LATE last year, Mark Oliver Everett, better known as E, needed a life-saving emergency operation.
When the Eels singer had a routine check-up, an aneurysm was discovered on his aorta.
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The largest artery in his body, the one carrying blood from his heart to his circulatory system, had to be replaced. Fast.
Otherwise, as he puts it succinctly, he would soon have been “feeling the symptoms of . . . death”.
E says: “I had open heart surgery. They cut through my pecs, sawed through my breastbone and stopped my heart on the table.”
So imagine the scene when he’s wheeled out of theatre, complete with replacement aorta taken from a cow, and is waking up — groggy but happy to be alive.
“How are you feeling?” asks one of the medical team in attendance.
“Moo,” he mumbles in response.
“I can’t believe I was coherent enough for that punchline,” E tells me via video call from his home/studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Los Feliz.
“One of the side effects is that I do moo occasionally.”
Having got to know the singular E over the years, this is exactly the type of dark humour I’ve come to expect from him.
It dawned on me why he was wearing pyjamas when I talked to him for an Eels Christmas special last December.
Early warning sign of heart attack you may notice in bed
“I think the operation had just happened — but I didn’t tell you! I was probably doped up still,” he admits.
“I wore my pyjamas for two months.”
We’re hooking up again because of the imminent release of Eels Time!, the band’s 15th studio effort in a run stretching back nearly 30 years.
The new album was made prior to E’s operation but the opening song, bruised and beautiful Time, deals with mortality and has a prescient air to it.
“Tick-tock I rock, but then I look at the clock,” he intones.
I felt uncomfortable (posing shirtless) but I just wanted to bring awareness, so people get checked
Mark
E continues with the black comedy when I mention the startling publicity picture which finds him showing off his massive scar.
“I should have been posing topless years ago,” he smiles before revealing the serious reason behind stripping off.
“I felt uncomfortable but I just wanted to bring awareness, so people get checked.
“Luckily chicks dig scars. That’s what The Fonz said!”
If that’s not enough, E delivers another funny anecdote: “When I was in recovery, I was in a lot of pain.
Serious boffins in the family
“I was hooked up to all these needles and hoses so going to the bathroom was an ordeal.
“One time, there was a new nurse on duty and I was having a really rough night. I kept buzzing her every hour for sleep or pain meds.
“Then in the morning, she came in and said, ‘I heard you were a singer, so I looked you up. I saw that your biggest song on Spotify is called I Need Some Sleep’. And I said, ‘Yep, that’s him!’ ”
Those aware of E’s life story might recall that his father Hugh Everett III was a serious boffin, a quantum physicist credited with the many-worlds theory.
Hugh was also a chain smoker who loved a drink and died from a heart attack aged 51 when his son was just 19.
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Dad’s early death prompted E, now 61, to have the regular heart scans and it is those that have just saved his life.
“The one positive thing I can find from my father dying young is that it’s kept me alive,” he says.
“I wouldn’t have known I had this condition if I wasn’t having checks every year.”
I sing, ‘It’s all about time now’, because it’s hard not to have it constantly on your mind when you know you don’t have as much of it left
Mark
So how is he feeling now? I venture.
“I’m totally fine,” replies E.
“It was a big ordeal of course and it took me a couple of months to recover but I’m as good as new now.”
We turn to two new Eels songs which resonate, firstly Time.
He says: “I sing, ‘It’s all about time now’, because it’s hard not to have it constantly on your mind when you know you don’t have as much of it left.”
‘Circling the drain’
E suggests that irrepressible Dick Van Dyke, the 98-year-old cheeky chappie actor of Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fame, “puts it well”.
“Dick started his autobiography by saying, ‘Well, now that I’m circling the drain, I thought it would be a good time to tell my story’.
“I’m not at an age where I’m ‘circling the drain’ exactly but you never know.”
Moving on to the life-affirming Let’s Be Lucky, E says: “I feel incredibly lucky and that’s the point of the song.
“I say, ‘Sometimes you’ve got to make your own luck,’ and part of that is putting yourself in a position where you can receive luck.
Luckily, I found out about this condition despite having no symptoms. I’d probably be dead right now if I hadn’t
Mark
“I guess that I was smart enough to go, ‘Oh, my dad died of a heart attack at 51 so I’m doing these scans every year’.
“Luckily, I found out about this condition despite having no symptoms. I’d probably be dead right now if I hadn’t.”
Five of the songs on Eels Time! find E working with a new collaborator, Tyson Ritter, actor and frontman of brash rock band The All-American Rejects.
They met on the set of Prisoner’s Daughter, a 2022 film starring Kate Beckinsale and Succession’s Brian Cox.
E’s involvement began when he was approached by Ritter’s people.
“Tyson was working on a song for the movie and wanted me to be on it,” he says.
