The New Cue #382 May 20: E from Eels
Good morning!
Another week, another stellar edition of The New Cue and a lovely catch-up with E from Eels that gives you another reason to put off that thing you’re putting off doing. Do it tomorrow! As always with every Monday delivery, this is a free edition. Our pleasure. Now get stuck in, and don’t forget to share it if you like it. Share it if you don’t like it too. Sharing is caring.
We’ll see you on Friday, enjoy the edition
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… E From Eels
Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, has been making music under the Eels handle for almost three decades now. Over that time, the band’s sound has swung from barbed rock’n’roll to playful 60s pop to gently devastating troubadour-ish balladry and back again, songs where the big things are often wrapped inside the little things. His forthcoming 15th album Eels Time! is to be filed alongside his more upbeat collections, cheery Beatles-y vignettes to have an existential crisis to. There has been more than the fair share of death in Everett’s life and work and Eels Time! finds him reflecting on his own mortality after a major medical procedure. A few weeks ago, he hopped on Zoom with Niall, who he stills blames for getting him drunk six years ago, and told him all about it. Because he is a gentleman, E arrived a few minutes early, right as Niall was setting up the NASA control board-style set up he has with Dictaphones…
Hello E. Hold on, let me turn on my other two Dictaphones. You can never be too safe when it comes to recording interviews.
Oh, that’s very professional. I did one a couple of weeks ago for radio and they needed me to record in a professional quality my answers and it came out all fucked up and there was nothing we could do.
Argh, the worst.
You’re more professional than I am.
Only because I’ve been burnt, a Kurt Vile interview that I accidentally deleted.
Ooh, that’s a bad one. My one was 50 minutes too. I had all my audio experts trying to fix it but nobody could.
Well I’ve got three, we’re gonna be OK. Thanks for doing this.
Thank you.
Congratulations on the new record, it’s great. Take me back to the beginning of it.
About five of the songs I wrote with this guy Tyson Ritter. Back in the day, he was in a band called the All-American Rejects who were on Dreamworks Records at the same time as us but I wasn’t familiar with them, it just wasn’t on my radar. Then recently I got a request through my manager to collaborate with him on a song he was doing for a movie. They sent me a song and it was really cool and I liked it a lot and I did end up being on that song and that also led to me doing a scene in the movie [2022’s Prisoner’s Daughter] where Tyson actually beats me up and then we started doing another song for the movie and I liked it so much I said, ‘Can I just hijack this for the next Eels record cos I think this is really cool’ and he said, ‘Sure’ and then we just kept making more. So that’s how almost half the record was made, with him. We found out we were neighbours, just a few blocks away and it just seemed like a good time to do it. I wasn’t planning on making a record at the time and ended up making one.
What’s the special ingredient when a collaboration just chimes like that?
It’s the reason John Lennon collaborated with Paul McCartney and vice versa, because they got stuff out of each other that they wouldn’t have got out of themselves and that’s what’s exciting about it. It’s a whole new aspect, you’re adding your thing to something different.
When did it start to turn into a full album from that?
It picks up momentum because once you have a few songs you’re like, ‘Oh well, I guess we need more!’ and you just keep going. I think it’s all over the place musically, they’re all kind of their own thing. It was a while ago, it wasn’t too recent.
I’ve had the song Haunted Hero on repeat a lot, it’s my current go-to from the new album.
I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about in that one, I just had this vague idea in the back of my mind about the idea of a fucked up superhero. Maybe it was in my mind from being in the Ant-Man movie [E made a cameo in 2023’s Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, a nod to the fact his father invented the theory of the multiverse, watch a documentary he made about his dad here]! I just thought, ‘I’m gonna write a song about a fucked up hero who’s a good guy and who’s somebody we need’.
Haha, tell me about that cameo, it was quite the surprise when you popped up onscreen.
It was fun. It took two days to just shoot that scene, that’s how intense those movies are. I was there for two days. It was really fun. I’ve acted with Paul Rudd before and it was great to see him again.
Yeah, in This Is 40? Who would’ve thought at that point he’d end up as a massive superhero.
Yeah, and also Paul Rudd is big Eels fan. He told me he bought Souljacker the day it came out. He’s been listening to us for a long time, so who’s the superhero now?!
There’s a lot of very cool and famous Eels fans out there, isn’t there?
I know of some. It’s funny how you’ll hear about how someone like that could like Eels and you’ll like, ‘Wow, I never would have guessed’.
Who’s the most unlikely?
They’re all unlikely to someone with low self-esteem like me. Finding out that Jon Hamm has been following me since before the Eels, since when I did records just as E, and that he’d been to all my shows over 25 years, that’s like, ‘Wow, I wish someone had told me during all the years I was obsessed over Mad Men that he was in the audience!’.
You got to visit the Mad Men set at some point, didn’t you?
I did, so I did actually find out towards the end of Mad Men and he invited me to visit the set, which was really amazing.
I’m glad to hear you fit and healthy, I was reading about how you had open-heart surgery last year.
That’s right, it’s just open-heart surgery that’s all, no big deal, they stopped my heart on the table and cut through my bones and my muscles and luckily it all worked, I’m good as new, I feel great.
