Eels - Friendly ghosts and other revelations

Symphony for toy drum

There's excitement in the neighborhood today. The Everetts' neighbor has organized a garage sale, one of those second-hand junk markets you see in American TV shows, meant to empty the house of all the clutter accumulated over the years. Everyone goes to browse the makeshift stalls, has a look around and tosses away a few dollars for some useless object, inevitably destined to end up at the next lucky buyer's own garage sale. Mrs. Nancy Everett has finally given in to the relentless pleading of little Mark, her six-year-old younger son, and agreed to take him to the neighbors' market. As usual, her husband, Hugh Everett III, is at home reading the paper or scribbling some abstruse mathematical formula. He hasn't been the same since his revolutionary quantum physics theory about parallel universes, known as the "Many Worlds Theory", ran into academic ostracism: as a young man he exchanged letters with Albert Einstein, now he works in the defense industry, always withdrawn and aloof. But the object of little Mark's desire isn't the "little quantum physicist's" box — it's a toy drum set that, for the modest sum of fifteen dollars, triumphantly makes its way into the Everett household.
Circumstances that can change your life can be strange ones: usually a kid plays with a toy like that for a couple of weeks and then abandons it to oblivion. But Mark Everett is different: unfortunately for his family's ears, he'll keep playing that toy drum kit every single day for the next ten years… and fortunately for us, his unhealthy passion for that children's drum set will give birth to a bizarre creature called Eels, without which the sound of American indie-rock in the Nineties wouldn't have been the same.

Life is funny, but not ah ah funny

An unspecified number of transient members, and one permanent, deeply troubled one. That's how Eels are self-deprecatingly defined by their leader and soul, Mark Oliver Everett. Their story is nothing less than the adventure of his life.
The Everett family lives in Virginia, not far from Washington, in one of those classic American small towns with a perfectly bourgeois veneer. Mark Oliver, born in 1963, is the Everetts' second child; a few years earlier they'd had a daughter named Elizabeth Ann. But since there were too many Marks among his friends to tell them apart, the young Everett decided to go by the initial of his surname as a nickname, becoming, from then on, simply "E" to everyone.

The Everetts are strange people: their inability to communicate with one another is such that E himself would later compare them to the characters in Ang Lee's film "The Ice Storm". As a teenager, his sister Elizabeth begins to suffer from psychiatric troubles, but for young Mark she always remains a role model, especially when it comes to his love of music. For an entire year, every day after school, Elizabeth puts After The Gold Rush by Neil Young on the turntable, and Mark listens closely to every note, even though he's convinced the singer is a woman: he certainly couldn't have imagined that one day, during the recording sessions for Daisies Of The Galaxy, he would play the very same piano Neil Young used on that record…
Besides his toy drum kit, E amuses himself by banging away on the family piano and on the acoustic guitar his sister had left gathering dust in the closet. School, on the other hand, isn't for him: between drugs, alcohol and petty theft, at fourteen he finds himself having to appear before two different courts on the same day… By the time he gets to college, he's already tried everything: "The other kids were excited about having sex and drinking beer for the first time, but for me those things had been cool when I was twelve".

One day in 1982, E wakes up and finds his father lying motionless in bed. A heart attack had struck him down at just fifty years old. Up until then, father and son had barely exchanged more than a couple of sentences. "I found out more about him by researching him on the internet than I did living in the same house with him", E recalls.
Mark decides to drop out of college and goes to work at a gas station. Meanwhile, his listening habits grow ever more omnivorous: every new musical passion becomes an obsession for him, from Ray Charles to Bob Dylan, from the Who to Prince. With a second-hand four-track recorder, E decides to turn his dreams into songs. "I didn't have a purpose. I just had a real hunger to write songs", he would later note in his autobiography, "Things The Grandchildren Should Know". "Musically it was a strange, naive mix of pop, country and soul with synthesizer and drum machine. Almost every week I'd put out a new 'album' of songs".

Among those early experiments is the album Bad Dude In Love, credited simply to Mark Everett and released in 1985 in just 500 copies. Later disowned by its own author (who would always avoid mentioning it), it briefly surfaced on eBay in 2005, before finally spreading online thanks to fans only in 2009. It's not the typical early sketches of a budding singer-songwriter, but rather the pop exercise book of an Eighties kid: brazenly catchy melodies, synths galore and even a backing group of female singers (aptly christened the "Everettes"…).
Introduced by an abrupt notice of dismissal, the kind Mark was surely used to receiving back then, "Everybody's Trying To Bum Me Out" immediately delivers a sticky chorus built around the title line, which would be echoed years later in the lyrics of "Flower". Amid the glossy plastic sheen of the guitars and grooves, Prince is the record's guiding spirit, which mostly suffers from the conventionality of its more or less danceable arrangements. There's also room for a couple of Motown covers ("Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" and "I Can't Get Next To You") and an excursion into the Elvis Presley catalogue with "Burning Love", but E's real talent shines through in the sparkling ode to the girl next door, "The Girl In My Neighborhood", which is nothing less than the first draft of what would later become "Rotten World Blues", included in 2008 on Useless Trinkets.

Virginia's provincial air has by now grown too confining for E, who flips a coin to choose between New York and Los Angeles as his destination. The City of Angels wins out, also because of the two it's the farthest from home, and Mark wants to escape somewhere nobody can reach him. At twenty-four, he loads all his belongings into his car and heads off alone to the Californian megalopolis.
Los Angeles is a hostile city for an introverted, solitary young man who doesn't know a living soul there. Mr. E finds work at a car wash, from where he gazes at the Polygram Records building in the distance like some unreachable monument. Meanwhile, his four-track recorder fills up day after day with new ideas, new lyrics, new songs. But his life in California grows increasingly alienating, hemmed in between dead-end jobs and obsessive home recordings.

Hello cruel world

Another garage sale. Could life really hinge on a neighborhood flea market?
This time the stalls in question are the ones set up outside the house of John Carter, an Atlantic talent scout E had met in Los Angeles and to whom he'd given his latest demo tape. Carter had been fired from the label before he had time to launch E's career, but fate wasn't ready to give up so easily: that day, E's tape ends up not in the hands of some random neighbor, but in those of record producer Davitt Sigerson, who would soon become president of Polydor. Almost without realizing it, E suddenly finds himself walking into the very building he had so often stared at from afar, signing a contract with Polydor — all without ever having actually played a show, save for the one at school where he'd performed as an accomplished drummer, launching into a Keith Moon-style rendition of the American national anthem…

It's 1991, and E gets straight to work turning all the ideas buzzing in his head into his first proper record. The album comes out in early 1992 under the perfect calling-card title A Man Called E. For anyone listening today, already familiar with what Eels would go on to do in the years that followed, E's style feels immediately unmistakable. The sound, however, comes across as plasticky, with hazy keyboards and synthetic drums that are irredeemably Eighties, wrapping everything in a pop devoid of bite. "Listening back to it today," E would write in his autobiography, "I cringe at the kitschy sound of the reverb and the instrumentation on some of the tracks." And yet there's no shortage of songs that reveal E's still-raw talent, starting with "Hello Cruel World," which easily cracks the American indie charts with its cocky finger-snapping and catchy melody. What's still missing from E's music is personality: the rock inflections of "Are You And Me Gonna Happen" and "Nowheresville," along with the pianistic romanticism of "Mockinbird Franklin," "E's Tune" and "You'll Be The Scarecrow," could belong to a duet between Tom Petty and Billy Joel, but they're too predictable to really astonish. As for the lyrics, A Man Called E is a declaration of inadequacy in the face of life and time, and at the same time a proud assertion of one's own difference, never losing the hope that tomorrow a ray of sunlight might break through even the mud.

After the album's release, E tours America as support for Tori Amos and starts getting comfortable with the live dimension he hadn't yet had a chance to tackle, getting encouraging responses from audiences.
In December 1993, the second album under the E name, Broken Toy Shop, sees the light of day, marked by the end of a relationship he recalls as his "personal Vietnam." It's a record whose atmosphere closely echoes its predecessor's, though this time E seems to have achieved greater economy of means. The decisive flash of genius is still missing, but "The Only Thing I Care About" is the most fully realized idea across his two solo albums, in the way E manages to sing all his dissatisfaction with a breezy smile. The reflective yet spontaneous style of songs like "Manchester Girl," "The Most Unpleasant Man" and "The Day I Wrote You Off," which recall both Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren, firmly places E within that new generation of American pop singer-songwriters that would later include the likes of Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright.
In terms of sales, though, Broken Toy Shop is a flop, and Polydor, which has meanwhile changed presidents, doesn't hesitate to drop him: early-Nineties radio is looking for angry young men in flannel shirts, not E's romantic depression. The blow is hard to take, and E starts to feel like his cause is already lost. John Carter, who by now has become something between a manager and a kind of adoptive father to him, organizes a short tour of California, but the shows are almost always empty, except for the one where E finds himself facing a group of drunk kids trying to rough him up… The young Everett is convinced he has truly hit rock bottom.

