Lyrics for Here Comes Your Man as interpreted by riffic

Here Comes Your Man Lyrics
outside there's a box car waiting
outside the family stew
out by the fire breathing
outside we wait 'til face turns blue
i know the nervous walking
i know the dirty beard hangs
out by the box car waiting
take me away to nowhere plains
there is a wait so long
here comes your man

big shake on the box car moving
big shake to the land that's falling down
is a wind makes a palm stop blowing
a big, big stone fall and break my crown
there is a wait so long
you'll never wait so long
here comes your man
there is a wait so long
you'll never wait so long
here comes your man

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atombombjohn
01-01-2005

Rated 0 
I guess...but that atomic bomb thing still fits so well its scary

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NewWaveWitch
01-03-2005

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Someone on livejournal said this song is about Hitler and the Holocaust, the boxcars being the ones that brought people to the camps. Sounds plausible, I suppose. The Nagasaki bomb, however, fits better to me.

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mdeaves
01-04-2005

Rated 0 
Lmao, i dont believe this. I used to say to my girlfriend (we are both fans of the pixies) "here comes your man hehe" but now i feel like a tit because its about a bomb. But i could carry on believing it is what i thought it meant lol. The pixies rule with ther hidden meanings

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kirtap
02-01-2005

Rated 0 
I've always thought this song is about "waiting for the man" the weed man. I coulkd be totally off but it fits.

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asstronaut
03-19-2005

Rated 0 
This song is entirely written by a dog owned by a hobo. His owner is gone for now and he doesn't know why. The dog might look in the boxcar, he likes the other hobo families. He can smell the food. However, there is one guy, his master -- whom he calls his man. When he comes, the dog believes stuff will happen. Who cares what? The anticipation is unbearable. But the man comes, and he takes the dog to the next "nowhere plains." The dog can even poke his nose into the rushing air when the train moves. If it were not written by a dog, the grammar might parse. Dogs have very bad grammar.

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bubbles_pop
04-08-2005

Rated 0 
I like the dog one

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Paulos
04-09-2005

Rated 0 
I always thought the 'box car' referred to a hearse waiting outside a house. The 'family stew' being the relatives waiting for a funeral....but who knows? The Pixies lyrics are so cryptic it could be about practically anything...possibly even nothing. But I also like the atomic explosian/earthquake theory!

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greensleeves
04-10-2005

Rated 0 
The Pixies were such an influential band.

This song (which undoubtly was one of their most "popular") is great. I guess, (sometimes) there is reason behind popularity.

One of my favorite Pixies' songs. It's BRILLIANT!!!

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bonginthereggaesong
05-19-2005

Rated 0 
I always thought this song was about being nervous on a first date. Lmao. I'm such an idiot.

Great song though, and the weirdest damn video ever...

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Sir_Larrikin
07-27-2005

Rated 0 
I found the Hobo interpretation interesting -- however here's another clue as to why this could be a reference to WWII. The name of the album, Doolittle. Doolittle was a WWII General (Gen. James H. Doolittle, d. 1993). He won the medal of honor for his secret bombing raids on Tokyo.

So, if there's a "theme," of this album, it could be the events of the early 20th century. In Debaser, "Un Chien Andalusia" making reference to a surrealistic film of the 1920s. Not sure if there are other refs, in other songs, but maybe "I Bleed" is a reference to Nosferatu, the silent-film of the early 1920s? Dunno.

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sanguinalis
08-13-2005

Rated 0 
You are all idiot sheep! This song is about waiting on a drug dealer. How do I know this? I interviewed Frank shortly after Surfer Rosa was released. We talked about the album and specifically this song. He told me and I qouted him in my interview that the song although ambigious was about the anticipation of waiting on a drug purchase.

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bad_mofo
08-15-2005

Rated 0 
sanguinalis,
if this song was indeed written by Charles when he was 15, I highly doubt it was written as anticipation for waiting for the man. You've been listening to too much Lou Reed. It might be about homeless people, it might be about the big one. Who knows- it rocks.

