Mark Oliver Everett has been making music as Eels (definite article usually deleted, but kind of in the same way it’s supposed to be in “Eagles,” at least according to the late Glenn Frey, which is to say seldom, but that’s where the similarities between the two groups end) since Beautiful Freak in 1996. Though that album spawned the medium-sized alternative radio/MTV hit “Novocaine for the Soul,” Everett is almost certainly better known for the tragic dimensions of his family life, which includes an astonishing amount of death.
Everett has lost his father (he found the body), his sister (to suicide), his mother (to cancer two years later), and, in a stunning twist, his cousin (who was a flight attendant on the plane that hijackers flew into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001). Throughout all this, he managed to build a huge body of Eels music up until 2014, when he decided it was time to take a break—during which time he got married, had a child, and got divorced. Eels returned earlier this year with The Deconstruction, an album that struggles (successfully) to put an optimistic face on life’s bleak vicissitudes. We spoke by phone in advance of the band’s show tomorrow night at the Showbox.
All the interviews and reviews of The Deconstruction have mentioned the long period between the last Eels record [The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett, 2014]. How intentional was that hiatus? And also did you ever got nervous during those years that you wouldn’t be able to summon your old work habits when it was time to start making music again?
Not at all because it was a very intentional hiatus, to the point where I really didn’t care if I ever did it again. It was a naturally enforced hiatus. My life had just gotten so one-sided, and it hit a brick wall where I had to stop. I was just completely fried.
Had you gotten to feeling like you were on autopilot, or like you were a passenger in the experience of doing the band? Or was it just that you needed to force yourself to have a different perspective?
That’s a good question. I mean, probably everything you just said was true simultaneously. I think it’s one of those things where life just tells you what needs to happen, and you have to go along with it.
Right. It’s not like you never had any optimism in your songs before, but the thing I’m most struck by on the new record is that there’s almost seems to be a mandate to wind up at optimism, no matter how dark the subject matter gets. Can you talk a little bit about optimism as a practice in life and as a songwriting subject?
I think I get pigeonholed as being the depressing guy or whatever, which I think is really missing the point of most of our records. If you look at most of our records, there’s almost always an optimistic point to it all in the end, but yeah. I hear what you’re saying. This one is definitely where I’m at these days. I strive to be the full of love, compassionate guy, and to try to look at the bright side of things as much as possible.
The song “The Epiphany” is a good case in point, because you’re starting from the perspective of defeat, and wishing you could go back “to that simpler time when we were so happy and free.” It’s a powerful yearning partly because it’s so common, but also because it’s the one thing you can never do.
Right. I guess that’s the point I was trying to make because it’s such a strong feeling that we all experience when you’re thinking about some really great time of your life and how much you miss it, but there’s not really any point in ruminating on it for very long because there’s nothing you can do about it.
That’s always been one of the more puzzling metaphysical things in life, when people always say “Why bother worrying about what you can’t control?” And it’s like, if I could control it, I wouldn’t have to worry about it, and if I could control what I worried about, I’d be a much happier person.
That’s a really good point. I think that all you can do instead of that is maybe just try to accept whatever your reality today is and be happy with it. It’s a choice we can all make, more or less. Some situations are beyond that, but most situations apply to it.
Have you traditionally been able to do that, instead of just knowing that’s what you should do?
Well not traditionally, but in the last few years, it’s something I try to practice as much as possible. But that’s the hard part about it is it takes vigilance and work, and that’s why most of us don’t do it. Because we’re all so fucking lazy. I mean, if you look at my situation now, I am someone who lost his family too early and then I finally got to a situation where I was brave enough to start my own family with my wife and kid. And the wife decided to leave me, which is not how I wanted it to go at all. And yet, here I am. Actually I would say I’m honestly a happy person. I’m just here to prove, anything’s possible, people.
Hey thanks, man.
