Monkeys Gone to Heaven

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When Monkey Gone To Heaven was released as a single on 20 March 1989, the cover depicted a benign simian with a halo over its head. Hence the need for 15 songs on the Doolittle album, only three of which make it past the three-minute mark. "We'd usually work on 22 or 23 songs for a Pixies album, and some of them would end up as 'B' sides and others would be scrapped halfway through," Norton states. Monkey Gone To Heaven opens with a tale of an "underwater guy who controlled the sea" who comes a cropper from (presumably) the "Syringe Tide" and the other effluents that were being dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. "The man dying from the sludge in the water in New Jersey is just me getting mythological," said Francis. "It's Neptune that I picture dying from the pollution."

Strings recorded on December 4, 1988, at Carriage House Studios, Stamford, Connecticut, United StatesThe connotationbehind it all is that the devil is superior to man, with God trumping both.And needless to say, such terminology can lead to a number of speculations as to why the Pixies would include such an idea in a song which appears to be primarily about the environment in the first place. Luiz from PortugalI always tought that the number was a geometric progression: the man is 5 which is the smallest and the devil is 6 which is bigger than 5 but smaller than 7. "Then god is seven..." But really, this song isn’t about mythology or anything like that per se.Rather, more to the point is the said figure being depicted as getting “ killed by 10,000,000 pounds of sludge”.So in actuality what the vocalist is alluding to, in a poetic way, is the issue of water pollution, thus setting the tone for the rest of the piece to come.

New York City senior health inspector, Roy Jelen holds up a syringe found on the beach at New York's Staten Island in July 1988. By the following decade, however, it was becoming clear from research and data analysis that the world was hotting up. Issues such as the destruction of rainforests and the use of ozone layer-damaging CFC gases (chlorofluorocarbons) in industrial and commercial use became more commonplace and many celebrities and musicians began to bring wider attention to the problems the planet faced. Some of the songs on Doolittle were newish and others they'd had for a while," Norton says. "For instance, they'd had 'Here Comes Your Man' for quite some time, and the version that appeared on the album was the third time they had recorded it. I listened to the different versions and came up with that arrangement of the song. Monkey Gone to Heaven" includes references to numerology in the lyrics "If man is five/then the Devil is six/and God is seven". Francis later expanded on the significance of the lyrics in an interview to Alternative Press, saying "It's a reference from what I understand to be Hebrew numerology, and I don't know a lot about it or any of it really. I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th. [...] I didn't go to the library and figure it out". [5] The song's numerology is alluded to on the single's cover, which features figures of five, six and seven, and also a monkey with a halo.Dimery, Robert, ed. (2010). "Pixies: Monkey Gone to Heaven". 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. Octopus Publishing Group. p. 631. ISBN 978-1-84403-684-4. Pre-production took place in a rehearsal room normally used by singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield, with the band set up in a circle. The Doolittle songs had mostly already been demoed with Gary Smith, the producer who had discovered the band in 1986 and taken them into his Fort Apache Studios to record what became the eight-song Come On Pilgrim mini-album. And then as far as the title goes, as reported by Rolling Stone the reason Frank decided to name the song so is because the titular phrase, to him, “sounds neat”. So there’s really no need to dive into what “ monkey gone to heaven” is supposed to mean since, according to the author himself, it isn’t meant to actually point to anything.