There is more to Eels front man Mark Everett that crafting tunes about death. He tells Kevin Courtney about life-affirming songs
Many people lose loved ones, but few make a music career out of their loss. Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, certainly hasn't, yet if the press bumf is to be believed, the small, beardy bloke who fronts Eels spends his entire waking hours writing songs about dead family members. Every time he releases an album, the bones of his past get trampled on, and all lyrical references to death are gleefully seized upon. But there's more to Mr E's tunes than bereavement - there's also the inexorable passing of time, the loss of innocence, and the ongoing freak-show of strange but fascinating misfits which populate his world. And there's an extra helping of Everett's odd, childlike and superb songwriting on Eels's new double album, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.
"It's really about life, and God is in the details of life," says Everett. "I'm always fascinated with the idea of what's behind everything. But it's about life, you know. It's not about death. But I can't ignore the fact that death has been a big part of it. But I already made that album, the death album."
There may be an abundance of life-affirming tunes on the new record, but it represents Everett's biggest emotional risk to date. Written and recorded over several years, and between other projects, the double album is a man-child's odyssey through a strange, alien landscape: this world we live in. It could well be E's magnum opus, but will people have time to listen to the entire epic.
"It's hard to expect people to give it enough time, cos it's the kind of thing that you probably won't get the first time."
However, listen on and you will be rewarded with a collection of gently empathetic songs which roll gracefully between folk, rock, alt.country and weirdcore.
"I wouldn't say I'm making my masterpiece. It's something I kept working on over the years and I was never happy with its previous incarnations. For instance, when I made Shootenanny, it was as a reaction to how frustrated I was working on it. At the time I was so tired of working with orchestras and orchestrations, computers and paper, and I just wanted to put on an electric guitar and just rock for a while."
Made mostly at Everett's Los Angeles home, Blinking Lights features "a cast of thousands" including Tom Waits, who provides some scary noises on Going Fetal. "I didn't set out to make my Santana duets album, and I don't go out looking for guest stars, it's just something that happens along the way."
The only people not present on the album and the live shows, it seems, are former Eels members, including Butch and Koool G Murder. On the current tour, which started in Dublin's Vicar Street last week, E is accompanied by a string quartet and two big-looking geezers who play double bass, organ, melodica, guitar, celeste, piano and trash can. Trash can? Didn't Tom Waits have one of those onstage? "Yeah, I think anything like that has gotta be influenced by him, probably."
EVERETT MIRRORS WAITS'S wilful adherence to his own musical vision. Since the runaway success of Eels's debut, Beautiful Freak, in 1997, he has studiously avoided the celebrity flytrap. If the record label wanted to sell Eels as a post-grunge Nirvana - they were a trio, their hit, Novocaine for the Soul was Smells Like Teen Spirit for the chemical generation, and their singer was a messed up genius - Everett was having none of it.
He followed up with Electro-Shock Blues, his own In Utero. A resolutely uncommercial record, it dealt with the deaths of his mother and his sister with stark, harrowing honesty. Since then, apart from the odd brush with the commercial world (My Beloved Monster was used on the Shrek soundtrack), E has trod a lone, sometimes lonely path along the outer edges of mainstream rock.
"Yeah, but you gotta pay a price for that. It really does take a toll. It's really exhausting because you have to fight daily battles. Everything's about oh, there's never enough money to do what you want to do, and if you have a vision and something you want to do, it can be quite difficult."
When the publishers of Kurt Cobain's diaries asked E to contribute to the book's foreword, the singer wrote: "Please don't do this to me after I kill myself." But though he has had a lot to feel unhappy about, you don't figure Everett as the kind of guy who would take his own life. Besides, anyone who can write a life-affirming song such as (Hey Man) Now We're Really Living can't be all that hung up on the negative stuff.
"You know, they say I always write songs about death and they call me a miserablist, and it is so off the mark. Because look at a song like that, it's a great example. It's like for the guy to go through all that stuff and still celebrate it all as part of life. Come on, that's anything but miserable."
Blinking Lights and Other Revelations is out now on the Vagrant label