Eels

On October 16th, Eels will release “Cookie Happened”, the sixteenth album of an honorable and eccentric career that, right around this time, turns thirty full years old. On August 13, 1996, “Beautiful Freak” came out, the record that kicked off one of the most elusive, tender and eccentric songwriting careers - and indie legacies - in memory.
“Beautiful Freak” is the debut LP by Mark Oliver Everett under the Eels name, a band whose only constant member has always been its founder, the source of the quirky, irresistible songwriting that has defined them from the start. It's the beginning, then, of one of the most significant and influential indie sagas of recent decades, as we said, but above all it's a point of arrival. The first milestone of an arduous journey, human even before it was creative. To truly understand this record, and where Mr. E and Eels came from, we need a detour through the life of Mark Oliver Everett.

Young Mark was born in April 1963, the second of three children of the famous physicist Hugh Everett III, a bespectacled man who corresponded with Einstein, no less. In his Virginia household, very little was ever said: mom Nancy took care of household matters, dad Hugh sat silently hunched over his papers and his abstruse theories, Elizabeth listened to Neil Young shut in her bedroom and slipped into madness. Mark, meanwhile, took refuge in the attic, torturing a drum kit picked up at a neighborhood flea market.
Given these circumstances, it's easy to imagine why by the age of twelve Mark had already experimented with binge drinking and assorted drugs, but also how he came to develop the musical bulimia that would soon lead him to write a new song every single day.
In 1983, Hugh Everett III died of a heart attack at just fifty years old; it was Mark himself who found him stiff in bed. After his death, the rest of the family was put through the wringer: Elizabeth's mental illness raged on, gradually stripping her of any grip on reality, Nancy silently absorbed the blows life kept dealing her, and Mark withdrew even further into himself and into music. After five years of suffering and cassettes filled with songs, he would finally make the decision to head for Los Angeles, to make a real attempt at a career in the music business.

After another couple of years spent dreaming of getting inside the Polydor building, which Mark could glimpse from the car wash where he worked to make ends meet, he finally earned his long-desired way in. An employee of the famous record label had stumbled - of all places - on some material signed by E at another neighborhood flea market, and had been deeply struck by it. A record deal soon followed, and shortly after came “A Man Called E” and “Broken Toy Shop.” Released in 1992 and 1993 respectively, both simply credited to E, the two EPs are solid collections of songs. Still a bit unripe and overloaded with frills, a sign that at the time Mark was hungry for the Eighties and for synths (especially Prince's), and did nothing to hide his obvious debts. Still, the two efforts already revealed the fragile poetry their author was capable of.
Unfortunately for Mark, the charts and the market of those years were far too hungry for grunge rage to make room for his slightly unsettling sweetness. So when his delicate songwriting found neither space nor sales in that ecosystem of ripped jeans and sweaty hair, Polydor dropped him from the roster without a second thought.

Once again, young Mark didn't lose heart. Or rather... he did. But as usual, it didn't last long. A year of depression and solitude later, a new epiphany arrived, this time courtesy of the cinematic trip-hop of Portishead. The revelation coming out of Bristol made him realize that the miles of samples he'd recorded during his shut-in days in that Virginia bedroom hadn't been a pointless exercise after all. From there it was a short step to recording some seventy tracks - no big deal, if your name is Mr. E. This time, though, to give proper shape to all these sketches, Mark wanted to play as a team. So he recruited drummer Butch Norton and bassist Tommy Walter, with whom he gave new form to all these new songs, and brought Eels to life.
This is a thin, hurried summary of what happened to Mark Oliver Everett before making “Beautiful Freak.” What would happen to him afterward, as anyone who grew attached to his work well knows, is just as tortuous and gripping.
Sometimes you have to wonder: who on earth wrote this poor guy's life story? Tim Burton? Or maybe Steven Spielberg? Perhaps a mash-up of the two... certainly his life story must have intrigued the latter's scouts. In 1996, having heard the first wonderful Eels songs playing on local radio, they signed E and his band to the newly founded DreamWorks (founded together with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen), allowing them to finally bring their long-awaited debut album into the world.

