If ‘Tomorrow morning’ is an album about redemption as Mark Oliver Everett said it was, if this album exults what is closed to joy on certain tracks, why does it make me sad? May be because I like my losers, the guys who always mourn after lost and hopeless love, I wonder what will happen to me if I lose them too.
At first listen, you would not tell the album is cheerful because even when Mark Everett is happy, there’s some melancholy in the tunes. But after a few listens, it works like a rebirth, like spring time, in the natural sense of the term, there is even a blooming jacaranda on the cover, and many lyrics relate to nature: ‘The old oak tree was dead; I had to cut it down’ he sings in ‘I’m a hummingbird’ where he explains his metamorphosis, as if it was something deep happening inside him, at the physiological level, ‘I dreamt at night of growing wings so I could fly/A caterpillar to a moth before I die’.
Starting from this, there is hope and with the quiet and organic ‘The Morning’, everything seems possible, ‘Why wouldn’t you want to have/The greatest day?’
So why so much hope? Where does all this suddenly come from? Everett is the man who wrote ‘Agony’, ‘Suicide life’, ‘It’s a Motherfucker’ and tons of other songs on the same depressive line.
But this time, his baby loves him! And over hard drum beats and some ironic electronic numbers, he screams it with outbursts of jubilation and triumph, and a dash of fuck-you-all-she loves-me.
He cannot stop talking about her, this ‘Spectacular Girl’, who ‘sees the beauty in things we all miss’, and birds and sunny skies just suddenly appear when arrive the few notes over his ecstatic declaration, ‘She’s a spectacular girl/spectacular girl’.
Where is his usual self-deprecation, his familiar low self-esteem? This time he has a lot to offer as he declares in ‘What I have to offer’, while the sweet melody, guitar and strings all fused as one and melt over a ‘And you know I’m all full of love/for yoooouuu’,… Could it be too much?
But he goes on and on about his love for this girl in ‘This is where it gets good’, with powerful and dry drum beats over a symphony of strings, a track à la ‘Sea Change’, except that for Beck the situation was exactly the opposite. This song, the middle of the album, is an earth-breaking revelation, as the next track, a calming instrumental called ‘After the Earthquake’, seems to indicate; and yes I agree, ‘Well, it’s almost too much’.
Mark Everett’s jubilation continues with ‘Oh so lovely’, with some ‘Yeahs’, communicating many explosions of joy all over the song, a really happy tune waltzing around the changes that have occurred, or with the blues gospel, hand-clapping ‘Looking up’, Mr. E. cannot even contain his joy anymore and he lets it go, celebrating the ‘fine man’ he has now become, is he really looking up to the future this time?
Gone the low self-esteem, since he is ‘The Man’ for everyone, every creature, ‘Ask the birds singin’/I am The Man/It’s all part of the plan’.
Mark Everett views this record as the happy conclusion of a trilogy, which began with the somber and aggressive ‘Hombre Lobo’, and descended into misery with ‘End Times’.
‘Tomorrow morning’ is sprinkled with wonderful little musical pieces of hope, like the brief and beautiful melody when lyrics stopped in ‘That’s not her way’ or like the cheerful electric guitar line in ‘I like the way this is going’. These are these little things that have always made the Eels’ albums a comfort for the hopeless and the loveless, except that this time, hope and love are real.
And if the last song is a serious reflection about his recent transformation, he nevertheless celebrates this ‘Mystery of life’ that changed his heart in a joyfully explosive chorus of ‘la la la la la’, after declaring ‘No more sorrow, no more strife/Always some daylight followin’ the night/Good morning, mystery of life’.
So may be life does not suck after all, and ‘It was all worth it/To be here now’ as he says in ‘I’m a hummingbird’. However, the purple jacarandas only bloom once a year late spring, early summer, and what happens next? I guess we will still have the birds.
The deluxe version of the album comes with an EP of 4 songs, and I can understand why he did not include them on the album, since they would have seriously reduced the level of optimism of the album.
‘Swimming lesson’, whose melody reminds songs from ‘Daisies of the Galaxy’, is this perfect balance between pessimism and hope, and works like a little advice to protect yourself against the world, this rotten place: ‘If you let your feelings shine/You better cover ’em up, kid/Ain’t no sense in wastin’ time/Dream behind your eyelids’,… just keep your head out of the water.
And Mark Everett revisits his old ghosts: in ‘St. Elizabeth story’ nostalgia and melancholy are back with memories about a high school dance and the shadow of her passed sister Elizabeth, in ‘Let’s ruin Julie’s birthday’ lamentations over deception in love seem to never have been interrupted, and in ‘For you’ promises are again mixed with self-doubt. I guess he is back to normal.
You can stream the three album trilogy on spinner.com or ‘Tomorrow morning’ was released on August 24th and you can stream the whole album (except the EP) on the Eels’ myspace page: