Mark Everett's Painful, Revelatory Music

By JIM FUSILLI

Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2003

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."