EELS Play “Last Stop: This Town”

Listen to this track by Los Angeles-based pop music concern headed up by Mark Oliver Everett, EELS. It’s “Last Stop: This Town”, a single from the group’s second LP Electro-Shock Blues released in September 1998. That album was a kind of concept record of sorts, with many of the songs on the record dealing directly with family history, illness, and personal bereavement. These themes are come by very honestly. In the span of months, Everett aka “E” suffered the loss of his sister Elizabeth who died by suicide, and his mother Nancy who succumbed to cancer.

After his losses, E became the only living member of his immediate family. His famous quantum physicist father and Many Worlds theorist Hugh Everett III died in 1982 at the family home. A 19-year-old Mark Oliver Everett was the first person to discover him. Mental illness in his family, estrangement, death, and loss characterized his existence more than most. He even refers to it as the curse in many places in his work even beyond this album. Being of the John Lennon school of songwriting, E drew from his own emotional pain that was still very raw when he set out to follow-up his debut album.

With all that in place, you’d think the new material would come out in morose shades of gray to black, full of mournful lyrics and relentless minor chords. Yet, this song and many others on the album all seem to have a wider perspective than expected. In fact, the songs are expressed in a colourfully varied musical palette, grim in places, but also wistful, and even playful. The video for this song that served the record as a single is downright goofy, with animated depictions of gene splicing that, perhaps indirectly, is yet another ode to his family and to his heritage in the world of science.

Family is as strong a narrative thread as loss is on the album, making them inseparable. Along with his father and mother, E’s sister Liz is a recurring main character throughout. In other places on the record, she’s the principal narrator. Switching up perspectives is what helps E to keep the songs balanced and from being too downcast and monochromatic. In his quest to find peace in loss, it seemed that imagining emotions and events from points of view other than his own freed him up to better examine his own feelings and to express them in artistically viable ways.

In this song, he takes his grief and inverts it in an unconventional way. At least a part of the inspiration for this tune came from Francis, his neighbour and landlady. E had been away to attend his sister’s funeral. He hadn’t informed Francis of the reasons for his trip. But when he returned, she had news for him. First, she informed him that she had a talent for seeing dead people. Next, she’d seen the apparition of a young woman entering E’s abode only hours before he arrived home.

E recounts the story from his autobiography:

“Initially, it really spooked me when Francis told me this and I was feeling a little scared about sleeping in the house that night. But then I thought about the timing of it and I tried to look on it in a more positive, less spooky, light. Kooky or not, I liked the idea of Liz coming to say good-bye one last time, even if she just missed me by a few hours. If there’s gonna be a ghost in your house, you might as well think of it as a friendly ghost.”

~ Mark Oliver Everett, Things Your Grandchildren Should Know (2008)

As he says, kooky or not, the idea was a comfort in the middle of a grieving period. It was also the spark of an intriguing idea: what if the dearly departed felt a similar sense of grief in leaving the dearly bereft behind? What if they wanted to say goodbye to their loved ones and the world as much as those who remain to grieve their passing?

This empathetic perspective informs the lyrics. The music is supportive by never being sombre. In fact, “Last Stop: This Town” is more celebratory than funereal. Music box celesta, cheerful beats, a Kurtis Blow sample, and lighthearted vocal interplay punctuate its Sixties girl group melody. There’s even a subtle melodic reference to Scottish folk song “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”, another bright tune about love and loss thought to date back to the 1740s and Bonnie Prince Charlie. That reference handily suggests that the weight of bereavement was never an easy one to bear.

Importantly, “Last Stop: This Town” doesn’t trivialize how difficult saying goodbye to a passing loved one is. It doesn’t shy away from the troublesome thoughts that often arise when we experience the burdensome and overwhelming feelings caused by that loss. The opening line hits as hard as anything associated with that experience: You’re dead but the world keeps turning. This line contains an ocean of feelings and thoughts. How dare the world continue as normal when I’m in so much pain? Why isn’t the hole in my life obvious to everyone? In this world of billboards and factories and smoke, where can I find any source of comfort now that you’re gone?

E seems to find that comfort in storytelling and in the imagination. In writing this song, he gives shape to his grief. He paints a picture of his sister as a person who isn’t really gone, but is just on a long journey somewhere else. Whether he believes that or not is immaterial. By writing a song about her last errand before flying away from the world forever, he’s immortalized her. He’s preserved her essence in his world and freed her of the torment he knew she felt in her own. By making her a part of his song about grief, he’s taken steps to freeing himself, too.

With this song and the record off of which it comes, EELS solidified their sound. E made a habit of writing songs about hard subjects with lightheartedness, candour, and respect for how difficult and sometimes absurd living in this world so often is. In doing so, he does what artists are meant to do; allow us to connect to our own stories and feelings with greater clarity through their art. In so doing, this song helps make us feel less alone as tides turn one way or the other in our own unpredictable lives.

EELS is an active musical vehicle today, with a lineup that’s revolved around E’s songwriting. You can learn more at eelstheband.com.

You can read this interview with E on American Songwriter from 2013, a few years after the EELS record Tomorrow Morning came out. That release was the last in a trilogy of albums that in turn came out before he released Wonderful, Glorious. In it, and among other things, he talks about the inherent optimism and sense of gratitude in being alive in his music even though he’s often pegged solely as a writer of bummer rock.

Enjoy!

#90sMusic #Eels #MarkOliverEverett #songsAboutDeath #songsAboutLoss

"1 SUMMER OF LOVE

I was driving through the pitch black Virginia night, down the perfectly flat blacktop that was once a railroad track, across that high bridge over the ravine, thinking about the details of how one night I was going to drive off it. I was sure I'd never live to the age of eighteen, so I never bothered making any plans for the future. Eighteen had come and gone a year ago, but I was still breathing. And things were only getting worse.

The summer of 1982. That disgusting, sticky, humid weather where your back soaks through your shirt just from taking a short drive. By midsummer everything was a mess. My sister Liz's boyfriend flipped out in our kitchen one night and attacked me with a butcher knife. Soon after, Liz tried to kill herself for the first of many times. Swallowed a bunch of pills. Her heart stopped the moment we got her to the hospital, but they were able to revive her.

Pretty soon after that, Liz and my mom went out of town to visit relatives and I found my father's dead body lying there sideways on my parents' bed, fully dressed in his usual shirt and tie, with his feet almost on the floor, like he just sat down to die at fifty-one. I tried to learn CPR from the 911 operator on the phone, carrying my father's already-stiff body across the bedroom floor. It was weird touching him. That was the first time we had any physical contact that I could remember, other than the occasional cigarette burn on my arm while squeezing by him in the hallway.

I figured driving off the bridge might be the best way to deal with the crushing, lost, and empty feeling of being me. A dramatic way to go, of course. I was a kid. Later in life it would usually be a gun I imagined using on myself. Not quite as dramatic as driving off a bridge in your hometown. You can chart my development this way. In more recent years I would think about pills most often. That dramatic stuff is for kids. I'm mature now.

At the end of the summer, which I had already started referring to as The Summer of Love, I drove my gold '71 Chevy Nova away from home for the first time. I had bought the car that I called 'Old Gold', complete with a stop sign used in place of its rusted-out floorboard, for a hundred bucks from my hot, blonde cousin Jennifer, who years later would die on the plane that hit The Pentagon, September 11, 2001. She was a flight attendant. Sent a postcard from Dulles airport that morning that read 'Ain't Life Grand?' in big letters on the front.

My father worked at The Pentagon back around the time I was born. If I believed in curses, I'd have to wonder if the plane hit the part of the building where my father's office once was. But I don't believe in curses. Life is full of ups and downs. There have been some extremes in my life's case but, considering I had no plan, and very little of the kind of self-esteem you need to get by in this world, things could be worse. I'm just wandering through here, seeing what happens.

I don't know what happens when you die and I don't expect to find out until I die. Probably nothing, but you never know. For now, I'm still alive, and I've come to realize that some of the most horrible moments of my life have led to some of the best, so I'm not one for eating up people's melodrama. Just another day to me."

— Mark Oliver Everett: Things the Grandchildren Should Know, pp. 1-3

#MarkOliverEverett #reading #memoir

Eels, Hombre Lobo (12 Songs of Desire), 2009 on E Works Records

Seventh full length from Mark Oliver Everett (aka “E”) and Eels. Hombre Lobo as you might guess is Spanish for Werewolf. The MySpace Transmissions EP of live tracks was released to promote this release. Everything they do is just interesting and cool.

There’s also a documentary called Tremendous Dynamite: Making Hombre Loco if you buy the CD/DVD version:

My copy via Crossroads Music in Portland OR.

#2000s #2009 #CrossroadsRecords #E #EWorksRecords #Eels #MarkOliverEverett #PortlandOR #vinyl #vinylcollection #vinylfinds

Eels, The Myspace Transmissions / Transmission Session 2009, 2009 on E Works

I’m a huge fan of Mark Oliver Everett (aka E) and Eels so was super excited to find this record at Down in the Valley in Golden Valley MN.

These were made available for streaming and download at https://www.myspace.com/transmissions/ though I don’t think they are there anymore.

Great version of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” as well as “My Beloved Monster”

#2000s #2009 #DownInTheValley #EWorks #Eels #GoldenValleyMN #MarkOliverEverett #MySpace #vinyl #vinylcollection #vinylfinds

Episode fifty-five is up now! Today's song is Fresh Feelling by Eels.

I discuss the many places this song has shown up, and how often the chrous gets stuck in my head.

https://youtu.be/frbUExL_OQ0?si=qm-z2aRpjeCDv2AC

#podcast #dailypodcast #pigeon #pigeonsongspod #music #songs #summer #eels #markolivereverett #freshfeeling #scrubs #chuck

Eels Play “The Deconstruction”

Listen to this track by the distinguished gentleman of Los Feliz, California and his merry band of musical compadres, EELS. It’s “The Deconstruction”, the opening track from 2018’s album of the same name that served as something of a comeback for head writer and creative head Mark Oliver Everett aka E. This was after a four-year hiatus period as a musician, which may not seem like a lot in the late 2010s for most outfits. But up until that point, Everett put out records at a furious pace, and toured them just as rigourously at a near-continuous rate from the late Nineties. On a productivity cadence like that, it’s no wonder E needed a break after 2014’s The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett.

