrusive and kind of—

Jill Riley: Violating, yeah.

Frank Black: Violating, yeah. It's like, it's not good. So their ruse worked, because I was so irritated at the whole affair that I just jumped in my car with my guitar and took off for a couple days and wrote a sh**load of lyrics and got the project up to speed again.

Jill Riley: I'm Jill Riley. I'm talking with Frank Black, who's headlining night one of The Current's 20th Anniversary Celebration at First Avenue, January 24. He'll be playing his album Teenager of the Year in its entirety, which is also celebrating 30 years since its release. Now, you talked about the players on the album, and I understand that you really got the band back together to tour with you. I wonder if you could talk about the timing of that a little bit.

Frank Black: Oh, we all know each other, and we all sometimes even work with each other in different capacities. So it's not that we've not been in touch. You know, we tend to think of, "Oh, it's the 10-year anniversary of something." We like fives and 10s. We like, "Oh, I'm a child of the 60s," "I'm a child of the 40s," "I'm a child of the 90s." We like to think in terms of decades. And so, of course, I have a celebrated LP in my catalog. It's the superfans that really like this Teenager of the Year record. It has a kind of distinction. I don't mean that it's been so enormously popular. But whatever! People like the record and they still like to listen to it, so there's a cause for celebration. We're all looking forward to playing it. We never really got to tour it properly. I think that we did do some tours together as that group, but there was nothing really that felt like a big campaign, not that at the time it required a massive campaign. They're all just records. I never know how they're going to do, and generally speaking, most of the records that I have put out that have been a little more popular than others, they don't become popular immediately. And it's not that my music is so complicated; it's not. There are other composers that are far more complicated. But I've heard it described by a lot of the fans as music that is not ... you don't necessarily kiss up to it the first listen. You might not even like it the first couple of times. It's interesting, some music, I think, has that kind of ability to to kind of turn off a lot of the listeners at first, but then they come back, because something happened in that first listen. They're kind of still curious. They're irritated that they're still thinking about it. "Why am I still thinking about that record that I didn't even like?" Right? There's that kind of annoyance with it. "All right! I'll go check it out again." And then you go, "Ohhh..." You start to open up a little bit.  know, well,

Jill Riley: Well, the timing of the reissue. I mean, it makes sense, like, OK, 30th anniversary.

Frank Black: The record has been around 30 years. What the hell. It's the same guys, the same core guys. We have one auxiliary member in the group, a guy named Rob Laufer, who has worked on other records of mine and also worked a lot with the other Teenagers — I'm calling them that now — they've all been in a gazillion bands together, you know. Even though he didn't technically play on Teenager [of the Year], Rob is part of the same kind of group of people that I have encountered in Los Angeles when I have been here working.

Jill Riley: You talk about listening to albums, and you start to pick up on them, or things become revealed about albums. In rehearsing this for a live tour, were there things that occurred to you about the album? Or, "Gosh, you know, we didn't really think about playing this one live someday"?

Frank Black: Well, that's the thing with overdub technology, which has been with us, of course, since the 19 early 60s or whatever. You get to record things, on the one hand, that are a facsimile of live performance, right? But of course, you can go Sgt. Pepper's with that, and you could have 25 kazoos doing harmony. However, when it comes to doing a live concert appearance, you can't replicate all that stuff, of course, or if you did, it  would be prohibitively expensive. You could never do it. So you have to kind of go with the most important stuff. But fortunately, we didn't go too crazy. Everything from an instrument point of view can be replicated, although there's maybe one or two instruments that we haven't bothered to try to replicate because it's too tedious. Certainly having the same core three or four people playing all of the things that they played on the record back in the day, from my point of view in the rehearsals, it's enormously satisfying. I'm enjoying very much playing the music with the people that I originally made it with. It's a bit surreal being here in L.A. with all the fires everything, because that's the way it was when we were making this record. There was fires, and we were working right in the middle of one of the fires, and there was earthquakes, and, you know, all this stuff going on, and here in town in L.A., and now that's what's going on right now, and we're still holed up in some warehouse space next to an airport and doing the same thing that we did over 30 years ago, and the same songs and everything. And it's kind of funny, you know?

