EELS: E throws a party!

(© Piper Ferguson)

After a veritable flood of records and compilations, plus a book and a film, you might have thought that E had no more to say, but there’s no stopping EELS. The man has actually brought out a cheerful record, the perfect soundtrack to his fiftieth birthday party at the Cirque Royal. "This is quite an achievement."

Da da, boom boom...heavy bass drum, a snare, fuzz bass, and then vocals: “Oh man...feels so nice / That was a long cold night / But then the sun came out to thaw the ice.” It sounds like the announcement of the long-awaited spring, but it is actually Mark Everett, “E” for short, using his cigar-smoked vocal cords to express his joie-de-vivre in “Peach Blossom”. “Open the window man and smell the peach blossom / The tiger lily, the marigold”, he continues wittily. The first single off EELS’s wonderful album Wonderful, Glorious (his tenth!), which came out at the end of January, is by an E who was clearly in a cheerful mood.

“I’m a fighter, at least that’s the conclusion I have to come to when I look back over my life,” says E, who lost his father, his mother, and his sister in his twenties, and has repeatedly been unlucky in love too. Those personal miseries were acknowledged on extremely dark records like Electro-Shock Blues and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations and were also dealt with at length in his autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and the recent albums Hombre Lobo, End Times, and Tomorrow Morning, a trilogy on desire, destruction, and renewal. “I haven’t exactly been spared disaster, but I have always got through it. The fact that I have now brought out my tenth album is an achievement, I reckon.”

I thought your book was a sort of end point, but after it you started on the busiest period of your musical life. And barely two years after your album trilogy, you have brought out yet another record.
E: Taking on so much work was actually good for me, at various levels. But once all that work was done and the dust had settled, I was left feeling, “What am I going to do now?” For God’s sake, who writes his life story and does all those career and life defining things in his forties? [Laughs]

I have to admit I was wondering what on earth I could still ask you. You have already put everything on the table.
E: I have that problem too, I have nothing left to talk about! When someone wants to know something about my life, I just answer, “page 73, second paragraph”. [Laughs] Lots of the lyrics on the album come from someone who finds himself at a crossroads in his life and who sees himself pushed into a corner. I had no plan; I felt unsure about where I wanted to go. The great thing is that that became the subject matter of the record.

In your book you write: “I survived by just being me.” But now you sing: “I’m changing up what the story is about.”
E: Well, you don’t get through things by just lying back and saying, “Hey, that’s just the way I am.” It takes an effort, though. If there is just one thing you must remember about this album, it is that every day we have a choice. There are lots of things that are outside our control, that you can’t do anything about. But you can actually change yourself – not anyone else. If there are situations in your life that aren’t working, all you can do is look at yourself and think about what you can change to get it to work. Every day I try to improve my outlook on life.

Wonderful, Glorious is a very funky, physical record: it seems to be bursting with life.
E: You can put that down to my fantastic band, musicians I have been playing with for a few years now. Before, I used to always look for new band members for a new record, whether out of necessity or not. It clicks so well with The Chet, Knuckles, P-Boo, and Koool G Murder: they have the talent, the humour, and the imagination to be fully-fledged EELS.

Are you an easy-going band leader or a pain in the ass?
E: Gee, I see them as my friends, but I do have to be the leader. It is a delicate balance that you have to keep an eye on. We can play the fool and joke, but sometimes I do have to be strict. They call me the “benign dictator”. It was sweet, though, that all the guys in the band thought that “You’re My Friend” was about them. [Laughs] I played the innocent. I like it when they compete for my affection.

After ten years you have moved out of your basement studio. Was it played out?
E: At the risk of sounding very boring: the basement had just become too small. Over the years I had collected so much stuff that in the end there was no room for people any more. Now we have a whole house: it’s our musical playground. The living room is the live performance area, where we set up our guitars, bass, drums, and amplifiers. The control room is in the basement. And there are other rooms where we need some extra insulation, for keyboards and so on. The ideal workplace.

Did it have an influence on the way you worked?
E: [Enthusiastically] Oh, yeah. Beforehand, we had no idea at all of what we were going to do: we would just see what happened in the studio. We tried every idea, even those of which I thought they were really bad. It was one big experiment, really; looking back on it, it could have all gone terribly wrong. Usually, I have a very specific idea, both in terms of the music and of the lyrics. Often, too, a lot has been written down in advance, if I haven’t actually cobbled everything together already. Over the first few hours, moreover, it didn’t seem to be working; but after half a day we got into gear and we kept going without a break for a whole month.

Soon you will be celebrating your fiftieth birthday at the Cirque Royal. Will it be as good as at Werchter two years ago?
E: I hope so. You Belgians made that a great moment. During “The Look You Gave That Guy”, we had to stop because we couldn’t hear ourselves any more with all the applause. Onstage you sometimes feel like a Beatle – well, Ringo anyway. But that evening I felt like John. [Deadpan] Fifty: I never thought I would get that old, bearing in mind my history. I am fortunate that I still have lots of energy and that I still look relatively good. Actually, people usually reckon I’m ten years younger. I got lucky with some genes.

EELS • 10 & 11/4, 20.00, SOLD OUT!, Koninklijk Circus/Cirque Royal, Onderrichtsstraat 81 rue de l’Enseignement, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-218.20.15, www.cirque-royal.org