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Mark Everett's Painful, Revelatory Music
By JIM FUSILLI
Wall Street Journal
Mark Oliver Everett, who's better known as E, leader of the band Eels, is
baring his soul again, this time on his ninth album, "Shootenanny!"
(DreamWorks). Mr. Everett's customary awkward eloquence is in ample supply
on its 13 tracks, but never before has he brought so much fire to his music.
It's his best work, which is saying something: Previous Eels albums such as
"Electro-Shock Blues" and "Beautiful Freak" were among the finest rock
recordings of the '90s.
Most of "Shootenanny!" was recorded in a hectic 10-day stretch, with many of
the tracks performed live by Mr. Everett with bandmates and visiting
musicians. (On previous Eels recordings, he played most of the music
himself.) Accordingly, there's a rough, jagged edge to several cuts,
including "All in a Day's Work," the disc's bluesy opener, and two finely
crafted pop tunes, "Lone Wolf" and "Rock Hard Times." But "Shootenanny!"
also is rich with the gentle, offbeat ballads for which Mr. Everett is best
known, in which his thin, reedy voice wafts over a single electric guitar or
what sounds like a toy piano.
As always, Mr. Everett's lyrics present an awkward, self-deprecating and
deeply felt man in all his hesitant glory. He is a rare writer whose work is
both funny and painfully revelatory, often within a single phrase.
"I have low self-esteem, so that self-deprecating thing just goes
hand-in-hand with it," he told me recently. "I never realized I had a sense
of humor. In my family, that was just the way we communicated." If that's
so, dry irony, with undercurrents of barely contained animosity, must have
defined the small talk in the Everett home.
The 40-year-old Mr. Everett was raised in McLean, Va., with his sister
Elizabeth, mother Nancy and father Hugh Everett III, a quantum physicist who
in 1957 proposed a formal theory of parallel universes known as "The
Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics." "Everett's work has
boggled minds inside and outside physics for more than four decades,"
reported Scientific American in last month's issue.
Mr. Everett said his brilliant father wasn't communicative at home. When I
asked him what the conversation was like around the breakfast table, he
replied, "There wasn't any."
"Physicists and geniuses don't always make great family men. I lived with
him for 18 years and I learned more about him from the Internet."
Mr. Everett's family was a heartrending source of inspiration for his most
notable work, the 1998 album "Electro-Shock Blues" (DreamWorks), written
after his sister committed suicide and his mother succumbed to lung cancer.
Mr. Everett's father died in 1982.
From its opening track, "Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor," "Electro-Shock
Blues" is a stark, compelling examination of their deaths and his agonizing
recovery from the sudden loss of his family. Its coda, "P.S. You Rock My
World," finds him looking forward with surprising optimism.
He said, "A lot of people told me it was depressing, but I don't think I've
made a more uplifting album. It was a big turning point for me, obviously,
because of the subject matter. It's when I grew up and where my career
began."
There's a troubling innocence to Mr. Everett's work that's derived from his
sweet voice and his writing, which has a perspective that's intimate and
detached, focused and frazzled. Occasionally, his narrator is a child, as in
"Saturday Morning," a track on "Shootenanny!" in which a restless
eight-year-old finds himself awake before other members of his family.
"When you've only lived for eight years, a day is a big chunk of time so you
don't want to waste it," he said. "Now I would give anything for a day to
waste, but not when I was eight."
"Shootenanny!" also conveys Mr. Everett's ever-present conflicting feelings
of optimism and hopelessness. In "Dirty Girl," he sings, "Once in a while
your life gets so good/ Worth all the trouble of the past/ That was the case
but I think I always knew/ Good things don't ever last."
Recognition has come gradually to Mr. Everett, whose first album was issued
in 1992. His songs have appeared in films such as "American Beauty," "The
End of Violence" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." He was recently
filmed by Wim Wenders for Martin Scorsese's forthcoming PBS documentary on
the blues; Mr. Everett performed a Skip James song on pipe organ. And his
delicate score graced the recent film "Levity," the soundtrack to which Mr.
Everett said is "the album of mine I'd most like to listen to."
He and Eels will venture to Europe before returning to the U.S. to tour this
summer behind "Shootenanny!" (Visit www.eelstheband.com for dates and
locations, as well as Mr. Everett's advice column, "Dear Uncle E.")
"So once again," he said, "in my own dysfunctional way, I'll try to make up
for my strange life by baring my soul to a roomful of strangers."
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