La La Love You

The song La La Love You sounds like an unexpected detour within Doolittle. It is neither the longest nor the noisiest track on the album, but it has something that makes it stand out: that chorus that repeats with an almost childlike cadence, as if the lyrics couldn’t escape their own obsession. Black Francis’s voice here neither shouts nor cracks as it does in other moments of the album; instead, it sways between the melodic and the absurd, as if the song itself resisted taking itself seriously. The clean production, with guitars that sound almost pristine but with a hint of controlled distortion, gives it an air of contradiction: it’s catchy without being cloying, and short without seeming rushed.

Recorded in 1989 alongside the rest of Doolittle, the song was one of the two singles that the label Elektra Records chose to promote the album in the United States, where it achieved some resonance on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. Engineer Steve Haigler handled the mixing, while Gil Norton—the producer who gave the album its polished sound—also contributed to the recording alongside Matt Lane and Dave Snider. Though Pixies never achieved massive success in their home country, in Europe, and especially in the United Kingdom, their influence grew without needing chart numbers. The song itself, at 2:44 in length, plays with the paradox of being brief yet impossible to forget, as if time itself stood still in that unresolved "la la la".