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MozfanMS2
08-26-2005

Rated 0 
Just to clarify...
Listen closely and you will find that the line is:
"Outside the family's tomb" (not stew)
I thought it was stew until I turned it up and heard the "M" at the end of the line. It is quite clear (at least on the EP version I bought on iTunes.

~M

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dadasarah
08-31-2005

Rated 0 
Great artists are often able to channel profundity beyond even their own comprehension. Salvador Dali said, "The fact that I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless." This song could easily mean all these things mentioned, and more.

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bkat004
10-18-2005

Rated 0 
Great thing about this site, is that we can all argue about the meaning of a song. But if there is two things I know for sure about this song is
a) the Riff is a godsend
b) the video clip is hilarious - do we really need video clips

I do like the Atomic interpretation, though.

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Drugsarebad
12-08-2005

Rated 0 
i don't know what the song means but damn it is awesome and i heard it on Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005) and that was the only time it made sense to me but after reading all this i just don't know any more. When i saw the movie and this song came on i yelled out "Thats the fucking pixies hell yeah" and then i sunk back down into my seat.

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freeter mcbean
12-26-2005

Rated 0 
wahh i always thought it was about an earthquake hey. its the hironaga bombs.

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czechm8
01-23-2006

Rated 0 
thank you lactosefreeman.

i always thought it was about hobos going to california during the winter (CA being "the land thats falling down") and they are waiting outside the family *store*. he always knew the homeless people (dirty beards) hung out by the trains but he never tried to spot one..

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anakoluthon
02-21-2006

Rated 0 
"Only the pixies could make a song that sounds so upbeat and cheerful about an atomic explosion."

Not true: consider "99 Luftballons".
Great song though. In many ways.

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suclid003
02-21-2006

Rated 0 
If this song IS about an atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, what the heck is he trying to say about it?

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Audaciousmoose
04-17-2006

Rated 0 
Everyone needs to stop saying this song is about WWII. I know, it'd actually be cooler if it was, but in an NME interview Jack Black said:


"This is a pre-Pixies song that I wrote when I was about 15. It's about winos and hobos travelling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake. Before earthquakes, everything gets very calm—animals stop talking and birds stop chirping and there's no wind. It's very ominous."

Now the lyrics:

"big shake on the box car moving
big shake to the land that's falling down
is a wind makes a palm stop blowing
a big, big stone fall and break my crown
there is a wait so long
you'll never wait so long"

Make sense. A "big shake" to the "box car" the box car being the train cars.

And the "wait" is the wait right before the earthquake when everything's quiet.

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1 Reply
Audaciousmoose
04-17-2006

Rated 0 
Nevermind, Lactosefreeman wrote what I said, it's too bad he hadn't written it before the guy with the whole A-Bomb idea because now people are only reading that one...

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Dingbats
06-14-2006

Rated 0 
I never believed the atomic bomb theory, it seems too farfetched. Why is it that people always believe controversial theories even when a more normal analysis fits much better with the lyrics? Yeah, if Black actually said it's about an earthquake, it is indeed so.

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lathyrus
06-17-2006

Rated 0 
thanks for the meaning about a-bomb...makes sense! awesome!!

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twocent
06-19-2006

Rated 0 
If Black Francis wrote a song about hiroshima, it would sound more like his uptempo ditty "I've got a broken face" something more nihilistic, grotesque and cynical--nothing poignant and heartfelt because he's no Bono and thank fucking-god for that.
If you look up the cover to the single, you'll see a cute bull terrier, not a fucken a-bomb or radiation-sickness casualty. Vaughn Oliver as art director must have had some inkling as to what that fat cherub was warbling about.
15 Yr old charles thompson with his big big love for Lou Reed did a spin on waiting for my man, and that clever boy made the narrator a dog, ha! He made it charmingly upbeat and it's about dead hobos, ha and ha! Musically the song reminds me of velvet underground's Sunday Morning.

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