In today’s corporate world of album release schedules, which involve video shoots, radio singles, world tours and publicity and marketing campaigns, releasing two albums in 14 months is an incredible task for any musician.
Yet the Eels, aka Mark Oliver Everett, has managed to release three albums in that time. The fact that fans and critics alike have lauded all three makes the achievement even more exceptional.
Until June 2009, the Eels’s last record was the 2005 masterpiece, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, a 33-track double album that Everett described as “a love letter to life itself, in all its beautiful, horrible glory”.
Although the album was heralded as one of Everett’s finest, he has admitted that he felt as though he had painted himself into a corner, describing it as the kind of album “you make at the end of your life”.
No wonder then that Everett withdrew from public life for four years to begin work on his autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and a documentary about his father, Hugh Everett III, a famous American physicist who first proposed the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics.
Then all of a sudden an Eels album was released in June last year, titled Hombre Lombo, which is Spanish for werewolf. The album saw Everett revisiting a character, Dog Faced Boy, whom he first introduced in the opening track of his 2001 album, Souljacker.
During an interview with Maddog magazine last year, Everett described the thinking behind his new album.
“Well, it all started with my beard. I was working on some other music and I was brushing my teeth one morning and I looked in the mirror and I thought, ‘Y’know, this beard doesn’t fit the music I’m working on’. I was about to cut it off and at the last moment it occurred to me that why not make an album that fits the beard?
“So that started off the idea and I thought about the last time I had a beard in 2001 for the Souljacker album — and the reason I had a beard then was that I was getting into character for the first song, which was Dog Faced Boy. Then I thought, ‘Well, he’s older now, what did he become?'”
According to Everett, the album sees Dog Faced Boy all grown up as a dignified old werewolf, but he is having some issues with the object of his affection, who won’t give him the time of day. What follows are 12 songs that focus on the werewolf’s lust, desire and unrequited love.
In the opener, Prizefighter, the werewolf declares, “I’m a dynamiter, I’m a prizefighter”, obviously attempting to win his maiden’s affections backed with a Rolling Stonesesque swagger. That Look You Give That Guy offers a gorgeous guitar riff over a hip-hop break as the werewolf stares on jealously as a rival gets the attention of his dream girl.
Tremendous Dynamite is a more menacing song in which the werewolf declares, “She is a formidable opponent/ She could put up a hard-won fight”, and Fresh Blood sees the werewolf howling over a big drumbeat in a song that sounds like a motorik version of Prince.
Hombre Lombo was a welcome addition to the Eels discography, but little did anyone know that it was the first in a trilogy of albums by Everett that deal with the themes of desire, loss and redemption — in that order.
In January this year the second album in the trilogy, End Times, was released. Everett is said to have gone through a divorce recently, although he has refused to comment on it, and his hermit-like lifestyle means that this has never been confirmed. But if End Times is anything to go by, then the man has definitely lost the love of his life somewhere along the way.
Dripping with devastation, End Times has 14 heartbreaking songs, which at times appear to be so disturbingly honest and sad that they make the album difficult to listen to.
Nevertheless it ranks alongside 1998’s Electro Shock Blues, an album that dealt with the suicide of Everett’s sister and the death of his mother from cancer, as his finest achievement.
The album’s heartbreaking moment comes during A Line in the Dirt, in which Everett documents the moment of realisation that the crumbling relationship is beyond salvation. “She locked herself in the bathroom again/ So I am pissing in the yard/ I have to laugh when I think how far it’s gone/ But things aren’t funny any more.”
In a recent interview with Q magazine, Everett responded to a question about how people perceive him as a very sad songwriter by saying: “People need to shut the fuck up. Because every album I put out, everybody says is so sad, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah? Check out this one called End Times, motherfuckers. You want sad? I’ll give you sad!'” Which is exactly what he did.
Fast forward to August this year and Everett finally released the third album in his trilogy, Tomorrow Morning. “I had this idea that I wanted to make this kind of warm, celebratory record,” said Everett in the Q magazine interview, describing the album’s theme as about redemption.
Launched with publicity photos depicting Everett as a boxer, he says he thought it was a good way to show the world he hadn’t given up and that he had come out swinging: “I just wanted to make sure people didn’t think I’d killed myself after the last record.”
The album is the most upbeat of Everett’s career with songs like Baby Loves Me, In Gratitude for This Magnificent Day, This Is Where It Gets Good and I Like the Way This Is Going. As he sings in The Morning, “It’s anybody’s day/ It could go any way/ Why wouldn’t you want to make/ The most of it?”
Tomorrow Morning is an album firmly rooted in looking towards the future and the concept of hope.
Featuring songs built with acoustic guitars and electronic beats, the album also uses tape loops, found sounds and some subtle string work to create an Eels album that sounds very unlike his previous work.
But when compared with the two other albums in the trilogy, some of the songs seem a little half-baked, with some of the lyrics coming across as trite. Granted, Everett has released three well-received albums in 14 months, so perhaps he can be forgiven these moments of weakness.
Then again maybe Everett is at his best when life has him with his back up against the wall. Whatever the truth, you know he is going to go down fighting.