Blogs are supposed to be up-to-date diaries, right? But, heh — a week can be a long time in teaching …
So last Monday Archie and I were at the RFH for the latest Eels' tour. It was a great evening. Centred mainly around the music from Everett's new CD, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, it of course bore the stamp of the same — highly reflective, markedly introspective, sometimes sombre, often subdued, frequently melancholic. These elements have always been there in his songs; they're just more prominent now. From the band's website page about the new album:
Everett's father, famed quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, author of the Many Worlds Theory, died in 1982. His sister, Elizabeth committed suicide in 1996 and his mother, Nancy, who appears in a childhood photo on the cover of Blinking Lights, succumbed to cancer in 1998. "I would have ended up like my sister a long time ago except for one thing -- music," says Everett, "I've been very lucky to have that to hold onto. I take it very seriously. Maybe too seriously. It's everything to me."
"The family I grew up with was completely gone by 1998. I dealt with it at the time by making Electro-Shock Blues. But it's something that is never going to change for me and its implications are far-reaching in my life," he says. And the "curse" didn't let up after 1998, either: Everett's cousin Jennifer was a flight attendant on the plane that hit the Pentagon September 11, 2001. "There's kind of a ghostly sound to a lot of Blinking Lights," says Everett, "maybe because I'm living with a bunch of ghosts."
My favourite song of the evening and the album? The album's closing track, 'Things The Grandchildren Should Know'. Excerpts:
… I'm turning out just like my father
Though I swore I never would
Now I can say that I have a love for him
I never really understood
What it must have been like for him
Living inside his head
I feel like he's here with me now
Even though he's dead… So in the end I'd like to say
That I'm a very thankful man
I tried to make the most of my situations
And enjoy what I had
I knew true love and I knew passion
And the difference between the two
And I had some regrets
But if I had to do it all again
Well, it's something I'd like to do
Why my favourite? The Telegraph briefly mentioned the new album here and David Cheal said the necessary: 'It grapples with death, with waking up in the morning and not wanting to go on, with grief, and with anger; but it also seizes on the beautiful moments that punctuate the life of this troubled individual, beginning in his childhood when he used to sit in the dark and stare at the lights flashing on the Christmas tree … ultimately Everett seems to reach a kind of resolution, an acceptance of his place in the universe'.
I think both The Independent and The Times missed the point of the evening — as did our neighbour, a moderately extrovert American who swore his way through the opening Russian cartoon, was in the bar for the short film and was expecting a trad Rock concert for the rest of the evening. When, oh when, will people grock that the best of today's non-classical musicians are always going to be breaking new ground? That's ground, not wind. (See the Eels' site's FAQ no 6.)
(The brief Observer review got closer. Reviews of the 2003 tour can be found here and here.)
Last word to Mark Everett:
After a life full of some intense and horrific episodes, while looking back and taking stock in disc two's closing 'Things The Grandchildren Should Know', there's an extraordinary moment when the bloodshot and world-weary Everett clears his eyes and finds that life is still sweet enough to live all over again.
"There are two kinds of Christmas people," Everett says, "those who like their Christmas lights to stay on solid and those who like them to blink. As a kid, I always had a thing for sitting in the dark and watching the lights blink on and off at random." Now he says this fascination goes much further. "In the end, what we have are these little, great moments. They come and they go. That's as good as it gets. But, still, isn't that great?"
