There is an interesting interview of Mark Oliver Everett on drownedinsound.com. The frontman of the Eels, or E in short, is someone who has really interested me ever since I read his book published in 2008. ‘Things The Grandchildren Should Know’ is an incredible tale of survival through creativity and music, a survival guide when death surrounds you, as his father (a quantum physic genius he did not really know) died when Mark was only 18, and his sister and mother died the same year, respectively from suicide and cancer.
His book is very direct and sincere, extremely depressing but funny, and manages to ask the more complex metaphysical questions in a simple way:
‘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’.
Through the book, you wonder how he was able to maintain this acute sense of humor with the life he had: A totally absent father (‘My father was so uncommunicative that I thought of him the same way that I thought of the furniture’), a younger beloved sister who committed suicide, and a mother slowly dying of cancer, everything in a short amount of time.
Then it seems that everywhere he goes, death follows, as he loses many friends along the pages, and even when he was in London promoting his ‘Beautiful Freak’ album, Princess Diana died and his whole stay is tainted by death again.
In the interview, E talks about these episodes and many others, but also about the release of the third and upbeat album of his trilogy ‘Tomorrow Morning’. To explain so much work he evokes the sense of emergency that drives him ‘I’ve always had that, because of my family history. I’ve always felt that I better strike while I can.’
He also says he does not know what will be next and this is in complete continuity with what he wrote in his book:
‘Bob Dylan said that, when he was young, he had a secret sense of his destiny. I wish I had something like that, but I didn’t. At all. All I had was an aching sense of desperation and an acute cluelessness—a nasty combination. I didn’t have any idea what the hell I was doing and was only doing it out of knowing what else to do. Music was the only thing that I had a passion for and the passion was getting stronger all the time. But I didn’t have any idea what could become of it.’
If you want to read the whole interview, go there: