Pixies’ classic ‘Where Is My Mind’ now a children’s book
If you’ve ever heard the Pixies play their cult classic “Where Is My Mind,” you were probably grooving on its grisly guitars, its lurching drumbeat, its general sense of surreal mischief. But you were probably not thinking, “Hey, this would make a great children’s book.”
But pop culture is always full of surprises, and “Where Is My Mind” has indeed become a children’s book — part of the “Lyric Pop” series put out by the Brooklynbased indie publisher Akashic Books. Most of the dozen-plus songs they’ve done are good-feeling songs with obvious kid appeal, like Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing” and the Go-Gos’ “We Got the Beat.” But they’ve also thrown in a few eyebrow-raisers, like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” — which sidesteps its obvious sexual overtones by making the heroine a jealous cat.
“Where Is My Mind” went to New York illustrator Alex Eben Meyer, who like many Pixies fans has a pretty vivid imagination. He gives the story a suitably psychedelic look, tracing a young girl’s journey to get her mind back after losing it in a fall from a skateboard.
“One of the big problems in working on a kids book is actually having children, because you can get too sweet and thoughtful with your stories,” Meyer said this week — though he does indeed have a young daughter who checked out the book as he worked on it.
“The ironic part for me is that I’m not actually a lyrics person. So the song popped into my head in a very literal way, the idea of giving the mind a character and a consciousness. So I kept one foot in the real world and the other in the imagination, with the idea of a mind popping out and then going on this adventure to recover what you have lost — visiting these strange worlds and going through all the different environments.”
Unlike the Pixies song, his book has a clearly happy ending. “Through the book she’s actively looking for it, but in the end she gives up and slows down. And the brain character that has run away sees that it’s no longer being pursued, so it comes back and they re-meet while she’s in the water. It’s like a re-invigoration of the natural world.”
Meyer picked “Where Is My Mind” from a long list of song titles that the publisher gave him.
“I think there’s a definite nostalgia part to this, for parents to introduce their kids to songs that were important to them; and also to see them re-imagined. A lot of the songs in this collection have a very visceral response, of where you were when you first heard them.”
So far he hasn’t heard from any of the Pixies about the book, though songwriter Black Francis gave it an official thumbs-up for release.
“I probably came to the Pixies later than most people, in college instead of high school. And I’m sure the song will always sound a little different to me now — not that it’s my song but I have a partnership with it now, I could create something out of it. My daughter gets into it because it’s so easy to sing with. But I played the song so many times doing the book that I’ve probably hit the wall for a while.”