Black Francis Tackles Sexual Abstraction on 'NonStopErotik'

When Black Francis announced that his new solo album would be called 'NonStopErotik' and would include a song called 'When I Go Down on You,' many fans and critics assumed the album is all about getting physical. But as the erstwhile Pixies frontman tells Spinner, things aren't that simple.

"I find that too literal," Francis says. "Sexuality obviously can be complicated. I didn't only write songs about bumping and grinding, you know what I mean? I did the art thing and mixed in some death, redemption, some lust and some romance and love, some sexual abstraction."

Just as in the statement he released about the album, noting that when he was young he used "fern" as a code word for vagina, Francis says the album is inspired by his adolescent discovery of sexuality. "I don't know how it is for other people but I know that when I became pubescent, when the world of sexual imagination took hold of me, a lot of it was really abstract and strange," he reveals. "There was still like a basic sexual element to it, but all the sort of detail could get pretty psychedelic. When I think back on it now, when I was first sort of blossoming sexually, it was a lot weirder than it is now."

Even as a man in his 40s, Francis is still discovering new things about sex, occasionally from odd sources. "Sometimes when I'm waiting for my to-go order at the local café, I'll open up the freebie art rags that have the sort of modern bohemian version of the 'Ask Beth' answer column, all the sexual stuff," he says. "Every time, I'm like 'Oh, wow. I've never heard of that one. Wow!' I haven't even heard about it but here it is in the paper, talking about it like it's a whole thing, this whole vocabulary.

"In a very short span of time, the whole notion of identifying your sexuality through fashion, certain colors you wear or the shape of your shoes, think about how much that is a big part of fetishes," he continues. "From my caveman point of view, a lot of fetishy stuff is very abstract when you compare it to the normal reality of everything that has existed for a super-long time. I don't mean that in necessarily a negative way; I just mean sort of bizarre."

True enough. 'NonStopErotik' will released in the US on March 30 via Cooking Vinyl.