Pixies: Reading Between the Lines

C ool rock tunes.

That’s the bottom line of all the yelping vocals, jagged music and dreamy, harsh psycho-sexual imagery contained in the songs of the Boston-based Pixies, which has the opening slot at the Sept. 8 Dodger Stadium show featuring the Cure, Love and Rockets and Shelleyan Orphan. At least, that’s what the songs’ singer-creator Black Francis says.

“Really, we’re just trying to make rock tunes, just entertainment, and it’s not really a heavy thing,” said Francis, 24, sweating a bit over hot curried tofu at a Hollywood Thai restaurant.

As for his seemingly possessed singing and writing style, he shrugged that off as “just making a bunch of loud noises to draw attention to yourself, you know.”

Actually, Francis (his real name is Charles Michael Kitridge Thompson IV; Black Francis, he said, was a name his father always said he’d like to name a child) tends to shrug off all attempts to read meaning into his music. He insists there’s nothing as dramatic behind his writing as with the Pixies’ Boston pals in Throwing Muses, whose Kristin Hersh has always been quite up-front about the emotional tumult in her background.

“People ask, ‘What’s your motivation or drive for your lyrical content?’ ” he said. “It’s like, I need lyrics. That’s my motivation.”

Even on “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” a majestic, poetic abstraction on humanity’s environmental folly that is the centerpiece of the current “Doolittle” album?

“I’m really talking about the sky and the ocean because they’re romantic, mythological places of epic proportions,” he said of the song. “The phrase ‘monkey gone to heaven’ has no meaning. It just sounds neat. If people read between the lines, fine. There probably for the most part isn’t anything there. You can catch a riddle or a joke, but the bottom line is did you get your money’s worth, whether it’s a deep experience or just a rhythmically enjoyable music experience.”

He does, though, cop to wanting the songs to have at least an aura of depth.

“I want to actually make an attempt at being surreal,” he said, professing a particular interest in the “poetic structure” of his writing.

“But my impression of people like David Lynch (the director of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Eraserhead’) or whoever is that they come up with cool ideas and cool images, but they don’t really think about them. They just do it.”