“It was a cool song. I liked it so I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ As we were talking, we found out that we were living in the same neighbourhood.”
This led to E taking a cameo role and also contributing an Eels song to the soundtrack, Man I Keep Trying.
There’s a scene in a Mexican diner where Ritter’s character thumps E in the face. “I actually cracked a rib filming that,” he reports.
“I do my own stunts and we were doing about 20 takes. He would punch me and I would fall into a restaurant table.
“One of my ribs hit the side of the table really hard but I was the new guy, only there for a day. I didn’t want to be a diva so I didn’t tell anyone.
“I drove home to LA the next day and went and got an X-ray.”
There’s no worse feeling on earth than being with eight professional actors and you’re the one who blows the whole scene
Mark
Injuries aside, I ask E if he enjoys his movie cameos — other recent ones include Bill & Ted Face The Music and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania.
“Yeah, it’s not what I usually do. I’m learning,” he answers.
“I was doing a scene over and over again with Kate Beckinsale where I get to fire her. A lot of it was improv — it’s so fun to do stuff like that.”
E gained valuable experience from several appearances in Judd Apatow’s Netflix rom-com series, Love.
‘Bundy is cuddly one’
He says: “There’s no worse feeling on earth than being with eight professional actors and you’re the one who blows the whole scene because you f***ed up your line.
“I can just imagine the star of the show going straight to the director and saying, ‘Great job bringing the singer in!’ ”
We digress. Let’s just add that E’s work on Prisoner’s Daughter explains why Ritter contributes several co-writes to Eels Time!
One is Goldy with it’s garage rock feel and named after a pet goldfish.
It comes with a typical E back story.
“I don’t currently have a goldfish,” he explains.
“So, in order to get into the lyrics, I had to picture it as my dog Bundy [named after the serial killer. His other pooch is called Manson by the way].
“Sometimes when I’m just snuggling with Bundy, I’m thinking, ‘You are all I need’. He’s doing great — he’s the cuddly one.”
What about Manson?
“He’s like the real Manson. He gets others to do his killing, so he might make Bundy the killer.”
The track Sweet Smile is particularly revealing about its creator.
E says: “The nice thing about getting older is some of the hard edges start to soften. The Beatles were right, ‘All you need is love’.
He pulls a comedy sour face and cries: “Look at my resting bitch face!
“I’ll be out walking and be conscious of my facial expression. Then, if I just smile, everything seems better.”
The only snag to this theory comes when E is out with his “crazy little serial killer dogs”.
‘Polished a turd’
“I actually look for times of day to walk them when I won’t run into as many people and other dogs because it can be an ordeal.”
Another Eels Time! song, the exquisite And You Run, began life decades ago.
E says: “I wrote it when I was a teenager and my old friend Sean Coleman had kept a bunch of my demo tapes.
“I’ve known Sean for so long that his older sister used to babysit me. We grew up together in Virginia but now he lives in Dublin.
“Occasionally, he’ll send me one of those old songs and I’ll think he’s just trying to rib me.
“But when he sent And You Run, he said, ‘I think there’s something here’. It was from the Eighties — terrible drum machine production, terrible synthesiser sound. I hated it.
“Then, unsolicited, Sean came up with a beautiful production and I was like, ‘Oh my God, you’ve really polished a turd. I’m going to sing on this and put it on the album’.”
On the woozy slice of psychedelic rock If I’m Gonna Go Anywhere, E asks: “Love, what else is there but love?”
It’s a theme that cuts through this thought-provoking album, looming large on I Can’t Believe It’s True which celebrates E’s joy at having young son Archie in his life.
‘Hotbed of creativity’
In his album notes, he writes: “This probably works as a romantic song, but what was in my mind was my son and — sorry to bore the non-parents out there — the cliches are true. It’s all a marvel.”
Before we go our separate ways, there’s one last revelation from E that I must share.
“The woman next door died recently — she was almost a hundred,” he begins.
“But before she died, she handed me an article from the Los Angeles Times, which I have had framed and put on the wall.
“It turns out that the woman who used to live in THIS house, also my studio, discovered a manuscript of Huckleberry Finn in the attic — now the control room.”
E continues: “I wish I’d been the one to discover it. I think she made a million dollars.
“Her grandfather was Mark Twain’s lawyer and the manuscript had a bunch of material not in the original book.
“I guess it was deemed im- portant because now it is in all new editions. I really didn’t expect somthing like that to happen in Los Feliz, California — Mississippi maybe.”
E laughs at the thought of Mark Twain’s ghost being the reason his attic has become a “hotbed of creativity”.
“Whenever people go up there, they say it’s got a good vibe,” he affirms.
It’s fair to say there’s a “good vibe” around Eels Time! and, thankfully, its creator is feeling “as good as new”.
EELS
Eels Time!
★★★★★
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