I mean, I got through the whole family dying thing and turned it into some lemonade, as they say. And I’m managing to then lose another family, partially anyway. I still have half of the kid, which is amazing. I just feel so lucky that I get to experience fatherhood. I managed to turn that into lemonade, too. I feel so lucky to be able to be an example like that for people who read my book [Things The Grandchildren Should Know, 2007] and get hope out of it. I’m so lucky to be able to be that guy for people.
I think I know the answer to this question, but is it true what absolutely every single person says about having a kid, that it re-frames your consciousness and makes you better able to not be so obsessed with your own problems?
I’m someone that definitely had written off being a father as a possibility. When I titled my book Things the Grandchildren Should Know, it was supposed to be ironic. But I can tell you now that every cliché you’ve heard about parenthood is true. It will surprise you in amazing ways. Luckily for me it happened the old fashioned way, by accident. It was thrust upon me, and so I got to learn about all these surprises. I don’t know if I would have otherwise. It’s the same thing with my ex-wife. She was someone who, if she was at a party and if people were passing a baby around to hold, she would take a pass. “I’m good.” She never wanted to have children. And she’s completely in love now with our son. She’s an amazing mom. You just don’t know how that’s gonna turn out.
Changing direction entirely: Do you miss anything about record labels?
The money. The money was nice. I mean, I got in it right at the end when it was still a real business. It was just insane how much money they would give you to make a record and all that. That was great. But I don’t miss the part of them meddling in your art and all that stuff. It’s nice to be truly indie in that way.
You address that really well in your book in the scene when you played Electro-Shock Blues [1998] for the bosses of Dreamworks, Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin. It was clearly not an obviously commercial album, and pretty different from the previous one that had been so successful [Beautiful Freak, 1996] but they were just like, “Great. This is great. It’s important. Here we go. ” That sense of stewardship, them actually getting must have been a great validation.
That was one of the greatest moments of my life. I had gone through such an intense situation where I ended up firing my father figure manager because he didn’t want to put it out, and then when Lenny and Mo hugged me and said thank you, and said they loved it, I broke down sobbing in the car on the way home.
There were, and probably still are people who actually stuck it out in that business because they actually knew what they were doing, versus the tons of people who stuck around despite not knowing a goddamn thing.
I can now add a really nice addendum to that story that Lenny and Mo really did do the right thing, and I made the right decision, even business-wise, because all those advances and all those videos we made, we spent a fortune of Dreamworks Records money, and we made the most records of any act on that label. We did five albums. Then they went bankrupt in 2003 and that was the end of it. Yet all these years later…
Lenny and Mo, during their Warner Brothers heyday and everything, they were always about: Give the artist time to grow. Like, the first three records or whatever might be bombs. That’s okay. That died with them. But in the case of the Eels, it applies because many years later, the whole catalog recouped. They actually did the right thing. Now it got sold to Universal. And now Universal makes money off The Eels. I couldn’t believe it. One day I got a check just showed up from Universal. I was like, “What is this?” My accountant said, “Oh, the Dreamworks catalog recouped.” That’s amazing that Lenny and Mo were on to something.
It’s interesting that artists or even just aspiring musicians used to think of themselves as being at odds with the business, or at least at a bemused distance from it. But when they’re successful, and actually recouping a deal with a major, it’s a real accomplishment, but there’s also something weirdly honorable about it.
Totally. I’d never recouped before. It was always about take the advance and run and wait until they go bankrupt. So, it was nice for them to go along with my artist qualities all that time, and then get paid back for it. It was a good feeling.
Aside from the money and the machinery, what’s different about the process of putting out an Eels record now?
For me, putting a record out is always painful. It’s a painful process. It’s my least favorite part of the whole thing. Making it is nice. Then everything after that is just kind of a shit show for me. I mean, it’s always disappointing what happens with, especially nowadays with the machinery of putting a record out. Then having it go out to be judged and all that, it’s just a very awful, vulnerable feeling. When it becomes a finite thing in the world, it’s unpleasant for me.
Even the shows?
No, definitely not the shows. The shows are part of the lemonade.
