After the Pixies’ 1993 breakup, frontman Black Francis rechristened himself Frank Black and embarked on a solo career. His second solo album, 1994’s Teenager Of The Year, is a fired-up alt-pop classic in its own right, and Black already announced plans to commemorate its 30th anniversary by reuniting with his circa-1994 backing band for 2025 shows in London and Paris. Now, Black is getting ready to release a 30th-anniversary reissue and to play the album in full every night on a North American tour.

Teenager Of The Year has been remastered for the first time ever, and 4AD will release it early next year on 45-rpm double gold vinyl, with liner notes by Black and producer Eric Drew Feldman. There will also be a digital version. Black and his original backing band — Feldman, guitarist Lyle Workman, and drummer Nick Vincent — will tour North America before those London and Paris shows, and they’ll play Teenager Of The Year in full every night. Before the tour kicks off, Black will also play a few solo-acoustic shows in New England.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Frank Black has chosen his favorite spooky songs for Halloween. His list include the Specials’ “Ghost Town” and the Beatles’ “Long, Long, Long,” and he talks about them in his best scary voice. Below, check out Frank Black’s press-release quote about the Teenager Of The Year anniversary activities, his tour dates, and his spooky-songs picks.

In that press release, Frank Black says:

Sometime in the early ’80s, I’d have to look up the date, I matriculated high school. This school held an awards banquet for some of the departing students at the school. I received an award called the TEENAGER OF THE YEAR award; my brother received the same award the following year. Our award was a 50-dollar credit for textbooks, a TEENAGER OF THE YEAR medallion (my mother still has this), and also the banquet hall dinner, soup to nuts. My brother and I had no complaint about the award (it was given for being all-around-good-guy as best as we could determine). But for such a grand title to be given as TEENAGER OF THE YEAR, I felt the glory had not been amplified enough.

In 1993, I was doing “solo recording” sessions with Eric Drew Feldman in Los Angeles. We had settled on a core band with Nick Vincent and Lyle Workman, occasionally augmented by Joey Santiago and Moris Tepper. Though we had to change studios numerous times for actual forest fires and earthquakes, the whole process was such an addictive musical buffet that Eric and I couldn’t stop. We did some vocals at a studio rumored to be owned by Sergio Mendes; in the control room was a wall of television screens broadcasting the brush fire which crept toward us. We eventually evacuated to someplace else. We never met Sergio, but we saw him perform a few weeks later when we vacated to Las Vegas after the Northridge earthquake, which had trapped the Teenager Of The Year tapes in a studio vault for some time. Our zeal plus empathy from our financiers — they safely observing our travails from London — was enough to keep the money flowing until Eric and I relented and declared “Consummatum est”.

We tried to make it grand. 22 in 62. I called it Teenager Of The Year. It is 30 years old now, and the original band will perform the record at various venues in early 2025. 4AD has remastered the LP for a fresh printing. Enjoy

TOUR DATES:
12/03 – Battleboro, VT @ The Stone Church *
12/05 – Portsmouth, NH @ 3S Artspace *
12/07 – Newport, RI @ Jane Pickens Theatre *
1/15-16 – San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore ^
1/18 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Orpheum ^
1/19- El Cajon, CA @ The Magnolia ^
1/22 – Denver, CO @ The Paramount ^
1/24 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue ^
1/25-26 – Chicago, IL @ The Metro ^
1/28 – Detroit, MI @ St. Andrews Hall ^
1/29 – Toronto, ON @ History ^
1/31 – Boston, MA @ House Of Blues ^
2/01 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Street ^
2/04 – Paris, France @ Le Trianon ^
2/06 – London, UK @ The Palladium ^

* solo acoustic show
^ Teenager Of The Year anniversary show

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The Teenager Of The Year reissue is out 1/17 on 4AD.