The cover of “Beautiful Freak” is a kind of magic portal that puts listeners in touch with the depressed but tender world of Mr. E's mind even before the music begins. Out of its blinding white background, a little girl in black and white crawls into view, her hair as raven-black as Wednesday Addams'. She's deathly pale and stares straight at you with two huge eyes that take up half her face, a wilted daisy lying at her feet. A disproportionate little monster, seemingly pulled out of who-knows-what trunk in who-knows-what attic, yet irresistibly sweet. The kind you just want to run and hug.
These are the freaks that populate the record: not repellent creatures, but neglected lives to comfort, protect and make happy.
We meet the first of these creatures in the achingly sweet title track, tucked among the big fat piano drops and gentle guitar arpeggios: “Some people say/ You have a problem/ But that problem/ Lies only with them/ Just ‘cause you are not like/ The others/ That is why I love you/ Beautiful freak/ Beautiful freak/ That is why I love you/ Beautiful freak/ Beautiful freak”. Another, even more disarming one, strolls happily through an electric sketch titled “My Beloved Monster”: “My beloved monster and me/ We go everywhere together/ Wearing a raincoat that has four sleeves/ Gets us through all kinds of weather” or again “My beloved monster is tough/ If she wants she will disrobe you/ But if you lay her down for a kiss/ Her little heart it could explode”.
The most prominent and restless of these lovable creeps, though, is E himself, the unstoppable narrating voice that haunts all twelve tracks. Now he seeks refuge in pills, “Life is hard/ And so am I/ You’d better give me something/ So I don’t die/ Novocaine for the soul/ Before I sputter out”, he sings on the ticking opening track “Novocaine For The Soul”; now he vents all his frustration as a misunderstood soul, “They say I’m mental but i’m just confused/ They say i’m mental but I’ve been abused/ They say I’m mental ‘cause I’m not amused by it all”, he roars amid the huge guitars of the unhinged “Mental.”

No less compelling is the sound, the versatile and playful setting where these little freaks live out their bittersweet adventures. An accompaniment, now stormy, now placid - mentally unstable, one might say - that counterpoints E's sweet, raspy voice. Indie rock that has become a blueprint for others.
At the heart of this small but massive collection of indie classics lies an incredible sense of groove and melody. The Eels practically nail one unforgettable melody per song, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. It's almost music you can see, musical set-pieces engineered down to the last detail and programmed to suddenly explode, only to be temporarily wiped out by electronic blazes and abrasive riffs. The rounded-off guitars, the most soothing and joyful basslines, the softly brushed drums, the silvery music-box tinkling - everything most serene about “Beautiful Freak” can be blown away in an instant by a fit of hysterics or a wall of noise.
A formula this simple at its core allows the band to graft the most disparate contaminations and germs onto every track, turning this indie songbook into a kaleidoscope of influences.

“Flower” opens with a gospel choir and is brushed by an autumnal banjo, “Guest List” instead meets the harmonica of first love Neil Young, while “Mental” drowns in an electronic short-circuit. “Susan's House,” meanwhile, has a bit of everything, blended in the manner of Beck on “Odelay” - released, incidentally, just a few months earlier on Geffen. Beck is probably the name from the American alternative scene of those years most easily paired with Everett's, the two sharing both outcast subject matter and a bizarre, explosive creativity.
The ideas and references that feed “Beautiful Freak” don't end there. The hypnotic “Your Lucky Day In Hell,” for instance, sways over a trip-hop backing, perhaps one of the reasons the album made more of an impact in the UK (where it landed straight at a very strong number 5) than in E's native States.

Achieved through the total synergy between lyrics and music, the defining trait of “Beautiful Freak” - what we might call its poetic signature - is that despite all the anger, despite these songs and these characters constantly being on the verge of a nervous breakdown, within their infinite tenderness there is always a very bright light to be glimpsed. The light that allowed E to never give up and to end up giving us this masterpiece. The light that would never abandon him, even when things would get worse again.
Right around the release date of “Beautiful Freak,” Elizabeth Everett would take her own life in the bathroom at home; two years later, mom Nancy would be diagnosed with a terrible cancer, which would soon take her away from life, and from Mark.
But E, once again, would not throw in the towel... And we would once again get to enjoy his songs and his light. Starting right from the landmark album “Electro-Shock Blues” and from “Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor.”

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16/08/2026