The music of
Mark Oliver Everett
(Virginia, USA; 1963) is so warm and welcoming that it makes you want to wrap yourself in it and not get out of bed.
His elegant songs, which from rock and pop have become heirs to the best tradition of the
American
singer songwriter
, provoke a sensation similar to that of seeing a sad clown who, through thick and thin, manages to outline a smile.
That is precisely the image with which
'Earth to Dora'
(PIAS) is presented,
the leader's
thirteenth studio
album and the only stable member of
Eels
.
Or simply, E. Laconic and lucid in equal parts, E corroborates it by phone from his home in Los Angeles: "If there is any mood common to the entire album, it is the one reflected on the album cover, that clown who seems to have been through difficult times but still manages to get a small smile on his face. It is an image that represents me. "
This is how we are, trying to draw strength from where there are none before a 2020 that seems bent on grinding us down and leaving us, among many other things, without live music.
"We are dying to get out of here and give a concert, but we have to wait ..."
.
And there he leaves it, because for him the interview is a necessary evil of his profession: "I try to remind myself that I do what I want to do for a living, and if talking about my job is the worst part, that means that I'm a very lucky guy. "
Despite the small and great troubles of life, E manages to find cracks and crevices through which the light can be sensed.
That's what he talks about in
Are We Alright Again
, the only song on the new album composed during the pandemic.
"
I wrote it to cheer myself up
, give me some hope and fantasize about how things could improve. I was hoping that when the album came out maybe it would be less fantasy and more reality, but it wasn't."
What is clear to him is that, when that longed-for moment finally arrives, his idea is to literally replicate what the lyrics say: "my plan is to get high until I fly with the birds, march through the streets with a municipal band ... more crazy things you can imagine. "
Beyond that triumphal march, his goal as an artist, he explains, "is to try to reflect life, with all its different layers and nuances."
Writing songs that are like novocaine for the soul, paraphrasing the title of the song that put him on the map back in 96, has helped him "to discover some things, to
deepen who I am and how I feel at all times
" .
A few years ago the alarms went off when he hinted that he was going to leave the music, but now he sees it as a fleeting moment of weakness: "I just needed a long and placid rest, I saw the opportunity and I have not felt that way since then. that worked. "
Since the publication of his
moving and hilarious memoir
,
Things Grandchildren Should Know
(Blackie Books), in which he told, among other things, how in just a few years his parents and sister died leaving him alone in danger, he has been tempted to write a second volume, "about all the crazy things that have happened to me since then. The problem is that the people I wrote about in that book are dead and most of the people I would write about now are alive. I could not publish anything about them without getting mad at me, so I guess I'll have to wait for them to die, "he says sarcastically, his favorite shield to face this cruel world.
Of all the crazy stories in his biography, which are many, perhaps the most surprising is the one that has to do with his
father
, Hugh Everett III,
the quantum physicist who created the theory of parallel universes
and a total stranger to his son despite to live with him for 19 years.
"Now that I have a young child I would say to him, 'Thank you for giving me an example of all that I don't have to do as a parent.'
I just do the opposite
, but at the same time I am proud of him and I have completely forgiven him. for not being a great father. "
Or, as it says in OK, another of the songs from Earth to Dora: "They have hurt me ... so what?"
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