In those intervening years between releases, E’s personal life became more complicated. He got married and became a father. Then, he got divorced. That’s quite a rollercoaster ride of experiences in a relatively short period of time. Any one of those events would be enough to give a fella an existential kick in the pants to make him re-think things. That’s certainly reflected in the material that eventually appeared on the album. These are songs E wrote during a time when he considered abandoning his music career altogether, never considering that his new material would make for a cohesive record.

What is evident on the album that came out of all that and certainly on this song was that E kept true to his approach of self-examination in his work. Specifically, one of his stalwart themes of putting the past behind to make way for life in the present takes center stage here with a streak or two of irony to balance it all out. But how does this song and approach represent an evolution for a guy who’s made a career out of examining his own shortcomings and errors in song?

Since at least 1996 and the release of Beautiful Freak, E has become notable as a songwriter unafraid to stare his own insecurities square in the eye. From themes of loneliness, failure, redemption, joy in the small things, longing for love and connection, gratitude, and the grim reality of human mortality, he never wavered in his songwriting at drawing connections to these themes in his own life for the benefit of his audience. It’s this sense of emotional and even spiritual resonance that marks his work as singular. Another theme of course is that of survival, and those mechanisms that carry a human being through life as unpredictable as it is. Presumably, this includes songwriting.

“The Deconstruction” questions all of that, asking: what would happen if we tore that all down? What would remain when we did that, and what would we build up in its place? During a period of deliberate deviation from his usual breakneck routine of recording and touring, and coming into a new era of parenthood and partnerhood all at once, it was a potent question to consider even for the man who has written songs about getting over events and having to start over since his career began.

A four-year break allowed him the time to undertake the process after over twenty years of being a musician constantly on the go, turning his life’s trials into grist for his art. With his signature lyrical candour it’s easy to think that for Mark Oliver Everett, even the act of writing songs about pain, loss, and personal missteps is all a part of the big mess that needed examining and, possibly, also needed dismantling along with everything else that served as the pillars to an old way of life. This may explain a lot about his four-year hiatus as he worked all of this out.

The reconstruction will begin
Only when there’s nothing left
But little pieces on the floor
They’re made of what I was
Before I had to break it down

-“The Deconstruction”, EELS

There’s a certain amount of irony that remains for a songwriter presenting a song about, possibly, not writing songs to work through problems, but rather doing the work of self-examination without thinking about how it will fit on a new album. There is a further irony still that this resulted in a comeback record and one that seems like a callback to the quasi-Trip Hop sound of EELS’ first album that kicked the whole thing off.

Here’s the thing with EELS, though. The songs aren’t just about their author, even if he does tend to sing in the first person a lot of the time. They’re also about the audience. The question of what would happen if we really examined ourselves with a mind to remove assumptions and kick out bad patterns in our lives is as pertinent to us as it is to the person who wrote this song. How far are we willing to go with that? What will it mean for us when we do? These are real head-scratchers that are worth asking for all of us who are trying to make our way through this thing called life, whatever it is.

That’s where “The Deconstruction” really breaks through. Any background information about its author’s motivations for writing it are secondary once we begin to think about the song’s implications for ourselves. Whatever barriers E felt he had to break down at the time, his calling to capture what it is to be alive, human, and flawed remains in place. Valid deconstruction projects and personal journeys aside, we can always count on E’s honesty and his drive to reflect the struggles of his audience as we try to make sense of things, even if our own apparatuses for doing so are often just as flawed.

For more about Mark Oliver Everett just after his hiatus period and around the time The Deconstruction first came out in 2018, listen to this 44-minute NPR interview with E of EELS. In it, he talks about what this song means, what the benefits of following its advice might be, and what this reveals about him as an artist and as a person.

To explore the recurring themes of personal journeys and life’s sometimes harsh lessons found in Mark Oliver Everett’s work, check out these 20 Great Songs by EELS.

Otherwise, there’s always eelstheband.com.

Enjoy!

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#2010sMusic #Eels #MarkOliverEverett #songsAboutExistence #songsAboutHealing

Wer hat eigentlich beschlossen, dass Weihnachtsmusik immer besinnlich und friedlich sein muss? Die Indie-Meister der unweihnachtlichen Weihnachtsssongs sind definitv Mark Oliver Everett und seine Eels. Die Songs klingen zwar besinnlich, aber da hört es auch auf.

#DerGrinch #Eels #IndieWeihnacht #MarkOliverEverett #Popfilter #SongDesTages #Songempfehlung #Weihnachten #PopfilterDerSongDesTages

https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-eels-christmas-why-you-gotta-do-me-like-this?utm_campaign=share_on_mastodon&utm_medium=mastodon&utm_source=mastodon

🔊 #NowPlaying on #fip

Eels & Mark Oliver Everett & Jeff Lyster (the Chet):
🎵 Stumbling bee

#Eels #MarkOliverEverett #JeffLystertheChet