You’d better give me something to fill the hole

A slowed-down beat, cinematic strings, a sinuous, piercing voice: E pulls over to the side of the road and switches off the engine to focus solely on the notes coming from his car radio. It's Portishead, and for him it's like a revelation: suddenly the oddball sound collages he used to enjoy making as a kid look like the door to a whole new musical universe. With the help of a few computer-music-savvy friends, E throws himself headlong into assembling new tracks built from digital loops, samples and electric guitar parts. Between 1995 and 1996, E records more than seventy songs, drifting between his friends' basements: at this point, what he needs is a band that will let him play the new material live. Together with drummer Jonathan Norton, known as "Butch," with whom he'd already shared a stage before, and bassist Tommy Walter, E improvises a jam session, and the result is instantly thrilling. "Actually I was doing just fine on my own," E recalls, "but playing with Butch and Tommy gave the songs a new live perspective that impressed me so much it convinced me to swallow my pride and become part of a band." Mr. E has finally found the spark he was still missing: this time, the adventure is really about to begin.
For the new band, Carter suggests a name that directly echoes his own: what better, then, than a word starting with a double "e," even if "eels" are hardly among E's main sources of inspiration… "I wanted my solo albums and the band's albums to sit next to each other on record store shelves," E notes wryly, "but I hadn't thought about how many Eagles and Earth Wind And Fire records there were…"

Local radio stations start playing the new Eels songs, and the record industry soon takes notice: Eels sign to Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks, and in August 1996 their debut album is ready to hit record store shelves. The title is Beautiful Freak, and the cover features a little girl on all fours with long black hair and eyes so wildly huge they take up almost her entire face: a monster, sure, but one of an irresistible tenderness. "Is the celebratory side of being a freak," E proudly declares. And indeed, Beautiful Freak presents itself as a veritable hymn to misfits, who manage to keep smiling about being eternally out of place.
The dazzling single that accompanies the album's launch, "Novocaine For The Soul," which had been sitting in a drawer since 1993, is the perfect manifesto of a slanted rock that still manages to speak directly to the heart, like a Beck busy writing a new "Loser" alongside Grandaddy. It opens with the crackle of vinyl and the echo of an old-fashioned little orchestra, but then E's voice comes straight in, hoarse and dusty like some old bluesman reincarnated in the middle of "Generation X," declaring that life is hard and that you need something to keep from dying: novocaine for the soul, something to numb the vertigo of desires that open up like a bottomless well. Only then do guitars, drums and the full arsenal of the rock ballad kick in, for what is destined to become a small "alternative" classic of the Nineties, one that immediately wins over the indie crowd and propels the album to a surprising critical and commercial success.

Compared to E's solo albums, what's most striking about Beautiful Freak is above all the eclectic candor of its arrangements. The guitars on "Rags To Rags," "Not Ready Yet" and "Mental" sound as full and biting as those of the Flaming Lips or Pavement, but they have little to do with the angularity of prevailing grunge. The rounded bass grooves and the loose-limbed drumming of tracks like "Your Lucky Day In Hell" bring to mind the playful pop of Cake more than the intellectualism of emerging post-rockers, while the use of vintage-flavored electronics is always filtered through a sensibility light years away from club culture. And even when the mood takes on a lullaby-like sweetness, as on the title track or the closing "Manchild," there's never a shortage of surprises, whether it's a heavenly angelic choir backing "Flower" or the deliberately off-key dissonances of "My Beloved Monster," written in half an hour during a songwriting challenge with friend Jon Brion and destined to become one of the band's signature songs.
The comparison that comes most naturally is with Beck, who just a few months before the release of Beautiful Freak had put out his masterpiece "Odelay." Just listen to "Susan's House" to be convinced, with its relentless spoken word that morphs into the piano soul phrasing of the chorus, sampled from an old Gladys Knight And The Pips record. It's no coincidence that alongside Eels in the album's production is Mike Simpson of the Dust Brothers, who had already worked with Beck on "Odelay." Mr. E, however, is keen to point out the difference that sets him apart from his fellow Angeleno: "Beck is more groove-oriented, I'm more song-based. We both have a passion for old recording techniques and the art of collage, but our approaches are very different. I'm less interested in being cool."

The characters who move through the tracks of Beautiful Freak are strange creatures who look around in bewilderment with their childlike eyes, discovering that the world of supposed winners they're shut out of isn't really all that interesting to want to belong to. “C’è un mondo intero, là fuori / lo so perché ne ho sentito parlare / nei miei sogni più dolci / vorrei andare fuori per una passeggiata / ma non credo di essere ancora pronto”, E sings on "Not Ready Yet." Just like the protagonist of "Guest List" (one of the album's most captivating ballads, whose nocturnal harmonica seems to come straight from the Dylan of "Oh Mercy"), the place of these "beautiful freaks" is in the shadows outside a club, watching the bouncer scroll down the guest list. But in the world of Eels, despair never gets the last word: after all, today could be your "lucky day in hell"…

Between 1996 and 1997, Eels are constantly on tour. The guitar impact of their shows is far louder than you'd expect from listening to Beautiful Freak, and their live performances prove thrilling, helping cement the band's reputation.
After receiving three nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards for the video for "Novocaine For The Soul," in which the band members float weightlessly with their instruments against a black-and-white urban backdrop, Eels win a Brit Award for "Best International Newcomer." A prize that Butch would soon put to much more practical use as a cymbal stand for his drum kit… Collaborations with the film world also start coming in, thanks to the gorgeous "Bad News," written for Wim Wenders' "The End Of Violence," and the inclusion of "Your Lucky Day In Hell" on the soundtrack of "Scream 2." But all the recognition the band receives only deepens E's bitterness over the hypocrisy of the indie scene he finds himself up against: "the so-called alternative culture," he would later observe in his autobiography, "wasn't really alternative at all. It was made to sell, just like any other shopping-mall product. It wasn't rebelling against anything." The low point comes with Eels' appearance at Lollapalooza: "a sea of teenage bullies with their baseball caps on backwards wanted to flip me off in unison while we played 'Novocaine For The Soul' as a spoken-word piece, complete with bongos and finger snaps, instead of the electric-guitar-and-drums version blasting out of their jeep speakers that summer."

You’re dead but the world keeps spinning

In "High Fidelity," Nick Hornby argues that "there aren't that many pop songs about death — not good ones, anyway." Faced with the mystery of death, pop music apparently has nothing to say. Evidently, E doesn't see it that way: for him, music can't ignore any aspect of life, not even its most dramatic ones.
His father's death is only the beginning of the losses that strike E's family: his sister Elizabeth takes her own life in 1996 after spiraling into alcohol and drug abuse, while their mother is diagnosed with cancer that leaves her little time left to live. Suddenly, E realizes he is destined to become the last surviving member of his family. Writing about the tragedy he's facing feels impossible: the grip of grief is so suffocating it takes his breath away. But the more he tries to escape the terrible reality in front of him, the more false and illusory his songs seem to him. So E decides to put his most intimate family dramas at the very center of his new compositions, trying to wring from them a positivity that seems almost impossible.

When you find yourself having to come to terms with the death of people you love, talk is useless: all that matters is the experience itself. E's new songs, destined to form the pieces of Eels' masterpiece Electro-Shock Blues, aren't abstract reflections on the meaning of death: they're traces of one man's experience in the face of existence's harshest drama. A man saved from the abyss only by the catharsis of music.
With raw honesty, E sings of funerals, hospitals, mental illness and radiation therapy, never losing his naive poetic sensibility or the sharpness of his irony, moving lightly between limpid guitars, old toy keyboards and sparse orchestration. The true protagonists of Electro-Shock Blues are E's family ghosts: the verses of the "Prelude" that opens the booklet belong to his grandmother, Katharine Kennedy, while the drawing of the boy crying over spilt milk printed inside is an old sketch by his father, and the lyrics of the title track are drawn from his sister Elizabeth's diary.

"If Beautiful Freak was our postcard to the world, Electro-Shock Blues is a phone call in the middle of the night that the world doesn't want to answer," E says of the album's meaning. The songs on Electro-Shock Blues are sad songs about happiness and happy songs about sadness: according to E, "being happy means being happy and sad at the same time, and being sad means being sad and happy. It's like the Motown formula: pairing sad lyrics with cheerful music."
The crystalline arpeggios that open "Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor" slide like dewdrops down cheeks hollowed by tears. Like a terrible warning, E's sister's first suicide attempt hangs in the air with chilling frankness: "Waking up is harder when you want to die." But there's no room for illusions, and the worst nightmare becomes reality immediately with the funeral march of "Going To Your Funeral Part I," under the cruel sun of "a perfect day for a perfect sorrow."
E's dismay in the face of death is all the more poignant for how carefully it avoids predictably funereal tones. From the cynical clangor of "Cancer For The Cure," as relentless as a spectral version of Beck's "Devil's Haircut," we move in the blink of an eye to the interplay of symphonic flourishes over pop dance rhythms in "My Descent Into Madness," as simple and inspired as the early Beta Band reimagined by Wilco, before plunging into the sickly jazz of "Hospital Food" and the Prince-style falsetto of "Efil's God."

The flashbacks to Elizabeth Everett's life bring back the innocence of childhood with the acoustic candor of "3 Speed," straight out of Belle & Sebastian, but then come the barred windows of the psychiatric ward in "My Descent Into Madness" and the anguish of the held piano breath of "Electro-Shock Blues." Then the ghostly music-box chime of "Last Stop: This Town" rises up tinkling, swollen with the nostalgia of a final goodbye, in an irresistible climax of guitars with liquid, jagged reverb. Shortly after his sister's funeral, E's landlady told him she'd seen the ghost of a young girl wandering around the apartment while E was out. After an initial moment of terror, E recalls thinking it would be nice if Elizabeth came back to say goodbye. In the perfect pop contraption of "Last Stop: This Town," once again the result of collaboration with Mike Simpson, E imagines his sister, just as in the drawing on the album cover, flying with him one last time over the city rooftops, sending the neighborhood into a panic…

In the second half of Electro-Shock Blues, the album's initial eclecticism gives way to a more rarefied singer-songwriter atmosphere, able to combine the fragility of Elliott Smith with the minimalism of Sparklehorse. After the brief nod to his father's memory in "Baby Genius," built around a sampled hymn, the focus shifts to his mother's illness: stark, bleeding elegies like "Dead Of Winter," "Climbing Up To The Moon" (featuring Grant Lee Phillips, T-Bone Burnett and Jon Brion) and "Ant Farm," enriched by Lisa Germano's singing violin, leave you breathless with their purity.
This time, numbing the pain doesn't work: a dose of "novocaine for the soul" isn't enough, because "the medication is wearing off" and there's no escaping the suffering, as E sings on "The Medication Is Wearing Off." But just as everything he loves seems to vanish before his eyes, it becomes clearer than ever to E that there's something at the core of the self that is simply not meant to fade into nothing: "I will not fade into the night" is the cry that rises from his heart as he watches his mother slowly slip away in "Dead Of Winter." Even in the parched soil of the sharpest pain, the seed of an unexpected hope can bloom, entrusted to the closing lines of the enchanting "P.S. You Rock My World": “I was at a funeral the day I relized / I wanted to spend my life with you (…) And I was thinking ‘bout everyone is dying / And maybe it’s time to live”.

