EELS
Biography EELS
EELS
is the name Mark Oliver Everett — E to almost everyone — puts on the records he makes with a rotating cast of collaborators: off-kilter pop influences set against personal lyrics that keep circling the darker end of human experience. Everett has been the one constant. The music turns warm and organic on 2005's Blinking Lights and Other Revelations and 2010's End Times, and deliberately discordant and noisy on 2001's Souljacker, but a melodic sense usually shines through the static, as it did on his 1996 debut Beautiful Freak and its bent indie pop. Later on he grew more interested in electronics, on 2018's The Deconstruction, then showed he still had guitar-based rock in him on 2022's Extreme Witchcraft and low-key pop on 2024's Eels Time!
Born in Virginia on April 9, 1963, Everett found rock music early through his sister's record collection, started playing drums at six and tinkered on the family piano. His teenage years were troubled, and his father's death complicated them further; the turmoil pushed him deeper into music. He taught himself to play his sister's guitar and began writing his own songs, and tragedy would later become the catalyst for Electro-Shock Blues. Because several of his friends were also named Mark, he took to going by his initials, and eventually by the letter E alone.
By his early twenties he was cutting demos on a used four-track cassette recorder, and he moved to Los Angeles to make a career of it. He wrote prolifically, the songs got better, and Polydor signed him as a solo artist, releasing 1992's A Man Called (E), which he supported on a tour opening for Tori Amos, and 1993's Broken Toy Shop. He left the label after that and formed Eels with bassist Tommy Walter and drummer Butch Norton. The trio signed to the then-new Dreamworks, which issued Beautiful Freak in 1996. Novocaine for the Soul became a sizable hit on MTV and alternative radio, its promo clip drew three MTV Video Music Award nominations the following year, and the band's popularity grew in England, where Spinal Tap handed them a Brit Award.
What should have been a promising stretch turned grim instead: Everett's sister and mother died in quick succession, and Walter left the group. That mood runs all through the second album, Electro-Shock Blues, which did not translate into commercial success. With Adam Siegal on bass the group toured it, then went straight back into the studio. Daisies of the Galaxy followed in 2000, brighter in outlook, with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck guesting and co-writing a track. It sold poorly too, but E assembled the Eels Orchestra and took it on an international tour — six people covering saxophone, trombone, trumpet, banjo, guitar, violin, upright bass, piano, melodica, clarinet and timpani, which meant each of them playing three or four instruments a night. A live recording from that 2000 tour, Oh What a Beautiful Morning, came out through the band's website.
For the fourth album E broke his habit of writing everything himself and called in John Parish. Souljacker came out across most of the world in September 2001 and reached America early the next year, the first US edition of the CD carrying a bonus four-track disc. On the road, E and Norton were joined by Parish on multiple instruments and by new bassist and synthesizer player Koool G Murder, with the live disc Electro-Shock Blues Show arriving to promote the tour. Spring 2003 brought a flurry of releases: I Am the Messiah, credited to MC Honky on SpinART and built from hip-hop beats, dance grooves and kitschy samples, was E in DJ drag; his score for the indie film Levity landed in April; and the fifth Eels album, Shootenanny!, in June. Then came 2005's Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, a double album of 33 songs. Eels With Strings: Live at Town Hall captured their New York Town Hall show of June 30, 2005, from the tour of the same name, and a second edition followed in February 2006 with a concert DVD. In 2008 the band issued two CD/DVD sets, the best-of Meet the Eels: Essential Eels 1996-2006, Vol. 1 and the odds-and-sods collection Useless Trinkets: B-Sides, Soundtracks, Rarities and Unreleased 1996-2007, and their songs made up the bulk of the soundtrack to the Jim Carrey comedy Yes Man.
Hombre Lobo, a concept album about desire, arrived in mid-2009, trailed closely by the live EP Transmissions Session 2009. The lo-fi End Times, built around broken love, came in 2010, and that August brought Tomorrow Morning, a far more polished record of upbeat optimism that leaned heavily on analog electronics. The tenth album, the eccentric, hard rock-focused Wonderful, Glorious, opened 2013, and roughly a year later The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett stripped things back to acoustic songs with light orchestration. On June 30 the band played London's Royal Albert Hall; the show was filmed and recorded, then released as an audio and video disc package in spring 2015. E worked with Koool G Murder and P-Boo on 2018's The Deconstruction, following his interest in electronic composition and recording, then stepped away from those frameworks toward a warmer, more organic sound and a relatively optimistic outlook on 2020's Earth to Dora. 2022's Extreme Witchcraft is a lively set of angular guitar-based songs, upbeat by the standards of the Eels, and it reunited him with Parish for the first time since Souljacker. December 2023 brought Eels So Good: Essential Eels, Vol. 2 (2007-2020), gathering 17 songs from the back catalog — two of them making their vinyl debut on the LP edition — plus three previously unreleased tracks. That year the band also toured for the first time in nearly four years, and not long after getting home Everett underwent open heart surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm. Once he recovered, work began on a new record: 2024's Eels Time!, a set of introspective numbers with Tyson Ritter of the All-American Rejects joining him in the studio on five of them.
