Monkey Gone to Heaven

Black Francis wrote and sang it, and Gil Norton produced. It was recorded in November 1988 and released as a single in the UK on 27 March 1989, weeks before the album, and it was the first Pixies song with guest musicians: two cellists and two violinists. Norton had the idea after seeing Deal pluck the strings of a grand piano during recording, and the strings were recorded on the afternoon of 4 December 1988 at Carriage House Studios in Stamford while the album was being mixed. No scores had been written. The cellist Arthur Fiacco wrote a part from riffs Francis showed him, and he said he had sent the second cellist, Ann Rorich, home and played all the cello parts himself.

The song is about human damage to the ocean and sky. Francis described the sea as a big organic toilet and a mythological place, and the line about man being five, the devil six and God seven comes from what he understood of Hebrew numerology. In 2022 he said it was loosely inspired by the human dilemma of whether we can survive as a race, and that monkeys are the animal we most relate to because of evolutionary kinship, which is why it is not a bird or a fish gone to heaven. It was the band's first video, filmed in black and white, and the strings are not seen in it.

It reached number 5 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, and number 60 in the UK. Rolling Stone's David Fricke called it a corrosive, compelling meditation on God and garbage. Francis recorded it again for his 2004 album Frank Black Francis.