Electro-Shock Blues is released in October 1998 and is essentially E's personal work, with a varied cast of occasional collaborators, the only permanent Eels member among them being drummer Butch. Mr. E introduces the album with his usual dark humor: "Suicide, death, depression, all that stuff… Come on, these are the things that sell records! Kids love cancer. It'll sell a ton. People love hearing the word cancer on the radio." Indeed, who hasn't dreamed of humming a song about hospital food in the shower…?
The first person E plays his new work for, as always, is John Carter, but this time the reaction is very different from what E expects: as far as Carter is concerned, a record like this has no chance of ever being released. Having laid himself so openly bare, E is devastated to feel misunderstood by the very first person who ever believed in his music. But Electro-Shock Blues matters too much to him, and he decides to press on even without Carter's backing.
Events prove him right: upon its release in October 1998, the album is instantly met with enthusiastic critical acclaim, and the surreal video for "Last Stop: This Town," centered on a mad machine that turns a carrot into a clone of E, earns a nomination at the MTV Video Music Awards, while the album's other single, "Cancer For The Cure," is included on the soundtrack of "American Beauty." Eels go on tour with a new bassist, Adam Siegal, replacing Tommy Walter, crossing first the United States and then Europe as support for Pulp. Their live show once again offers a far rockier approach than the record's mood would suggest, alternating biting guitars with acoustic whispers. To document the tour, a live album titled Electro-Shock Blues Show is put on sale in 2002 through the official Eels website, and it's far more than a mere souvenir for fans, as shown by the raw "Souljacker Part I," unreleased at the time and destined four years later to become the lead single of the album Souljacker, the stunning Spanish-tinged version of "Novocaine For The Soul," and the brazen mash-up of the melody of "My Beloved Monster," first with the legendary riff of "Satisfaction" and then, on the ghost track, with the Smokey Robinson classic "My Girl."

Maybe it's time to live

During the Electro-Shock Blues tour, E receives the news that his mother has died: news that, however long it had been expected, is certainly no less painful for it. To avoid being swallowed by the void opening up in his life, E has only one way forward: cling once again to music.
Mr. E recalls waking up one morning like any other and suddenly realizing that, in order to keep going, he had an overwhelming need to do something capable of expressing all his love for life. So, just a few months after the release of Electro-Shock Blues, E starts writing a flurry of new songs in his basement, picking up from the positive note on which the previous record had ended. The sense of a fresh start driving E leads him to challenge himself, since, in his view, "it's much harder to write happy songs than sad ones."

Recorded in the spring of 1999, Daisies Of The Galaxy wasn't released until March 2000, having sat in the label's drawers for months, as they were disappointed by the lack of an easy, radio-friendly single to push. According to E, this third album under the Eels name is "an antidote to Electro-Shock Blues," like "the hotel wake-up call telling you your delicious breakfast is ready."
In the songs on Daisies Of The Galaxy, the first thing that changes profoundly is the point of view, replacing the introspection of the previous record with the perspective of a whole cast of characters. Musically, too, the contrast with Electro-Shock Blues and Beautiful Freak is even more striking. "No samples were harmed during the making of this record," E proudly declares in the album's liner notes: Eels set aside their Beck-like side in favor of sunny, intimate songwriting rooted in the most classic American tradition. Alongside E and his trusty Butch, Grant Lee Phillips is once again on board, while "Estate Sale" features Peter Buck of R.E.M. on guitar. The result is a perfect fusion of the joyful melancholy of Go-Betweens and an intimate sensibility halfway between Ed Harcourt and Joseph Arthur. Compared to the varied shapes of the previous albums, Daisies Of The Galaxy stands out immediately for its consistent mood, alternating gently orchestral acoustic ballads with driving bass lines, as in "Flyswatter," "The Sound Of Fear" and "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues." The swirling strings, arranged by Jim Lang, lend Eels' compositions a songwriterly elegance that points directly to the refined, biting style of Randy Newman: "We're both people who enjoy ruining a beautiful song by throwing in a line that would stop Céline Dion from ever covering it," E jokes about it.

A rare case in the record industry, the lead single from Daisies Of The Galaxy, "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues," produced once again with Mike Simpson, is actually a ghost track. According to E, the song was never supposed to make the album, having been recorded several months after the rest of the record, but the label insisted it be included at all costs. For once, though, you can't really fault the music industry's logic: "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues" is a sparkling pop gem that translates the rock'n'roll of "La Bamba"'s era into a breezy indie detour, sticking in your memory with the bittersweet grin of its irresistible "Goddamn right, it's a beautiful day, ah ah."
The opening of Daisies Of The Galaxy once again begins with a funeral. But this time it's a New Orleans-style funeral, the kind described by the brass band on "Grace Kelly Blues": "it's music made to celebrate life," E explains. The folk delight that follows, "Packing Blankets," is the perfect bridge to Electro-Shock Blues, with its urge to start living again on a sunny day. Memory, on Daisies Of The Galaxy, takes on sweeter guises than in the past, as in the whistling stop-and-go of "I Like Birds," a tribute to the memory of his mother and her love of birds, or in the brief, floating instrumental "Estate Sale," inspired by the time E, during the recording of the album, had to go back to Virginia to clear out his parents' old house.

The raw pain of the previous record resurfaces only in the moving piano-and-strings lied of "It's A Motherfucker." A song that puts Eels in the headlines, though not for its musical merits: Daisies Of The Galaxy is given away free to attendees of a Democratic convention in support of Al Gore, and George W. Bush's staff doesn't hesitate to accuse his opponent of distributing inappropriate material, given the combination of the none-too-prim title of "It's A Motherfucker" and the artwork's old-school children's-textbook look. In the end, the only outcome of this hypocritical querelle is that Eels have to produce a paradoxically politically correct version of the track, titled "It's A Monstertrucker"…
"Flyswatter," with its gothic fairy-tale bells and ghostly dance, leads Daisies Of The Galaxy into its liveliest stretch, alongside the organ-and-drums prank of "Tiger In My Tank," which E calls "an anti-advertising jingle" and in which Eels have fun mocking the trend of lending music to commercials. Despite the number of offers they've received, Eels stubbornly refuse to let their music be used for advertising: according to E, "it depends on how much your songs mean to you. When I wrote 'Last Stop: This Town' I wasn't thinking about a perfume, I was thinking about my sister's death…" In a market where the only way left to climb the charts seems to be turning your music into a ringtone, it takes real nerve to take a stand like that.

The happiness that accompanies E during the recording of Daisies Of The Galaxy, however, doesn't last until the album's release. During the long months of limbo in which the record seems unable to find anyone willing to put it out, E sinks back into depression, and by the time it's time to go back on tour he has no desire to play songs that no longer reflect his state of mind. The turning point comes from drummer Butch, who, after overdoing it one night on pizza, dreams of a concert complete with strings and horns, in which he plays the timpani and Eels perform a grand overture… Such a wild idea can only thrill the band's leader, who decides to bring to life the "Eels Orchestra": together with Butch and Lisa Germano, E puts together a varied ensemble and sets off on the most colorful tour in Eels history, which, just as in Butch's dream, opens with an instrumental overture hinting at the band's classic tunes.
This tour, too, is captured on a live album sold online by the band, Oh What A Beautiful Morning. From the piano notes that mark the start of "Feeling Good" to the upbeat Ray Charles cover of "Oh What A Beautiful Morning," this album is also full of wonderful surprises, including standout acoustic versions of "Grace Kelly Blues" and "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues" and the jazzy improvisations of "Flyswatter."
In the United States, E tours in 2000 not only with his "Eels Orchestra" but also as a solo act, opening for Fiona Apple.
Daisies Of The Galaxy once again earns widespread critical acclaim, and director Ron Howard includes an unreleased Eels track, "Christmas Is Going To The Dogs," in his Christmas film "How The Grinch Stole Christmas," while "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues" ends up on the soundtrack of the teen comedy "Road Trip." The relationship between Hollywood and Eels grows ever closer, though E admits he isn't too thrilled about it, since he often finds himself knowing nothing about the film his songs will be used in: for "Road Trip," he's practically forced by the label to shoot a video with the film's cast, an experience that remains, for E, one of the most humiliating of his career.

The souljacker can’t get my soul

During the recording of Electro-Shock Blues, E lets himself be talked into attending a meditation retreat in the California woods. In the unnatural silence of those days, E starts reflecting on a serial killer who had made American headlines throughout the Nineties, dubbed by the press the "Soul Jacker," because he claimed he didn't just want to kill his victims but also wanted to steal their souls. Struck by what he'd read in the papers, E is especially taken by the idea that you can lose your own soul not so much through some outside threat, but simply by not even knowing you have one. "People are caught up in a thousand distractions and no longer recognize what should come first in life," he says. "How can you defend something you don't know you have? But nobody can take your soul unless you let them." The first lines of what would become "Souljacker Part II" start forming in E's mind, but since talking, reading and writing are strictly forbidden at the retreat, E has to sneak off to the bathroom and jot down notes on toilet paper so as not to lose the idea…

It's as early as 1998, then, that E begins working on the project for an album titled Souljacker. That same year, while in Britain promoting Electro-Shock Blues, E meets English guitarist John Parish backstage at "Top Of The Pops," where Parish is appearing as a member of PJ Harvey's band. The two click instantly, and from that day on a friendship develops that leads them to decide to collaborate on an album together. The first recordings start traveling back and forth between E's basement in Los Angeles and John Parish's in Bristol: among them are also a few songs left off Electro-Shock Blues, like "Souljacker Part I," which Eels had already played live. In 2000, while promoting Daisies Of The Galaxy, E states that he has another album ready, with a darker, more brooding atmosphere, full of guitar feedback: "I thought about releasing them together as a double album, but they're too different. Who knows, maybe it would have been my masterpiece…"
Only once the Daisies Of The Galaxy tour wraps up does E decide to finally bring the "soul jacker" idea to completion, reuniting with John Parish to develop the sketches gathered over the years.
Souljacker is ready for release in September 2001, but the Twin Towers attack delays the album's release in the United States: on the cover, E sports a menacing, Unabomber-style terrorist look, with a thick black beard, dark glasses and a hood pulled over his face. Not exactly ideal for a country where the wound of September 11th is still fresh… So the album is initially released only in Europe, while in the United States it comes out in March of the following year.

