Here Comes Your Man
by Pixies
- 124
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 67
- Danceability
- 5
- Acousticness
By the time the Pixies recorded Doolittle in 1989, they had already turned down "Here Comes Your Man" several times. Black Francis wrote it at 14 or 15. The band left it off its 1987 demo tape, the Purple Tape, and referred to it as the Tom Petty song. 4AD head Ivo Watts-Russell left it off Come on Pilgrim as too obviously commercial. A later recording was rejected as a post-Surfer Rosa single, and "Gigantic" came out instead.
Francis said he felt embarrassed by it during the Doolittle sessions, but that producer Gil Norton liked it so much that he "threw him a bone". Norton recorded the band's backing track while Francis was away. The arrangement was new, and Francis added another verse. Francis said it was about winos and hobos on trains who die in a California earthquake. He grew up in California and slept through a big one in 1971.
It came out in June 1989 as the second single from Doolittle and reached number three on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. Joey Santiago recalled that Arsenio Hall's show wanted the band to play it. They said they would only come on to play "Tame", and the show declined.
Here Comes Your Man runs at 124 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.94 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 484 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.