Many musicians sing about mental anguish and strokes of fate, Mark Oliver Everett experienced that shit. He lost his entire family in a very short time.
At the age of 19, he found his father, a physicist who was laughed at in his time but who helped to invent the many-worlds idea that is recognized today, dead in bed. His old man had severe depression. Nancy, the singer’s mother, also had a family history of mental illness; her mother, Katherine, wrote poetry between hospital stays. Nancy was prone to hysterical crying fits and childish behavior and left the children to fend for themselves. She died of lung cancer. Everett’s sister Liz, who is six years older than him, was his bastion against all the madness for a long time. He loved her dearly, as you can read in the wonderful autobiography “Happy Days in Hell” (more accurately in the original: “Things The Grandchildren Should Know”). But she also inherited a penchant for mental illness and drug abuse. Liz took her own life.
All of these events occur in various variations in the Eels’ songs, which are sometimes sullen, sometimes delicately sad and then almost playfully assertive of hope. The band that Mark Oliver Everett, who initially called himself just E, founded in 1995.
The eels are survival helpers
While the sensational debut “Beautiful Freak” was primarily an examination of variations of being an outsider and of course a declaration of love to all the cranks in the world, “Electro-Schock Blues” dissected the complete misery of a broken life, of rootlessness through no fault of their own. Anyone whose heart doesn’t stop at the prologue with “Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor” probably has no fears. “Daisys Of The Galaxy” then brought the first step back to light. The grieving clown became a joker, he played children’s instruments and sang about the joys of life (birds!). He sang a song about a motherfucker – and it’s one of his most beautiful.
The imaginative double album “Blinking Lights And Other Revelations” brought to light how much all of this rounds into a great story about survival. Not only can Everett’s dog, his long-time companion and patron saint Bobby Jr., who even maintained a friendship with Leonard Cohen, yelp, Tom Waits also yelps along. A miracle of a record, after which the musician began to move in new directions.
Three studio albums, released almost in one go, plus the memoirs followed. These songs are also filled with contrite melancholy, wolfish humor and lots of “shitty feelings”. Everett continued to appear as an unshaven bard. The singer played the plaintive bluesman, mourning the abandonment (or the inability to love?), but also revealing how freedom afterwards sharpens the senses. Everett is now a father. However, the relationship with his son’s mother did not last long. And in recent years you’ve noticed certain signs of fatigue on his records. Some things fell into the repetition loop. They are often the same topics, but still beautifully decorated and free of the compulsion to helpless pondering.
Rather, the songwriter emphasizes the joys of a life that actually ended when he lost his youth, but which still led to him being able to travel the world as a musician, even appearing as a crooner in the style of Sinatra (almost every Eels tour has one different sound, at one point the band even played in tracksuits and with ZZ Top beards) and never lost the desire to carry on.
So good? Second best of the Eels
“Extreme Witchcraft” recently marked the forward-thinking return to the harder style of John Parrish, who once helped shape the dog-face blues of “Souljacker”. And the second compilation of his life’s work, which has now been released (“So Good: Essential Eels Vol. 2 (2007 – 2020)), shows that despite some superficialities, there was always something in the pot and no film soundtrack can be bad if it is framed by an Eels song.
You don’t have to love the stubborn artist who likes to stay out of the line of fire with a sharp sense of humor. But it’s impossible not to like him when he acts like a bloodthirsty vampire, when he describes the feeling of what it’s like when your girlfriend looks at another man with a completely different look, when at some point you regret it, like many do Mistakes you made when you were young.
Many musicians hide behind their work, and that makes them great artists. Mark Oliver Everett is his work – and he gives it to us more openly than almost anyone else. Maybe he shouldn’t sing Christmas songs anymore.