Jill Riley: Yeah, yeah, the timing of that. Just the environment and in the city in Los Angeles and everything going on with the wildfires, that's just like, sort of in the background. I don't know. There's almost kind of a cosmic eeriness to that, a bit that, you know, "Here we are 30 years later."

I'm talking with Frank Black. We've been talking about the album Teenager of the Year. And hey, there are about, I guess, a dozen cities that you're going to be visiting. You're coming to Minneapolis, First Avenue, the headlining act for night one of The Current's 20th Anniversary Party. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about playing Minneapolis. Are there things about this city that you hold kind of special to you?

Frank Black: Well, sure, it would have — you know, being a band from Boston, it would have been one of our earlier stops when we finally started to get out of town. And a lot of the, some of the records that I listened to at the time would have been coming out of Minneapolis. Of course, a lot of them on Twin/Tone Records, you know, like the Let It Be record by the Replacements, and I was listening to a lot of Hüsker Dü. And so to finally go to Minneapolis for the first time that was, I guess, quasi important, or something. I don't know what sort of magical event we were expecting would occur, if anything, probably nothing, I guess.

But, you know, it's just like whatever, if you like a lot of records that were made at Hansa Tonstudios in Berlin, when you finally go to Berlin, you're like, "Ah! I'm here in Berlin. Ah!" You know? And so it adds a little bit of that, "Ah! Minneapolis! The Replacements! Hüsker Dü! I get it!" you know? It was hip. Like hip like Brooklyn, but it wasn't as f****** uptight as going to New York or L.A., or anything or whatever. It was a little more like Boston, I suppose, you know? I mean, just a little more college kids, bohos, you know, scruffy kind of work, a lot of working-class aspect to it. It was a little bit like New England, so I think that we understood the vibe there, and consistently it is one of the stops for whatever the reason, if you're going to “America,” you will play Minneapolis. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain gravitas, a certain history, a certain vibe, even a certain Midwestern kind of loneliness, which I think that any troubadour can kind of connect with, right? You know, if you travel around, it isn't just a beautiful kind of like — it isn't just the Alps, and it isn't just the Grand Canyon that we appreciate. It's those kind of bleaker Greyhound bus station kind of moments, you know, that you find aplenty in a place like Minneapolis, Minnesota. So when you get there, you're kind of like, "Yeah!" Whatever! You feel like you're Charles Bukowski or something, or Tom Waits and I'm hanging out in Minneapolis, and what's not to like? Yeah, it's not Brooklyn, it's not Hollywood, it's not London or Paris. And why would you want it to be when you have those elements? For an artist, those are things that smell familiar, you know?

Jill Riley: Well, we wouldn't want it any other way. And what started as a bus station and has been a music venue going strong for many decades, First Avenue Mainroom. I know we're looking forward to the show. Teenager of the Year performed in its entirety. Frank Black and those really great studio musicians who played with him when the record was made, joining him onstage. The Current's 20th Anniversary. More information about The Current's 20th Anniversary can be found at the current.org We look forward to seeing all the music fans, and we'll try not to have it too cold for you when you come to town. But it's January in Minnesota, and I think that's all part of the loneliness as well.

Frank Black: Yeah, I hope it's freezing!

Jill Riley: Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you joining.

Frank Black: Thank you very much. I've gotta move on to my next one here.

Jill Riley: Excellent. All right. Well, you take care. We'll see you soon.

Frank Black: Take care.

Jill Riley: Here's another song from Teenager of the Year. It's Frank Black with "[I Want to Live on an] Abstract Plane" on The Current.

Credits

Guest – Frank Black
Host – Jill Riley
Producer – Nilufer Arsala
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

Frank Black – official site