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E from the Eels
Determined to make the misanthrope laugh, I took a very light tone with the gloomy E from the Eels.
By Dylan Behan.
Like Elliott Smith, Thom Yorke and Adam Duritz before him, Eels alter-ego E (real name Mark Oliver Everett) makes a living out of popularising his own misery. Unlike those guys however, he relies heavily on a sense of humour to get him through. "I don't think about it consciously, it's just a way of life for me. I couldn't image wanting to go through life without laughing at its absurdity."
On the phone from his home town of Hollywood, California (a city he describes as being like a Bukowski novel "at it's best"), he's talking to me to drum up publicity for the Eels new album Shootenanny!
In preparation for this unusual interview, I managed to uncover an old May 1992 issue of American Rolling Stone in which E is profiled as a "New Face" alongside hip-hop girl group TLC and the obscure folk duo Sun-60. Renowned for being never satisfied (something he says "keeps you moving, but it's not such a great way of looking at life"), I ask his reaction on how it feels to have buried both these acts in the pages of music history: "Gee, that's like eleven years ago. Man, I must be getting old."
But after such a long time of creative exertion, are the creative juices still flowing?
Indeed, on this album, like many before, E had to "drown some kittens", leaving several tracks off the final disc, with them to one day appear as B-sides or on a possible "value priced" box set. But does E have a favourite of the thirteen songs included on the album?
"It's hard to pick favourites because they're all my children as the songwriters say. I don't want to say I like Love of the Loveless and make Dirty Girl jealous. I don't want to say I like Wrong about Bobby and then also say I like Fashion Awards but then make Numbered Days, which is between them, feel like the unloved middle child... and then when you're drowning kittens and mixing metaphors it becomes a really ugly scene."
So finally, the question on everyone's mind: who would win in a knife fight between E and Badly Drawn Boy?
"Good question. I might win because I would pull his hat down over his eyes and (pause). I wouldn't really want to cut him up though, he's a nice guy. I'd like to think it wouldn't come to a knife fight."
Well any singer/songwriters E really wants to wrestle then?
Bruce Springsteen?
Fiona Apple?
Shootenanny is out now through Dreamworks/Universal.
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Directors David Cronenberg Miranda July Walter Salles Guillermo Del Toro American Splendor Morgan Spurlock Tarnation's Jonathon Caouette What The Bleep...
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Named for a new colloquial term in which groups of people gather together socially to fire guns in the air, Shootenanny! contains more of E's wistful insecurity, poetic dissatisfaction and humorous depreciatory observations. "It finds me at the crossroads of How Did I Get Here Street and Where Am I Going Next Avenue," he declares, followed by an awkward pause and shouts of "Come on! That was a great answer!"