For anyone who had come to know Eels as purveyors of music built on acoustic melancholy and witty samples, the impact of Souljacker is jarring: from the very first notes of the record, the scene is dominated by the distorted sound of abrasive, angular electric guitars, culminating in the jagged edges of the single "Souljacker Part I," accompanied by a video shot by Wim Wenders in an old abandoned East Berlin prison. The fact is that the ZZ Top-style riffage of tracks like "Dog Faced Boy" and "Teenage Witch" is fun but coarse-grained, and even when the tone softens into more supple pop, some passages seem to lack the sense of balance found on previous records, making the ideas behind tracks like "That's Not Really Funny" and "Jungle Telegraph" come across as overly swaggering.
The candy-coated softness of "Friendly Ghost" and "Fresh Feeling" wraps the palate in that trademark Eels flavor, but it's in the more linear, stripped-down pieces, like the crepuscular ballads "Bus Stop Boxer" and "Woman Driving, Man Sleeping," that E's full brilliance remains intact. As for the high sugar content in the lyrics of some Souljacker tracks, it's worth remembering that, during 2000, E married a Russian dentist he met while staying at a kind of spirit-rehabilitation clinic in Germany: it's to his wife that "Fresh Feeling" (whose airy string motif is actually a sample of a track from Daisies Of The Galaxy, "Selective Memory"), "World Of Shit" and the punk sabbath of "What Is This Note?" are dedicated. The marriage would last only a few years, but for E it remains one of the happiest periods of his life.

Following in the footsteps of Beautiful Freak, Souljacker is a parade of strange, outcast characters, from the dog-faced boy to the teenage witch, right down to the bus-stop boxer, inspired by a story told during the recording of the album by one of the sound engineers, who as a kid was urged every day by his father, while being walked to the school bus, to go fight with his classmates… According to E, keeping up the telephone metaphor he used for the previous albums, Souljacker is like "a call from the front desk telling you your soul has been left with the concierge and you can pick it up whenever you like." The angry howl of "Souljacker Part I" captures the viewpoint of two kids who have already lost their souls and are now ready for anything, like Dostoevskian demons adrift in a bored, indifferent America plagued by school-shooting massacres. But the whisper of "Souljacker Part II," placed near the end of the album, is the ultimate declaration of hope that our souls might still be saved.

Faced with Eels' "electric turn," audiences are left disoriented, and critics also greet the album rather coolly. Despite its more immediate impact and a handful of tracks that rank with the band's classics, Souljacker thus remains the least convincing chapter in Eels' discography.
On stage, the songs from Souljacker grow even harder and more clattering, standing alongside incredible punked-up, Ramones-style readings of "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues" and "I Like Birds" and unlikely covers like Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On." The "Bus Driving, Band Rocking Tour" keeps E busy throughout 2002 and features John Parish on guitar (replaced by Joe Gore for the American shows), Butch on drums and Kool G Murder on bass, who shows up on stage every night with a robber's nylon stocking over his face…
Meanwhile, Eels' growing fame gets a further boost when "My Beloved Monster" is included in the soundtrack of a blockbuster as big as "Shrek": a pairing between the funny green ogre and Mr. E's own freaks that turns out to be a perfect match.

Everybody knows these are rock hard times

After the controversial reception given to Souljacker, E has in mind the ambitious project of a record capable of summing up everything Eels had expressed over the course of their career, an album able to reflect the awareness gained on the brink of his fateful fortieth birthday. But while the songs for what he considers "the mother of all Eels albums" start piling up, E can't sit still and needs to take some creative breaks from the massive undertaking. "I never get writer's block," E insists. "If anything I have the opposite problem: I can never stop, I write compulsively. It's torture: some nights I'm sitting at home watching a movie and after ten minutes I feel like I have to write a song, and if I try to ignore it, the thought that the song might be lost forever drives me crazy…"

So, during 2003, E actually puts out three new records, to the delight of Eels' ever-growing fanbase. The first is released under the new pseudonym "MC Honky" and is bluntly titled I Am The Messiah. Mr. E firmly denies that MC Honky is his alter ego and claims to simply be his discoverer, concocting a wild story according to which the MC Honky moniker actually conceals a fifty-five-year-old man from Silverlake who, after working at Capitol with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., supposedly decided to take up pottery… But his daughter allegedly sent E a tape of his, leading to the album's release. Given that such a tale comes from someone like E, who has always named the caustic, surreal American comedian Andy Kaufman as his idol, there's little reason to believe much of it is true… What is certain is that I Am The Messiah sounds like an exhilarating alternative-dancefloor version of Eels, unleashing a kaleidoscope of beats worthy of a DJ obsessed with indietronica.

The second detour E allows himself in 2003 is the perfect crowning of the close relationship that has always existed between cinema and Eels' music. Mr. E composes the soundtrack for Ed Solomon's film Levity: two tracks, "Skywriting" and "Taking A Bath In Rust," are credited to Eels, while the rest of the soundtrack bears, for the first time, the explicit signature of Mark Oliver Everett rather than the man known as E. The record, built mainly around instrumental compositions, is as soft as a spring cloud and stands as the most rarefied, atmospheric work born from the Eels frontman. As if that weren't enough, Eels also gift two more wonderful unreleased tracks, "Mighty Fine Blues" and "Eyes Down," to yet another soundtrack, that of the film "Holes."

But both the MC Honky record and the film work are nothing more than tasty appetizers ahead of the real new Eels album proper, released in the summer of 2003. The title, as usual, lives up to E's mischievous spirit: Shootenanny! is a delirious neologism which, riffing on the term "hootenanny" (used by Sixties folksingers to describe their gatherings), is meant, in E's own words, to indicate "a social gathering at which participants engage in folk singing and sometimes dancing, but mostly the shooting of guns"…
Recorded in just about ten days with Joe Gore on guitar, Kool G Murder on bass and Butch on drums, Shootenanny! is, more than any other Eels record, the sound of a live band. No concept this time around for Eels: Shootenanny! aims to be "just" a collection of great songs, even if, compared to the band's first three albums, it perhaps lacks that one flash capable of leaving you briefly open-mouthed.

Amid the only-seemingly-sunny power pop of tracks like "Rock Hard Times," the sweltering blues of "All In A Day's Work" and the guitar arpeggios of "Restraining Order Blues," "The Good Old Days" and "Numbered Days," one's mind drifts more toward E's early, rougher solo work than toward the cross-pollinations of Electro-Shock Blues: more R.E.M. than Beck, in other words, even if "Love Of The Loveless" offers electronic winks worthy of the pop smarts of Beautiful Freak.
The spontaneity of tracks like "Wrong About Bobby" actually comes across as mere filler, while the breezy rock'n'roll of the single "Saturday Morning" has fun once again playing with E's childhood imagery, telling the story of a bored kid waiting for his parents to wake up on a Saturday morning, with a video in which the band's pajama-clad frontman makes tasty pancakes in a cabin in the woods and gets picked up by a truck full of teenage zombies… But then Mr. E's dusty voice and the caress of Lisa Germano's violin make sure that the painful awareness of tracks like the distorted, anguished "Agony" melts into the hope of the closing "Somebody Loves You."
The feeling, however, is that E ended up spreading his energy too thin across his side projects: in the end, Shootenanny! seems to suffer from an excess of productivity, occasionally betraying dips in inspiration that a bit more polishing could probably have avoided.

The start of the Shootenanny! tour brings a nasty surprise for Eels fans: the long-standing relationship with Butch comes to an abrupt end over financial disagreements that had become irreconcilable, even though the official line is that the drummer is busy with Tracy Chapman. His place is taken by Puddin' on drums, while Chet Lyster (later rebranded The Chet) handles guitar and Kool G Murder (real name Rusty Loggsdon) plays bass. As usual, for the 2003 "Tour Of Duty" Eels also put out, in 2005 through their own distribution channels, a live album titled Sixteen Tons (Ten Songs), the result of a session recorded at an American radio station. Even though it's a less effective record than Electro-Shock Blues Show and Oh What A Beautiful Morning, the live renditions of the Shootenanny! tracks are energetic and sharp, and there's also room for covers of the Beatles' "I'm A Loser" and the blues classic "Sixteen Tons".
Mr. E ends the tour exhausted: his voice is on its last legs, and once home he has to undergo surgery to remove a nasal cyst. During the months of recovery, for the first time he finds himself unable to record new songs. But nothing stops him from working out the concept for his new album…

Alive in a magic world

In April 2005, E finally manages to bring to life the album he'd been dreaming of for years. Released on a new label, Vagrant, after Universal acquired Dreamworks and dropped Eels without even bothering to listen to the new material, Blinking Lights And Other Revelations is a record that's been a long time coming: the album's central theme dates all the way back to 1997, and the songs that make it up were written by E in his Los Angeles basement over the years, in the gaps between one album or tour and the next. It's no surprise, then, that Eels' sixth record arrives as an ambitious double album, gathering together no fewer than 33 new compositions for over an hour and a half of music. This new, mammoth undertaking, while not reaching the peaks of intensity of a soul-piercing album like Electro-Shock Blues, immediately comes across as the most brilliant Eels record since Daisies Of The Galaxy, of which it plays, to all intents and purposes, as the direct successor.

The two CDs of Blinking Lights And Other Revelations amount to a veritable Eels encyclopedia. There are the classic acoustic guitar chords, tailor-made to caress Mr. E's rough voice in its most intimate whispers. There are the unmistakable indie-pop carousels that Eels have always been masters of, full of filtered vocals, cheerfully vintage keyboards, drum taps and electronic toys, even venturing into Beautiful Freak territory on "Sweet Li'l Thing". And there are the Randy Newman-style piano ballads, whose range here is better than ever, from the old "Suicide Life" to "The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight", joined by a series of short instrumental pieces, light and airy like the compositions Badly Drawn Boy wrote for the soundtrack to "About A Boy". All elements that lead Eels to their perfect sound, with that gleaming polish of strings, horns, keyboards and little bells that always manages to stay measured rather than overdone. If anything, the only drawback of such a work is precisely that it serves as the perfect "Cliff's Notes" to a career, at times pushing right up to the edge of self-plagiarism.
But what matters is that Blinking Lights And Other Revelations is bursting with inspiration: just listen to the haunted-house party of "Old Shit / New Shit", which with its breezy swagger floats among the howls of some friendly ghost. How can you resist the brazen meeting of Van Morrison and Smash Mouth on "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)", or the organ-and-keyboard knees-up that erupts at the tail end of the driving tick-tock of "Trouble With Dreams"? Or, on the more intimate side, how not to fall for the delicate country-folk of "Railroad Man" or the bitterness-worn blues of "I'm Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart"?
Alongside E, as usual, besides drummers Butch and Puddin', bassist Kool G Murder and guitarist The Chet, there's a list of illustrious guests: from Peter Buck, who helps give the gorgeous "To Lick Your Boots" a gentle R.E.M. glow, to Tom Waits, who growls away in fine form on "Going Fetal", all the way to John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, who plays autoharp on the instrumental "Dusk: A Peach In The Orchard".

