When I was a scurrilous teen, I was on vacation with my family in Provincetown, MA. I have always enjoyed taking strange gambles on things, so I opted to spend some of what little money I had on a CD because it had a mental-looking chubby man on the front. It was Frank Black’s “Teenager of the Year” and it wound up being one of my favorite albums of all time. Weird design works on me every time.

I did not make any kind of connection with the Pixies until almost ten years later when Sam Brown and I drove cross-country to San Diego Comicon and we listened almost exclusively to the Pixies. I burned those albums into my head as I experienced the desert for the first time. It was a pretty good trip, for the world before iPhones.