This is basically a love song about a girl named after a soft furnishing fabric (velour). Yeah, we were kind of baffled by the lyrics too, so we asked Pixies frontman Frank Black about them. His reply: "It's folklore based; the Rosicrucians of 1920s San Jose California had some pretty interesting ideas."
Like a number of Pixies songs at the time, this utilized science fiction imagery. This was because of Frank Black's increasing influence on the band's output and his interest in space travel, aliens and flying saucers.
This song features a theremin, which was used in a number of sci-fi movies in the '50s and '60s. The theremin was invented by a young Russian physicist Leon Theremin in 1919. Robert Moog and his father made and sold theremins for a time in the 1950s. This experience helped Moog in developing in the late 60s his synthesizer, the Minimoog, one of the first portable and affordable synthesizers.
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