The idea at the heart of Blinking Lights And Other Revelations is simple and perfect: life works exactly like the blinking lights of the title, made up of an endless alternation between moments when everything seems to reveal its meaning and moments when everything seems to sink back into darkness. The only thing that matters is holding on to those instants of revelation, letting them become the path to follow.
Dreams alone aren't enough to sustain a life. The trouble with dreams, Eels warn us on "Trouble With Dreams", is that they don't come true, and when they do come true, they can no longer reach you. Rather, it's the longing for a place to belong that can reopen the heart to reality: a place where you let the water wash away every lie, as E sings on the hazy, floating "In The Yard, Behind The Church". Then life finds its truth again, and you can finally say, as on "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)", that you're "really living", whether you're lying on the floor screaming until you can't anymore, or in love with a girl who makes you feel like the world isn't such a bad place. Only then can fate become a road to travel, rather than a looming curse: "It's not where you're coming from, it's where you're going to / And I just wanna go with you", is the conclusion reached on "The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight".

Blinking Lights And Other Revelations sweeps away all the doubts raised by critics over the previous Souljacker and Shootenanny!, earning glowing reviews. Also in 2005, Eels release an EP containing, alongside the single "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)", two unreleased tracks and a live version of "Love Of The Loveless", and offer iTunes customers the exclusive chance to download a compilation of b-sides and rarities.
On the Daniel Johnston tribute album, "Discovered Covered", you can also hear Eels tackle "Living Life" in their characteristic style. Finally, there's the inevitable appointment with "Shrek" part two, on whose soundtrack Eels appear with the previously unreleased "I Need Some Sleep". Another unreleased track, "I Want To Protect You", ends up soundtracking scenes in the film "The Big White".

As the smoke rings from his cigar swirl in the dim light of his porch, a new idea takes shape in E's mind. "Why not do a show where I can freely smoke a cigar during the performance?", he recalls asking himself. Struck by such a flash of inspiration, E begins to picture himself walking on stage leaning on a cane, wrapped in a thick cloud of smoke. Around him are violins, cellos, pianos, antique keyboards… and a saw. At that point the vision is so vivid that it leaves the Eels frontman no choice but to make it real without hesitation.
So, in 2005 Mr. E takes on a new world tour with the brand-new Eels With Strings project: an adventure immortalized the following year on the band's first true live album, Live At Town Hall, which finally gives more than just die-hard fans the chance to capture the most intimate essence of Mr. E's creature as it expresses itself in front of an audience.
Recorded in June 2005 on the stage of the historic New York theatre once graced by names like Leonard Bernstein, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, Live At Town Hall presents Eels in the most crowded line-up of their history, backed by an all-female string quartet and with the two astonishing multi-instrumentalists The Chet and Big Al switching between guitar, upright bass, piano, celesta, pump organ, lap steel, autoharp, melodica and countless other odds and ends, including a trash can and a travel suitcase that let The Chet conjure up rhythms of pulsing warmth.
The theatrical setting proves to be the ideal context for the atmospheres of Blinking Lights And Other Revelations, managing to bring out new shades even in the fabric of classics like "My Beloved Monster". Because for Mr. E a concert isn't that kind of deflating "greatest hits with applause" so often served up to audiences these days, but truly is, following the Dylan lesson, an ever-new opportunity to recreate his own songs, to paint a picture that's always in motion. "It's painful to listen to an old song", E confesses. "You hear all the things you'd want to change. The beauty of a live performance, though, is that you really can change those things and adapt them to the present".

Across the whole length of Live At Town Hall, Eels' music floats like a single, enchanted chamber suite, caressing every song with measured orchestrations over which E's voice carves out a furrow of tears and smiles. From the infectious playfulness of "I Like Birds", "Losing Streak" and "Trouble With Dreams" to the dramatic sweep of "Bus Stop Boxer", passing through the Beatles-esque candy floss of "Dirty Girl" and the sprightly sweetness of the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina" cover, right up to the dreamy homage to Dylan on "Girl From The North Country", listening to Live At Town Hall is like plunging, breath held, into that bizarre and moving world Eels have managed to build over the years. You barely notice you've reached the record's closing moment, which sums up, in the lines of "Things The Grandchildren Should Know", the whole sense of that stubborn positivity with which E faces the tangle of joy and suffering that is life: “So in the end I’d like to say / That I’m a very thankful man / I tried to make the most of my situations / And enjoy what I had/ I knew true love and I knew passion / And the difference between the two / And I had some regrets / But if I had to do it all again / Well, it’s something I’d like to do”.

A very thankful man

For E, a single tour isn't enough to properly honor a double album like Blinking Lights And Other Revelations. Leaving Eels With Strings behind, Everett and co. embark in 2006 on a new tour, which proclaims itself right from its title: "No Strings Attached". What takes the stage this time is a sturdy, no-compromise rock trio, almost a more singer-songwriter-leaning take on the White Stripes. A full-on parody of rock-show clichés, as suggested by the cocky cover of Peaches and Iggy Pop's "Rock Show" and the constant onstage presence of bassist Krazy Al (formerly Big Al), busy doing anything except playing bass: posing as a bodyguard, miming kung-fu moves, boxing and bodybuilding, and reeling off the most over-the-top rockstar one-liners between songs... "Eels define coolness", Rolling Stone proclaims after the band's performance at Lollapalooza.
Once again documenting the tour, a semi-official live album, Live And In Person!, is released in 2008, opening with a thunderous, driving rendition of "Old Shit / New Shit" and "Eyes Down" before unleashing the inevitable "My Beloved Monster", updated into a frantic soul knees-up, and a distorted, dreamlike "Not Ready Yet", right through to a closing reinterpretation of Frank Sinatra's "That's Life" that seems tailor-made to fit E's crooked grin.

In 2007, the only notes coming from planet Eels are those of the feisty "Royal Pain", included on the soundtrack to "Shrek the Third". But that certainly doesn't mean E sits idle: at the end of the year, the BBC airs a documentary on the life and research of E's father, titled "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives". The documentary follows E himself as he embarks on a moving journey back into his father's memory, naturally accompanied by Eels' music.
Then, at the start of 2008, Eels fans risk a genuine overdose: first of all, Mr. E publishes his autobiography under the telling title "Things The Grandchildren Should Know", which Pete Townshend hyperbolically hails as "one of the best books ever written by a contemporary artist". With his usual plain, direct style, E opens his heart about the tragic and happy experiences of his life: "going through the suffering in my life made the other moments something I could really dig into and could learn to appreciate".

As if that weren't enough, in January 2008 two new records arrive at the same time: Meet The Eels, the band's first greatest hits after ten years of career, and Useless Trinkets, a monumental collection of no fewer than 50 tracks spanning b-sides, covers and assorted rarities. A look back that seems meant to mark a full stop after the glories of Blinking Lights And Other Revelations, before Eels take on a new chapter of their adventure. "I've never liked looking back because it's too painful. But doing it gave me the feeling of a weight lifted off my shoulders. I guess you could call it catharsis".

As always happens in these cases, the track selection on Meet The Eels (which comes with a DVD collecting videos shot by Eels over the years) can't please everyone: the exclusion of classics like "My Descent Into Madness" and "Bus Stop Boxer" in favor of lesser moments like "That's Not Really Funny" or the flashy cover of "Get Ur Freak On" doesn't quite convince.
But the richest course is obviously the useless trinkets of Useless Trinkets itself: anyone who knows Eels knows full well that it's precisely among the tracks left off the official albums that some of Mr. E's most precious treasures lie hidden. Nothing could be more wrong, then, than writing off these two CDs (plus a DVD collecting six tracks performed at Lollapalooza in 2006) as a mere product for die-hard fans only: on the contrary, it's an unmissable chance to retrace the history of "Everettian rock", as E has jokingly rechristened his own music, playing on the name of the school of thought born from his father's theories.

In the parallel universe of Useless Trinkets you find once again those crystalline acoustic-guitar miniatures capable of leaving you open-mouthed with their disarming simplicity; you're swept away once more by the irresistible indie-pop rough edges of prodigious toys like "Rotten World Blues" and "Eyes Down"; you run into the familiar traits of the more classically singer-songwriter piano ballads, including the old "Manchester Girl".
With a bitter bite, loneliness returns to pick at its own scars in the love letter that is "Fucker", one of the most perfect distillations of Mr. E's poetics: "Looking for a simple life / But life ain't simple". There's a perpetual feeling of being in the wrong place, as on "Bad News", and a dream of escaping life's anxieties, as on "Dog's Life" (already used as a sample back in the Electro-Shock Blues days for "Efil's God", which is nothing more than the title of "Dog's Life" spelled backwards…). What sharpens the questions is the experience reality forces upon us: from the death of loved ones, which E returns to on the icy "Funeral Parlor", to the realization of one's own fragility, caught in the daily routine of "After The Operation". And so a possible answer begins to emerge: the seemingly incomprehensible back-and-forth of pain and happiness in life isn't a sentence, but a mysterious opportunity for fulfillment. As E writes in his autobiography, celebrating life means embracing it in its highs and lows.

The alternate versions of old songs tell of a world where "My Beloved Monster" can turn into an intimate stroll one moment and a groove-laden romp the next; a world where "Souljacker Part I" and "Dog Faced Boy" can plunge into a dark, unsettling blues, and where "I Like Birds" can dress itself up as unrestrained punk. The remixes make "alternative" hits like "Susan's House" and "Novocaine For The Soul" sound more Beck-like than ever. The covers reveal E's wild passion for Prince, from a distorted "If I Was Your Girlfriend" to the sparkling "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", left off Live At Town Hall. The process of making a song his own goes so far that it's almost impossible to believe that "Open The Door", lifted from Magnapop, isn't E's own work: "Everything is good these days / But all of my friends are dying".

