Recommendations of the Editorial team
With “Eels Time!” Two years ago, Mark Oliver Everett alias E and his Eels returned just in time to the feeling that once made the band an always available consolation for gray or unbearably bright days.
The successor “Cookie Happened” will be released on October 16th. It is already the 16th studio album by the songwriter who is known to have transformed his biography, which was marked by strokes of fate, into a bittersweet, grimly comic work of music.
If even one more piece sounds like the first single “Cap In Hand”, there will hardly be an early Eels listener who will be disappointed. It’s about someone who finally realizes he’s made a few mistakes in life and now, hopefully not too late, starts to make things right.
Or in E’s words: “I wanted to sound a little exhausted on this song too – like someone who has screwed up their life but now realizes their mistakes and is trying to make up for everything with their tail between their legs. You know how record companies are: ‘We don’t care what you give us – the main thing is that you sound defeated on the first two songs!'”
The album title is a small reference to an overlooked philosopher, as the singer explains. “Every joy, every achievement and every difficulty will one day be as meaningless as if none of it had ever happened. But as the great philosopher of our time, Cookie Monster, once said: ‘I don’t cry because the cookie is gone. I smile because the cookie existed.'”
Eels – “Cookie Happened”: Tracklist
- 01 CLOBBERED
- 02 CAP IN HAND
- 03 ALL FORGOTTEN
- 04 BAMBOOZLED AGAIN
- 05 LOST AND BARKING
- 06 TAKING PICTURES
- 07 NEW STORY
- 08 CONGRATULATIONS TO ME
- 09 ONE RAZZLE, ONE DAZZLE
- 10 I’M ON STANDBY
- 11 DUM DUMS
- 12 THE WAY I WAS MADE
The Eels were formed in 1995 by singer and songwriter Mark Oliver Everett after a solo career failed. Their debut album “Beautiful Freak” brought the band a small hit and worldwide breakthrough with “Novocaine For The Soul”. Marked by serious personal tragedies in Everett’s family, the dark but equally great “Electro-Shock Blues” followed in 1998.
In the decades that followed, the Eels continually reinvented themselves, especially on stage. Although the music is tailor-made for the misfits and suffering of this world (who have never lost the ability to laugh), the Eels became known to a larger audience primarily through their presence on many a film soundtrack (“Shrek”).