E is good

He has the voice of Mr Magoo and the air of an eccentric maths professor, forever struggling with some complex conundrum. A few short hours after our meeting E will make his entrance onto the stage of Dublin s Olympia Theatre wearing pyjamas, as he is led to the microphone by what looks like his nurse.

He then launches into Oh What A Beautiful Morning . This hoary old feelgood standard is a sort of mission statement for his band, the eels. In some ways, their single Mr E s Beautiful Blues is a modern day re-writing of that song in its insistent, bubbling optimism.
Twas not always thus. In 1998, E released a record called Electro-Shock Blues, which was basically all about death and its aftermath. It was a difficult album to listen to because the songs graphically examined E s feelings and thoughts about the death of his mother from cancer and the suicide of his sister.
That album can be filed alongside Lou Reed s Magic And Loss in its unflinching documentation of the process of dying while still managing to achieve a level of release or catharsis for its author.
Cut to two years later and E has answered the question were does he go from here? with a record that is as chirpy and life-affirming as its predecessor was grim and glum. Daisies Of The Galaxy is a record bursting with joy, a record that feels duty-bound to be as up as up can be. A daisy growing through concrete is one of the album s many enduring images, suggesting life prospering in the face of death a far cry from Electro-Shock Blues, where daisies were being pushed up, alright, but in an altogether more depressing context.
Some would say it s a very brave thing to do: to write about the death of your loved ones in such an open manner.
Yeah, grunts E. Some people would say it was a stupid thing to do! But for me, I was excited about it from an artistic standpoint because it never occurred to me for a long time to write songs inspired by these things.
Then this lightbulb went off in my head and I started thinking about death in a broader sense than just what was going on in my life and I realized that everyone was really phobic about it and in denial about it. But it s just part of life, you know. Studies show that living causes death!
I got excited. I said: I can try and make something beautiful out of this and really contribute something to the world. I realised that there was a way of looking at this that hadn t been done before musically. I was very happy making that record during the time I was making it. That was the good part of my day.
Was that what got you through your personal crises?
Definitely.
Of course, if you look at the history of song, there s really only a limited number of themes involved, being roughly: love, death, sex, loss
Shuffling in his chair, E is a little sceptical of my analysis. If you want to categorise things , he ponders, I think there s an endless amount of grey areas. Sex-death! Put them together and you get all sorts of interesting things! I ll save that album for later!
A little more probing and the mask of humour slips and we re right down to brass tacks.
Death has always been a fascinating subject for me, he states. When I was a little kid, I was excited by graveyards. I liked the reminder that you re only here for a little while. I m still endlessly interested and fascinated in the subject of death.
Even though I got that record out of my system, I do find myself steering conversations towards it to the point where I can see people sighing, jeez, there he goes again .
So what conclusions has E come to? What, in his humble opinion, is it all about?
The thing I m not interested in is the easy answers, he says. People are so desperate for the answer to that. To me, the answer is there is no answer for you to know. You re not to know it yet. That to me is the really admirable thing people who can live without the answer.
So what drives you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
I have to say making a record gets me out of bed in the morning. If it s something I m really into and enjoying it can be great. The idea that at the end of the day you have something that didn t exist the day before.
Thanks to E and drummer Butch and REM s Peter Buck, Daisies Of The Galaxy does exist. One of the interesting things about the record is the artwork, which features a collection of drawings of children that were personally hand-picked by E and for a very good reason.
I came across a Greek children s book in my family s attic when I was cleaning it out, he says. Sadly, no-one can tell me the story of how it ended up in our house. There s an ambiguity in the illustrations that I really like that I thought fit the record nicely. The tear in the donkey s eye really summed it up nicely. It s a happy tear he s been through a lot but now things are going to be OK. That s exactly what the record is to me.
Then there s the kids walking through this nice, beautiful spring day but they have guns! Or even the image on the front cover the girl s pointing this wand at these dogs. It s uncertain if this is a good or a bad thing. Is she gonna torture them? Or is she gonna help them?
E was born Mark Oliver Everett and grew up near the plains of Virginia, where music was never really a big deal, rocksy or otherwise.
Well, Virginia was the wrong place for me, he says, matter-of-factly, but I didn t realise it until I was 23. Parts of Virginia are nice. But where I lived was the suburbs of Washington D.C. and there was just no artistic nurturing of any kind. There was no community of interesting people that had any point of view that made a difference.
So what was your entry into the world of music?
I started playing drums at the age of six. My next door neighbours had a garage sale with a little toy drum-set going for $15. I bought them and played them every day for, you know, 15 years!
I became a pretty good drummer so I started to play in older kids bands. There was an upright piano in the house so I d make up little songs on there. I didn t play guitar till I was 18. My sister had an acoustic guitar and I started stealing that from her. But everything really got going when I bought a four-track cassette recorder when I was 19 or 20. I became obsessed with it.
Although the first eels album is the best-selling Beautiful Freak, which spawned the classic single which launched them this side of the Atlantic, Novocaine For The Soul , E actually released two albums under his own single-lettered name prior to this. So why the name-change? Was there a big shift musically from E to the eels?
It s all really the same thing, he answers. The first two E records could just be called eels or vice versa. I just changed the name at that point to breathe new life into it. I felt like there had been a couple of years where I was growing and getting more adventurous musically and braver lyrically.
So I decided to call it something else. I also felt being called E could be a problem like at restaurants you d never get called to your table because the waiter would assume that the letter E written down on the list of reservations meant that a name had been started and not finished and so he d ignore it. That happened loads of times. I thought for logistical reasons maybe I d better add a couple of more letters!
How do you write songs?
An awful lot of my songs are written on napkins! I just keep writing things down and then when I get home I throw them down into this briefcase and then eventually I open it up.
The ubiquitous Peter Buck played a big role in the making of Daisies. What was it like working with him?
It was great, enthuses E. I would think he s a pretty rare thing in that he s a rock star who s been around for all these years and done everything nine or ten times now. Yet he s totally excited about music and loves to be involved with music that he likes. And he loves to work. He d come over to my house in the morning and then he d go and work with REM all night.
Any future projects?
Right now I m working on four different records piece by piece. They re all different sides of my split personality, perhaps. Some I don t think I ll call eels. Others I ll call eels even though it s a different eels to the last eels.