For his on the road return with “An evening with Eels”, E adopts yet another new formula, presenting a sort of autobiography in music and words accompanied solely by The Chet, who switches between guitar, drums, piano, saw, pedal steel and organ. Before each show, the BBC documentary about his father's life is screened, and E breaks up the songs with comic sketches and readings from “Things The Grandchildren Should Know”. A departure from the classic rock-concert format that could easily come across as pretentious, but instead once again puts the plain, unvarnished telling of experience at its centre. What really leaves a mark, though, is above all the explosive version of “Flyswatter”, in which E and The Chet swap places between piano and drums in the middle of the song, letting Mr. E dig up his past life as an accomplished drummer.
In 2008, E teams up with American playwright James Lapine, already a Pulitzer Prize winner, to co-write the stage play “Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing”, inspired by the life of eccentric singer Elva Miller.

Great pain over great beauty

Four years: practically a geological era by the frantic compositional pace of Mr. E. But when it comes to following up Blinking Lights And Other Revelations, E is ready to make up for lost time with an actual trilogy of albums, dedicated to the human heart in its most elemental experiences: desire, loss, hope. Stuff only someone like him could pull off convincingly…
Without wasting time on statements of intent, E takes advantage of the surprise factor and, over the span of a year and a half, delivers a cycle of albums whose full scope only becomes clear at the very end.
 

It's desire that E chooses as the theme to restart the Eels' return to the stage with, “that terrible, intense need that drives you into all sorts of situations that can change your life in big ways”: “12 songs of desire”, states the subtitle of Hombre Lobo, bluntly enough, released from the start of June 2009. A hairy record, and not just because of the beard sported right there on the cigar-box-style cover: Hombre Lobo sounds as rough and raw as a new Shotenanny!, starting with the almost Springsteen-esque blues that opens proceedings with “Prizefighter”, moving through the arpeggio-tipped fantasies of “In My Dreams”. It's no coincidence that the album was written and recorded entirely within a handful of weeks in the basement of the Everett house, with the immediacy of a live performance and with the sole help of Knuckles on drums and Kool G Murder on bass (with whom E co-wrote most of the songs).
Expected to be the Eels' back-to-the-future record, after the long stretch E spent looking at the past, Hombre Lobo actually comes across more as a varied catalogue of styles from the Eels workshop, where the classic jangly delicacy of “All The Beautiful Things” coexists with the brisk pace and backing vocals of “Beginner's Luck”.
As E himself admits, “there's a bit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Hombre Lobo, sometimes it's gentler, sometimes more aggressive”. When the werewolf takes over, “Fresh Blood” unleashes a late-period Beck with a teen-horror flavour and howls worthy of an anthology, while “Tremendous Dynamite” stages a hoarse hard-blues in the style of The Black Keys (in line with the “No Strings Attached” tour). Once the full moon has set, the aching pulse of “The Longing” and the romanticism of “That Look You Give That Guy” take over instead, with a melody that wraps itself around the heart like an impossible “Tempo delle mele” for beautiful freaks. On more than one occasion, though, the instinctive songwriting of Hombre Lobo feels familiar, from the uptempo pop trinket “Lilac Breeze” to the by-the-numbers “My Timing Is Off”.

The concept behind Hombre Lobo (“wolf man” in Spanish) stems from an old acquaintance: the protagonist of “Dog Faced Boy”. “What happens to him as he grows up?”, E asks himself. “He tries to make it in society. But he can't leave behind the fact that he's still seen as an animal. The best he can do is become an old, dignified werewolf”. But that's just a starting point to get to the album's real subject.
There's an irrepressible, dominant thought, the obsession that ties together the varied collection of songs on Hombre Lobo: loneliness and abandonment don't erase it, they only sharpen it. “The longing is a pain / A heavy pressure on my chest / It rarely leaves”, E murmurs on “The Longing”. Desire is like water from a spring that, instead of quenching thirst, keeps gushing endlessly, pulling you back up toward the mysterious point it springs from. Man's extra-ordinary nature – E confesses in the closing elegy of “Ordinary Man”, letting his own face show for a moment behind the wolf mask – lies precisely in never denying that longing: “No one has a right until they’ve fought my fight / To understand just where I’m coming from / And it’s that fight that brought me here today, exactly as I am / No ordinary man”.

Just six months after Hombre Lobo, E returns with the most solitary, singer-songwriter-driven record of his career, End Times. Never before has the Eels name ended up coinciding so closely with the simple nom de plume of Mark Oliver Everett: shut away in his Los Angeles basement (“OneHitsville, U.S.A.”, as he's renamed it…), the man known as E picks up his old four-track recorder again and sets about playing bare, intimate, pained songs.
End Times starts out from the same point where Hombre Lobo left off: desire, “the spark that lights everything up”. E's voice seems to emerge from the shadows, murmuring over the barely-arpeggiated chiaroscuro of “The Beginning”: it's an embrace meant to ward off the cold, a crack of light filtering through the window. She's wearing an evening dress, he brushes her lips. The purity of every beginning lies in correspondence, in the chance that desire might actually be fulfilled. “Everything was beautiful and free / In the beginning”.
But when reality betrays the promise, when life contradicts expectation, everything seems to dissolve in an instant. “That's gone, man, gone”, announces the Dylan-esque blues of “Gone Man” right away. Only regret and abandonment seem to remain. Waking up in the dead of night with no one beside you, talking to your own dog just to remember you're still alive. Burdens that time makes harder and harder to carry: “In my younger days / This wouldn't have been so hard”. But the flicker of “In My Younger Days” fades into the background like a yellowed photograph. “Here lies a man who only wanted to be left alone” is the bitter epitaph E imagines for his own headstone.

Flickers of guitar, shades of organ and keyboards: a sense of déjà vu lurks around every corner. An almost inevitable effect, after all, with songs as stripped-down as those on End Times. But for every episode that slips too easily into anonymity (the hoarse gait of “Paradise Blues”, the raw outlines of the resentful “Unhinged”), there are just as many that aspire to the stature of Eels classics, from the heavenly melancholy of “Little Bird” to the light touch of “Mansions Of Los Feliz”.
The loss of love becomes a sign of a deeper wound: the apparent sentencing of desire to disappointment, a sort of inner end of times. And yet the question never dies out. No disillusionment manages to silence it. If anything, disillusionment acts as a goad to keep searching, to push further and further, toward something in which the heart might find fulfilment. “Tell me my heart somehow, dear God, it's gonna mend”, is the invocation around which “Little Bird” revolves.
As had already happened on Blinking Lights And Other Revelations, the epilogue of End Times is likewise entrusted to a sort of confession/manifesto: “On My Feet” has the reflective gait of certain Springsteen-esque tunnel of love ballads, a stream of consciousness in which E finds himself on the move again: “One sweet day I’ll be back on my feet / And I’ll be alright / I just gotta get back on my feet”. One step after another. And it's a portrait that rings far truer than the opening self-epitaph: “I am a man in great pain over great beauty”. Because beauty, in the end, is always bigger than loneliness.
 

But it's with the release of the final part of the triptych, Tomorrow Morning, in the summer of 2010, that everything takes on a new perspective.
E himself sums up the previous instalments: “Hombre Lobo is the before, the hunger that starts everything off. End Times is the after, and how to deal with the consequences. Tomorrow Morning is the blossoming of a new possibility, hope coming to fruition”. Right from the title, then, the new Eels album casts a different light on its immediate predecessors: “Pairing it with Tomorrow Morning”, E explains, “changes the meaning of the title End Times: how could it really be the end if tomorrow there's a new morning?”.
The challenge of Tomorrow Morning is a simple one: to make a record that's bright from the first note to the last, in defiance of those convinced that depth must necessarily go hand in hand with inner torment. To pull it off, E brings back the side of Eels most inclined towards studio manipulation – the one that had been most missed on recent records: electronic toys and drum machines, in other words, but with the warmth of a kind of celebration of life's mysterious essence.
Hence the round beat of “This Is Where It Gets Good” unspooling for over six minutes amid scraps of orchestration and liquid flourishes: good old Beck, this time, seems to feel like popping down to the basement of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone to tinker about with his keyboards.

Happiness has nothing saccharine about it, when the pop breeze of “The Man” dresses it in irony. Love has nothing twee about it, when over the smooth gait of “Spectacular Girl” it comes to coincide with a new way of looking at everything: “She sees the beauty in things we all miss”. And the minuet of “Oh So Lovely”, with the strings of the “Tomorrow Morning Orchestra” evaporating along its edges, opens up into the gratitude of a seed taking root.
Every new day that begins could be the greatest one, E whispers in the suspended, promise-laden air of “The Morning”. In the end, the voices of the Amy Davies Choir accompanying him on “Mystery Of Life” bring the slightly chirpy carefree spirit of Simon & Garfunkel's “Feelin' Groovy” down into the reality of someone who has looked their own ghosts in the eye.
Some say that on a journey it's not the destination that matters so much as the road to get there: but sooner or later a moment comes when it becomes clear that it's precisely the destination that gives the journey its meaning. “I went about my way, unsteady and afraid / How could I know I was headed for this day?”. “I'm A Hummingbird” is the reverberation of a sigh swept up by the wind, the hushed ode of someone who still has eyes to recognise beauty even through tears. “It was all worth it / To be here now”. Nothing is destined to be lost.

Both End Times and Tomorrow Morning also come with a limited edition featuring a bonus-track EP: while End Times' companion disc is notable for the livelier touches of “Walking Cloud”, the extra songs on Tomorrow Morning (from the delicate “Swimming Lesson” to the sprightly “Let's Ruin Julie's Birthday”) seem tailor-made to please fans nostalgic for Daisies Of The Galaxy.
Nor could the usual live document be missing: Tremendous Dynamite – Live In 2011+2012 captures on a double CD two shows held at the same Minneapolis venue a year apart. In both cases, summer is the thread running through the set, with E taking the stage in a white ice-cream-man jumpsuit and a string of covers ranging from The Lovin' Spoonful's “Summer In The City” to “Hot Fun In The Summertime” by Sly And The Family Stone, not to mention a “Summertime” closer to Billy Stewart's flamboyant version than to the original. But while the first disc shows off a dazzling rock 'n' roll machine tuned to Sixties frequencies, the second unleashes a horn section capable of casting fresh Motown shades over songs like “Fresh Feeling” or the ever-present “My Beloved Monster”.

