Eels frontman Mark Everett: ‘I didn’t ask to be Tragic Guy’

Michael Hann

A little under 22 years ago, Mark Everett — known professionally as E — released Beautiful Freak, his first album with Eels. The lead track’s opening lines were: “Life is hard / And so am I / You’d better give me something / So I don’t die.” Things didn’t get any more cheerful from there: the next Eels album, Electro-Shock Blues, opened with a song called “Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor” that concluded: “My name is Elizabeth / My life is shit and piss.” Everett’s sister had been called Elizabeth; she had killed herself while Everett was on tour in 1996. “A lot of my stuff, I think, is existential,” says Everett, an attractively rumpled man in his mid- 50s, sipping coffee in a London hotel room. “Asking: ‘Why?’ And what might be different about this one” (the 12th Eels album, The Deconstruction) “or what’s added to the conversation with this one is: stop asking ‘Why?’ so much. The Deconstruction, I think, is about deconstructing your defences. We all have these walls built up, and what’s underneath all that? And really, life is just a collection of experiences and I think we all tend to make the mistake of searching for answers, and you’re not necessarily going to find too many succinct concrete answers. You’ve just got to get as comfortable as you can with navigating through all the turmoil. That’s about as good as it gets.”

The Deconstruction is the first Eels album for four years. It will sound familiar to anyone who has had even a passing interest in Everett’s work: deceptively attractive melodies wrapped around lyrics that are mordant to some degree. Even when he’s offering hope, it comes barbed: “I had a premonition / It’s all gonna be fine,” he sings on “Premonition”, “You can kill or be killed / But the sun’s gonna shine.” He took four years off, because he was “worn out from life being one-sided: work, work, work”. There was a lot of work: as well as the albums and tours with Eels, there had been an autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and a documentary about his father’s work as a physicist, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives.

The four-year sabbatical — over which time The Deconstruction was written and recorded, piecemeal — wasn’t a wholly satisfactory experience. “I made the mistake of treating it like a to-do list. So I got married, briefly, Wasn’t a good match, as a marriage, but I have a great son as a result.”

Fathers and sons turned out to be quite a big theme in Everett’s life. His own father, Hugh Everett III, died when he was 19, and Everett found the body. He later recalled that trying to resuscitate him was the only time he could remember touching his father. As a young physicist, Hugh Everett had pioneered the concept of parallel universes, but had ceased exploring it after his ideas were dismissed by the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr in 1959, a humiliation that led him to take up commercial work instead. Although he was later hailed for his work, Hugh died in 1982, before the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics entered the scientific mainstream.

Being a father, Everett says, has made it easier to know what kind of dad he wants to be, and to reconcile himself with his own dad’s emotional distance. “Things I will do differently from my father: I will actually talk to my son. It’s a very low measuring stick. I can remember a couple of conversations. The thing I’ve come to realise is that we’re all doing the best we can with what we’re given. Our dads, they were doing the best they could. They were dealt a shitty hand of cards. You have to give everybody a break.” There’s one thing he frets about for his son, though, despite him only being 11 months old: “I hope he’s not a big sports guy.”

At the 48th Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 2014 © Rex/Shutterstock

It’s sometimes hard not to imagine Everett’s family life as being refracted through his music. As well as his sister’s suicide and finding his father dead, his mother died of lung cancer in 1998, and a cousin was a flight attendant on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11. All of which has meant he has been typecast as rock’s Tragic Guy (let’s be honest, his lyrics haven’t helped). “It’s a strange jacket to wear. Because I didn’t ask to be Tragic Guy. I had tragedy thrust upon me. But it was all so long ago. I don’t wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, look in the mirror and say, ‘Good morning, Tragic Guy!’ I tend to look at it the opposite way: I’m the guy that lived through all that; it’s a really positive thing that I’m still here after all that. I think that’s part of this album, too; it’s about your frame of mind. You can be happy if you want to be happy; you just have to make that decision and accept that’s how your reality is.”

Combine the tragedy and the lyrics, and it’s easy to assume that Everett writes autobiographically. Yes, he says, he sometimes does. But the use of the first person confuses people. I’ve met songwriters who have flatly denied some songs being autobiographical when I’ve known enough about their lives to know not just that they are, but which specific incidents the song is referring to. He recognises that syndrome. “I definitely have a lot of songs that at the time I really had no idea were about me or some situation I was in. Years later, I go back and think: ‘That was totally what was going on with me.’ ” Maybe, he thinks, songwriters just don’t realise the truth about themselves until they’ve unthinkingly put it down in a song.

Everett laughs frequently — a warm, woody chuckle that’s at odds with the image he has sometimes projected. In 2002, touring his Souljacker album, he appeared on stage hidden behind dark glasses, with a huge beard, his head covered by a hoodie; he was dressing as the Unabomber, and the show I saw was one of the most coldly uncommunicative performances I can recall seeing. He seems almost affronted when I ask if he was trolling his audience. “No! Not at all! It’s really the opposite — that was like a fiction writer putting on the mask of a character so he can get to a deeper truth. I never do anything to troll anybody. It’s always genuine.”

Maybe everything Everett does should be taken at face value. But I don’t know. After all, he’s a man with two dogs — Bundy and Manson — named after serial killers; he’s a man whose dark, depressing songs have reached their greatest exposure by being featured in the first three Shrek films.

So, Mark Everett, what would be happening to you in the perfect alternate universe right now? “There’s a better world than this? You can be happy with it if you decide to be. In that sense, I’m in the perfect universe already.” And he laughs, gently.

‘The Deconstruction’ is released on E Works on April 6

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