How was the recuperation process?
I don’t have any hospital experience, I’ve never stayed in a hospital ever so this was being in a hospital for a week, a major ordeal. It took about two months for me to recover, it was a long time cos it was such a traumatic thing on my body. Now, I’m totally fine. It wasn’t that long ago either.
Was the record all done before that then?
Yeah, the record was done before that but I knew it was coming, it was on my mind.
Did it seep into the writing?
Probably a song like the first one, Time, may have been influenced by knowing something like that was coming up.
Where was your head at as you recuperated from something that huge?
It’s been good, it’s been really positive, I feel like I got a new lease on life. I’m like, ‘I’m so lucky I knew I had this condition’, because it kills a lot of people who don’t know they have it. It’s the only good thing that came out of my father dying of a heart attack at 51 – and this is unrelated at what happened to him but it’s the reason why I get scans every year, to keep an eye on stuff, because heart stuff can be so hereditary and it’s only because of my father that I found out my aorta was about to burst and that would’ve killed me so I’m really lucky that I knew about it and got to do something about it before it was too late.
How’s fatherhood going?
It’s great. It’s still a tiny bit surreal to me that I am a father, the novelty of it will always be there for me because it’s something that I never expected in my life. My boy is gonna turn seven next month so I’ve been a father for seven years and I never thought I would be one so that’s another amazing thing.
Ah. I remember when I came over to interview you for Q he was only one.
Yeah, that’s right, when you ordered me too many drinks it was because I was a brand new father, I was still shellshocked!
You’re alright, the person who got the most drunk that night was me.
Finally you admit it!
I was sick in an Uber.
Oh, you didn’t tell me that! You didn’t put that in the article! You know I’m sure if I was the one who’d got sick in an Uber then you would’ve put it in the article.
Well yeah, but that’s because no-one wants to hear about a music journalist getting drunk, you do it and it’s rock’n’roll, I do it and it’s just a bit sad.
True.
What’s your day-to-day like at the moment?
The great thing about my life is there’s no routine day per se. The one thing that’s changed that is a routine is driving my kid to school and back every day, his school isn’t near where we live so I commute across LA twice a day, there and back is four trips across LA every day. That’s a new thing for me because I used to barely ever drive. In between that, I have some time to either work on new music but there’s no real routine. Once you start making an album, there’s a routine for a little while, but otherwise it’s just day by day.
What are you like at the school gates, are you chatting away with the other parents?
I do, occasionally when we’re waiting for them to be let out in the afternoon we’ll bond over being a parent.
No-one ever talks to me, I think it’s my face.
Yeah, I get that too but I think the people who talk to me are the ones who talk to everybody.
Last week, someone did a call out on Twitter about songs that make people cry. I didn’t get involved but the one that came to mind for me was the title track of Daisies Of The Galaxy, that has been known to make me a bit weepy after a few drinks.
That’s an emotional one. I’ve always really enjoyed playing that one live because I never have a hard time getting into it.
Do any of your own songs send you over the edge emotionally?
It’s hard to say. I don’t hear my own songs that often but over the past few years they’ve been reissuing a lot of the albums on vinyl and at that point I have to listen to an entire album, usually for the first time in many years, and a couple of years ago they reissued the Blinking Lights double album so I had to listen to the whole thing, which is a lot – on vinyl, it’s like triple. I was surprised at how emotional it was for me to listen to it all the way through. I was overwhelmed just remembering how hard we all worked on it and I felt good about it, I was surprised. It was ballsy to put out a record with 33 tracks, I don’t recommend it! A lot of work.
Does Eels feel like one big thing to you or do you separate it in your mind into different sections and periods?
Yeah, it’s me and whatever and whoever, there’s not really any rules to it and that’s what’s nice about it. When I first got a record deal and met with the president of the record company I said my dream was to just do what I feel like doing from year to year, whatever that is and he said, ‘I think you’re gonna get a chance to do that’. And I put two records out with him and I got dropped. But I came back and got another record deal! And it is what I go to do. I can’t believe I got to make one record, let alone this is the 15th, it's unbelievable.
Those were the kind of artists I was inspired by growing up, obviously the Beatles, and Prince, and a big one for me was Leon Russell, who was always changing his style. I knew that’s what interested me. When I was a really little kid, I used to just sit on the floor and look at my sister’s Beatles albums. I’d line them up and it was easy to figure out which ones they made when they were younger and which ones they made when they were older because of their facial hair. I would just marvel at what they looked like on their first album cover and what they looked like on their last couple, it was amazing to me that they were the same people and that the music kept changing from album to album.
Similarly, you can measure where Eels are at by the length and density of your beard. It was quite menacing in the Souljacker era.
Bit menacing, yeah. The pictures that are coming out right now with this record, I have the crazy long beard that I had on tour last year but I have since tightened it up.
Last one – since this record is called Eels Time!, are you a punctual person?
I am known as the most punctual man in rock, which is not a very rock’n’roll attribute, but I am extremely punctual, maybe to a fault. You have to be when you’re driving your kid to school and back every day. So I can always be counted on to show up on time.
I’ll testify to that as you were two minutes early for this chat and I appreciated it.
You see!
ND