Make a new alphabet

“Now what?”. That was the title of the final chapter of “Things The Grandchildren Should Know”. And that's the very question E finds himself facing after completing the trilogy made up of Hombre Lobo, End Times and Tomorrow Morning.
“Once the dust had settled, I found myself asking: now what?”, E admits. “I didn't have an answer. But I'm a fighter and I knew I wouldn't give up easily. In the end, I found the answer in the four guys who shared the stage with me”. The Chet and P-Boo on guitars, Kool G Murder on bass and Knuckles on drums: in other words, the first stable Eels line-up in over fifteen years of career. That's the point to start again from. After more than a year touring together around the world, the most natural thing for Mr. E to do is call them together with a brand new plan: having no plan at all.
Unlike its most recent predecessors, “Wonderful, Glorious” thus comes about with no defined concept behind it, somewhat as had happened a decade earlier with “Shootenanny!”. And that, exactly as back then, is precisely the album's weak point: the fact that it isn't driven by that same urgency and evocative power that made people fall in love with Eels in the first place.

What takes precedence this time, instead, is the pleasure of sharing, of camaraderie. So much so that the songwriting process itself becomes a collective one, the opposite of the solitary songwriting E was used to. Even the setting changes radically: no longer the classic Everett-house basement, but an actual recording studio, built by E with the help of trusty The Chet and immediately nicknamed “The Compound”. “After twelve years recording in the same basement cluttered with instruments, I felt the need to expand and give myself more room to breathe and experiment”, E explains. “From the roof to the foundations, everything is designed to make our musical dreams come true. It's the happiest place on the face of the earth”.
The ragged, sinuous electricity of opener “Bombs Away”, with the shadow of Tom Waits acting as a guiding spirit, evokes moods closer to “Beautiful Freak” than to “Souljacker”. But the direction the songs on “Wonderful, Glorious” head in turns the clock back even further, straight to the heart of the Seventies: just listen to the funky interplay of keyboards and guitars on “Kinda Fuzzy” or the infectious rock-blues of “New Alphabet”, somewhere between Todd Rundgren and Fleetwood Mac. Not to mention the title track, which lays out the album's moral with a triumph of Stones-y swagger. A tendency already on display live during the band's most recent tours, one that leads to the building of a handful of songs with a solid, classic structure.
Eels play at combining electric flare-ups and sudden openings within the songs, reshuffling the most familiar ingredients starting with the single “Peach Blossom”, which seems to want to update The Stranglers' “Peaches” for the age of The Black Keys. What's missing, though, are the lightning-bolt melodic flashes of the old Eels songbook, the kind capable of winning you over instantly with just a couple of chords.

For once, there's no need to dig up E's family tragedies to see yourself reflected in his songs. “A lot of the songs on the record have to do with being backed into a corner and fighting to find your way out. So that struggle became the story of the album”. Right from the battle cry of “Kinda Fuzzy” (“Don't mess with me, I'm up for a fight”), what comes through in the songs of “Wonderful, Glorious” is an E more combative than ever. Resolute and full of vitality, just like the bright orange chosen for the cover.
Hence the chiaroscuro lyricism of “The Turnaround” making its way over a flickering backdrop, its gaze still open to the possibility of a new beginning. Right up to the album's peak with the hazy solemnity of “I Am Building A Shrine”, a direct heir to the moods of Tomorrow Morning. Mr. E once again settles his accounts, in his own way, with the spectre of mortality, giving voice to a funeral elegy that's anything but fatalistic: “Deep down in the cold ground, such a sad place to be/ But I'll be fine with all the little things that I'm taking with me”. The list of things to take along on the journey is made up of words, of glances, of the caress of a smile. But, in the end, there's only one thing that's truly indispensable: “All the love that never dies”. That spark of eternity deep in the heart that can turn life into a wonderful, glorious adventure.

The album's deluxe edition comes with a hefty bonus of unreleased material and live versions, including a pair of songs dating back respectively to the Daisies Of The Galaxy era (“I'm Your Brave Little Soldier”) and the Souljacker era (“Happy Hour (We're Gonna Rock)”). “I'm Your Brave Little Soldier” is indeed the most notable of the unreleased tracks, with the rest stringing together a couple of unremarkable outtakes from Wonderful, Glorious. On the live side, the horns on “That's Not Really Funny” try to redeem a song that's never quite landed. But what really shines is the stripped-down, slowed-down cover of “Summer In The City”, placed at the close of the set recorded for radio station KEXP.

I thought I’d have some answers by now

It's easy to say that what matters is learning from your mistakes. Rather comforting too, when all's said and done. The thing is, as time goes by, you end up building increasingly impenetrable forms of self-justification. So much so that you're no longer even capable of looking your own mistakes in the eye.
That's why, for once, the man called E decides to put his own face on the cover, complete with first and last name: The Cautionary Tales Of Mark Oliver Everett is his way of setting excuses aside and personally taking responsibility for life's mistakes. Starting over from the truth of experience to bring Eels back to their most essential vein.

The Everetts, as we now know, weren't exactly conventional parents: they had decided not to give their children any rules, letting life itself teach them how to get by. "It's like I grew up in the wild," E recalls. "I had to learn everything the hard way: by trial and error." And it's precisely the telling of these mistakes that the eleventh Eels album, released in 2014, is dedicated to. To serve as a warning to others, but above all to himself.
The faces and places are the same as on the previous Wonderful, Glorious: The Chet, P-Boo, Kool G Murder and Knuckles, playing between E's old basement and his brand-new recording studio. The similarities between the two records, however, end there. The sound of The Cautionary Tales Of Mark Oliver Everett clearly distances itself from its predecessor's rock classicism, aiming instead for the bare acoustic atmospheres of End Times, combined with the chamber-music timbre of 2006's Eels With Strings. Or, even better, with the fancies of the 2000 Eels Orchestra, as shown right away by the overture for piano, horns and flute that opens the record.

In fact, the songs on The Cautionary Tales Of Mark Oliver Everett were written even before those on Wonderful, Glorious. But for E, something was still missing: "Listening back to them made me uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough. If I don't feel uncomfortable, it means the songs aren't true enough. I had to dig deeper."
A rewriting process that, song after song, sharpens the sense of regret. Mr. E sees his younger self wandering on his bike in the video for "Mistakes Of My Youth", through the grayness of a soulless suburb: yet another gem to add to the Eels' catalogue of dreamy pop songs, but above all the imperative to break the chain of self-recrimination over past mistakes. “All the stupid things I said/ The people I hurt and let down/ Well, I hope that it’s not my fate/ To keep defeating my own self/ And keep repeating yesterday”.

To manage that, you need one simple certainty: the certainty that, somewhere, life still has something in store for us. After all, wasn't it Everett senior himself who theorized the possibility of an infinite series of parallel universes? It's precisely from his father's reflection that E sets off in "Parallels", a bittersweet ballad capable of addressing hope on a first-name basis: “Something down inside me makes thing there’s something more/ And I don’t have any proof but I’m sure/ And I know you’re out there somewhere/ And I know that you are well/ Looking for an answer but only time can tell”.
The opening overture thus turns into the notes of the epilogue. But it's not the closing of a circle: rather, it's the mysterious straight line of a road that vanishes into the horizon. Where am I, where do I come from, where am I going. "I can't say if the flowers will keep on growing/ But I've got a good feeling about where I'm going."
Like any self-respecting cautionary tale, the fable of Mark Oliver Everett has its own moral too. We could sum it up like this: experience coincides with judgment. Because we can't escape calling mistakes by their name. But neither can we escape the intuition that there's something more out there.

Following the model of Wonderful, Glorious, the deluxe edition of The Cautionary Tales Of Mark Oliver Everett also comes with a second bonus-track disc. Once again, though, it's a collection that's far from essential, split between unreleased songs (including a "Millicent Don't Blame Yourself" already performed live several times) and radio recordings (with a spot-on rendition of "Fresh Feeling").
To bring the album's songs to the stage, Eels opt for a format built on "sweet soft bummer rock", that is, the incurable-beautiful-freak version of the America of Fleetwood Mac and company. That's borne out in 2015 by the double live album (plus DVD) Royal Albert Hall, in which the ever-reliable The Chet, Knuckles, P-Boo and Al (Royal Al, for the occasion) back with impeccable elegance what E himself calls a "gentlemen's Eels concert", designed specifically to bring out the band's more chamber-music side. Amid pedal steel, trumpet, double bass and glockenspiel, the quintet makes no secret of its ambition to create a sort of orchestra without an orchestra, a band capable of giving the songs more elaborate clothing without needing any outside help.

Compared to the countless incarnations Eels have taken on live, this one brings to mind a cross between the 2000 Eels Orchestra and the 2006 Eels With Strings. The shape-shifting of the past thus gives way to greater fidelity to the originals, where nuance is what matters most (as in the slowed-down versions of "My Timing Is Off" and "I Like The Way This Is Going"). It's a choice that brings out some of the most inspired moments of latter-day Eels, but it also has the side effect of making the soft-rock treatment of Mr. E and co.'s songs feel a little too uniform.
The older songs take back the spotlight on the second (and more brilliant) of the two discs, from a rustic-flavored "I Like Birds" to the inevitable "My Beloved Monster", this time reimagined as an old-fashioned gem. The epilogue, though, is reserved for covers, with the ultra-classic "Can't Help Falling In Love" and a "Turn On Your Radio", penned by Harry Nilsson, that shows off The Chet's guitar work more than ever.

Are we alright again?

