You go onto YouTube and search for this song. The majority of the comments go along the lines of “Man, this song’s good, but the ending though? Human perfection. Best endings of all time,” etcetera, etcetera. And, yeah, the song’s outro is quite special. But the rest of the song ain’t too bad. Black Francis/Frank Black sings with the usual unhinged style of vocal delivery, working well with the song’s theme of a stalker-like fascination with a lady. He describes the characteristics of this subject like some sort of mad scientist looking for another experiment, it’s quite menacing. The obsession is too much, as made clear in the “I’m in a state” repetition, and its seemingly never-ending fade-out ending signifies the endlessness of the situation. At least that’s how I like to think of it.

Doolittle is an album of subtle surprises. The lone guitar chord strum at the beginning of this one is just a small taste. But generally there will be elements of a certain track that you wouldn’t pick up on the first time, but after a number of listens make themselves more and more apparent. Like on ’13 Baby’, I never took into account how the verses are made of one chord that doesn’t progress into another until the choruses. Or how bassist Kim Deal just stops playing at certain points to highlight those bending guitar wails at various points. There’s also a subliminal shout-out during the choruses to a Los Angeles gang that was active around the time of the album’s making. The way it’s incorporated into them is real sneaky, once you get the melody and the words down you’ll barely know your singing it.

What’s peculiar about this track though is that the vocals are out of there after two minutes. The rest of the track is essentially its ending, what a lot of people love about it, consisting of a slow building of layers. Kim Deal and drummer David Lovering keep the track steady with the rhythm alongside Francis’ acoustic guitar. After a few measures, lead guitarist Joey Santiago rushes in with a frantic guitar fill. After that fades out, he re-enters with a dreamy arpeggiated chord that goes on and on before being drowned out by a wild rhythm guitar from Francis that sounds like it’s being strangled its chords are strummed. It’s all so hypnotizing up to that point, then that guitar adds a bit of nightmare fuel to the proceedings. It’s creepy, it’s sneaky, it all sounds so good. Pixies were very good at getting those things down.