To present The Deconstruction, the twelfth Eels album after four years of recording silence, Mark Oliver Everett addresses fans directly, urging them to be kind to themselves and to others – whose private lives, E points out, we don't know, and whom we should never underestimate. By doing so, Everett continues, starting from our own little patch, we can fix, piece by piece, this huge mess of a world we find ourselves in. That's exactly what you feel throughout the forty-two minutes of The Deconstruction: a sleepy optimism, not yet ready to fully open its eyes and get to work fixing things, a bit shy but ready to get moving. Apart from the resigned title track, placed at the start of the tracklist as if to depict the reality we have to face, the tracks exude a serenity rarely found before in Everett's music.
The guitars, still present and played with great taste and delicacy, have handed the leading role over to light string, horn and choir arrangements, which create the perfect backdrop for the gentle invitations E insistently recites ("Be Hurt", "Sweet Scorched Earth"). This choice somewhat drains the record of energy, keeping the tempos consistently low, but it sometimes creates powerful suggestions. Such is the case with the horn sample dancing in the background of "Rusty Pipes" – probably the most successful track of the bunch – or the incense-scented choir floating in the luminous emptiness of "In Our Cathedral". There are also a few livelier moments. "Today Is The Day" is stirred by a bright, peppy riff, while the rougher "Bone Dry" and "You Are The Shining Light" recall, albeit in a more tempered form, the guitar outbursts of "Souljacker". Still, these episodes never feel out of place within the record's overall balance, thanks also to the skillful production, for which Everett enlisted the help of Mickey Petralia, with whom he hadn't worked since the days of the masterpiece Electro-Shock Blues.

Just two years later, Mr. E returns to the scene with Earth To Dora, a brooding collection of calm, heartfelt songs in which fiery rock and playful electronic quirks are set aside. And yet the band's thirteenth studio album sounds, from the first note to the last, like a classic entry in their catalogue: there are the immediate melodies, the delicate, essential arrangements with the crystalline, rounded guitar tone and the precious keyboard counterpoints; there's the apparent simplicity of the lyrics, able to describe and convey universal emotions with ease. And then there's once again a concept linking the songs together, or rather, their sequence allows a narrative structure to unfold. These twelve songs tell the story of a romantic relationship in which the happy initial idyll is soon replaced by tensions and resentments that will end up ruinously wearing it down. The protagonist thus finds himself in a tragically brooding state, during which he catches glimpses of a flicker of hope and rebirth.
In Earth To Dora, memory and poetic invention intersect and act simultaneously in the reworking of literary cues, concrete or ideal sources, personal experiences. Mr. E's autobiographical streak and his imagination are woven together so tightly that it becomes hard to tell where the references to his disastrous, short-lived marriage (which produced his son Archie) or to his famously unlucky existential path are hidden, and where narrative fiction instead shapes an exemplary, idealized parable.
"Anything For Boo", "Are We Alright Again" and "Earth To Dora", all placed in the first part of the record, recapture the spontaneous innocence and enchanted optimism of Daisies Of The Galaxy, without quite matching its melodic brilliance. Doubts soon begin to assail the lyrical self, who in "Who You Say You Are" goes as far as to wonder whether his partner really deserves to have a song dedicated to her. And while "Dark And Dramatic" sees him accept the lack of real connection with the woman he loves, the vibrant "Are You Fucking Your Ex", echoing the carnal urges of Hombre Lobo, confesses a dark whirl of obsessive thoughts. In "The Gentle Souls", Everett's pen moves us and finds the perfect blend of irony and nostalgia. The pairing of "I Got Hurt" and "OK" marks the turning point instead: from the pitch-black night enveloping whoever is trapped in the abyss of their own pain, one suddenly resurfaces and wakes up from a dream they had stubbornly clung to ("Waking Up").
As on other Eels records, negativity – lived and felt, internalized and externalized, analyzed and then courageously overcome – serves as a counterweight to a deeply optimistic message. We're not quite at the artistic and emotional heights of the harrowing catharsis told in Electro-Shock Blues, but Mr. E's probably God-given gift for writing songs listeners can relate to is something well worth continuing to cherish.

I'm learning while I lose

After the marriage-fatherhood-divorce arc told in Earth To Dora, and with the pandemic having brought the globe to a standstill, in 2022 E starts over with an old friend: John Parish. Almost like Dumas, the two return to the scene of the crime two decades after Souljacker. This time it's a long-distance partnership, as circumstances dictate. In Los Angeles, E writes songs while little Archie sleeps, trying to juggle being a parent in lockdown. In Bristol, Parish puts it all through his own blender and sends it back across the ocean.
The result, titled Extreme Witchcraft, won't be Souljacker's twin, but it's certainly a close relative: just listen to the crackling riffs of "Good Night On Earth" and "The Magic", which could easily belong to the "bearded" Eels of 2001. But the electric jaggedness of tracks like "Amateur Hour" also clearly bears Parish's stamp (credited as co-writer, producer and guitarist), blending it with the somewhat backward-looking leanings of latter-day Eels.

Let's be honest: golden mediocrity has been the hallmark of Mr. E and co.'s recent output (perfectly summed up by the second volume of their best-of, Eels So Good, released in 2023). And Extreme Witchcraft is no exception. A good half of the album is encouraging, from the rough, railroad-steady rock-blues of "Steam Engine" to the cotton-candy pop of "Strawberries & Popcorn", via the funky, Beck-esque pastiche of "Grandfather Clock Strikes Twelve". The other half, though, slips by without leaving much of a mark, caught between bland ballads ("So Anyway", "Stumbling Bee"), autopilot rehashes ("I Know You're Right") and misfired experiments ("What It Isn't"). Even the usual themes of romantic disillusionment, loneliness, and the need to keep hoping seem, this time, to follow an already-written script.
The best thing on the record remains the brisk, Daisies Of The Galaxy-style melancholy of "Learning While I Lose", in which E draws on his losses at Words With Friends (a Scrabble-like online game) to cast himself as a modern-day De Coubertin: “Play to win or don’t play at all/ Take the game and don’t bring the ball/ But I don’t care what you say/ I just wanna play”. After all, that's always been his life philosophy. Even when he's not playing to win, how can you not feel fond of that unmistakable arsenal of little keyboards, jingling bells and lump-in-the-throat smiles?

After a tour that finally reunites Eels with their audience (the forced Covid-19 hiatus now behind them), E has to contend with nothing less than open-heart surgery: "They sawed my sternum open, stopped my heart and put it on a table." Once again, the twists of fate play a crucial role in his life: it's the fact that he lost his father to a heart attack, when E was still a boy, that leads him to get checked and discover he has an aortic aneurysm. "Either I made it, or I'm really in a parallel universe now," he quips with his usual bittersweet smile.
So, returning in 2024 with an album centered on time, like Eels Time!, takes on a very particular meaning in a context like this. "Time, there isn't much time now," announces the near-title-track "Time" right from the start, a quintessentially Eels-like ballad as the script demands (acoustic guitar chords sketching a clear sky crossed by gusts of strings). "Maybe there's just some way, dear God/ I can stay." Let's hold on tight to our Mark Oliver Everett, one can't help thinking after a statement like that, which forces us to immediately come to terms with the brevity of the time we're given to live. Meanwhile, the song's video runs through images of three generations of Everetts: from quantum physicist Hugh to Mr. E, all the way to the still-unwritten future of the newest arrival, Archie (to whom the light-hearted "I Can't Believe It's True" is dedicated, with its little parable about discovering unconditional love).

According to the golden rule of Eels discography, after an electric record like Extreme Witchcraft it should be time for an intimate one: and the Beatles-scented madeleine of "We Won't See Her Like Again" seems to confirm this fully, evoking the aura of an almost mystical vision ("A supernatural love/ With no below or above"). Alongside this soul, though, Eels' 15th album has another one too, born from the meeting between E and Tyson Ritter of the All-American Rejects. The two, after getting to know each other while working on a song for the soundtrack of the film "The Prisoner's Daughter", discovered they were neighbors in Los Angeles and decided to try writing something else together. And that's where the slightly less positive notes begin.
In practice, between lyrics and music, half of the songs on Eels Time! bear Ritter's signature (also credited as co-producer) alongside E's. A partnership that steers the album toward somewhat more predictable pop-rock territory, between the thick outlines of tracks like "If I'm Gonna Go Anywhere" and "Goldy" (an ode to a goldfish, a new entry in the Eels bestiary) and the motivational optimism of the closing "Let's Be Lucky". It's no coincidence that the most successful of the Everett-Ritter co-written songs is also the most jagged and dusty-sounding one ("Lay With The Lambs"), in which a bit of E's healthy misanthropy resurfaces.
While "Sweet Smile" sets out to translate the light mood of the Seekers' "Georgy Girl" into Eels terms, "And You Run" goes digging directly into the band's distant past: thanks to Sean Coleman, E's childhood friend, who suggested he dust off one of his very first demos, stripping away the Eighties sheen of the original recording. Teenage naivety aside, it fits perfectly on a record devoted to time. Because to fully live the days we have left, we first have to come to terms with what we've left behind: "Time passes slowly and then it speeds up," E sings over the soft interweaving arpeggios of "Song For You Know Who", "You've gotta forgive and that is enough."

Boo Boos is a duo project between Everett and Kate Mattison, from New York's 79.5. Young Love (2025) is their first album.

Eels perfected that sound halfway between Beck and Elliott Smith (not coincidentally, two other of the most brilliant figures of 1990s Los Angeles), which has become a genuine trademark.
Theirs is not music chasing the trends of the moment, but it's not difficult music either: it has no revolutionary pretensions, and yet it manages to find an unmistakable freshness. Its secret lies in the ability to make the heart's strings vibrate through some mysterious alchemy: impossible to pin down the magic formula. "Asking what you look for in music is like asking what you look for in a sunset: that indefinable thing that makes it special," E reflects.
And yet, the man called E never stops declaring himself perpetually dissatisfied with his own work, in an endless, obsessive quest to keep surpassing himself. After all, it's the least you'd expect from the son of a scientist who devoted his research to the theory of parallel universes: "my father was a genius, I'm just a great worker," E claims. "I live by the 'Many Albums Theory': that's why I don't have time to think about what to wear in the morning." Who knows, maybe the true mission of Eels is precisely to write enough songs to reach all the mysterious worlds theorized by Hugh Everett III…

Contributions by Michele Corrado (“The Deconstruction”) and Daniel Moor (“Earth To Dora”)

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