Tomorrow Morning Dawns Bright for EELS

By Marcus Gilmer in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 23, 2010 4:40PM

It's been 14 years since EELS first hit the airwaves courtesy of their "MTV Buzz Clip" single "Novocaine For The Soul," off their debut Beautiful Freak. The song embodied what has become something of a stamp for the band - primarily E aka Mark Oliver Everett plus a rotating cast of semi-regular band members: songs that seem to shuffle towards an insanity that burst into beautiful melody, a dark, sad undercurrent flowing beneath otherwise shimmering beauty. While other mid-90's alt-rock acts got primarily relegated to the discount bin at used CD stores, EELS continued to churn out albums of steadily increasing quality: the bleak yet beautiful Electro-Shock Blues (1998), the borderline baroque Daisies of the Galaxy (2000), and the sprawling Blinking Lights (2005) being the best.

And now the band is back with its ninth album, Tomorrow Morning. It completes a trilogy that began a little over a year ago with Hombre Lobo and continued with End Times, released earlier this year. The trilogy cycles through emotions that, as E told me, "everybody experiences at some time in their lives." Hombre Lobo was about desire and longing while End Times was about loss and the reeling emotions that come from it. But Tomorrow Morning finished the trilogy on a genuinely upbeat note of hope and redemption. This theme starts with the first track, an uplifting instrumental titled, "In Gratitude For This Magnificent Day." From there, the record goes through the raucous ("Baby Loves Me"), the hopeful ("What I Have To Offer"), and the gospel ("Looking Up") to create the happiest, most upbeat record the band has released to date.

As EELS embark on their first tour in three years, I caught up with E to talk about the trilogy, the hectic pace of putting out three albums in one year, and what's next for him.

EELS hit Chicago next Friday October 1, 8 p.m., Metro, 3730 N. Clark St, $25, 18+

Chicagoist: This record completes a trilogy. When you went into recording the first record, was the idea for that concept there from the beginning?

E: Yeah, very early on I thought it was going to be a two-part thing but then pretty quickly I decided it needed to be three because I wanted the seeming end to be in the middle and the actual end a new beginning and I realized I needed three parts to do that.

C: Where did the idea spring from?

E: I just had this idea that I wanted to do three albums that were all about, or based on, a distinct human emotion that everybody experiences at some time in their lives. So I did the first one [Hombre Lobo] about desire, the second one [End Times] about loss, and the third one [Tomorrow Morning] about renewal.

C: Did you already have a package of songs for each or did some evolve as you moved from album to album?

E: After I had the idea, I recorded each album on its own. They were all designed to hopefully stand on their own whether they were part of a trilogy or not. And luckily as I was approaching the time to write the songs stuff went on in my life that made it very natural for me to be writing about these things.

C: Can you elaborate? What sort of things affected the songs as you were writing them?

E: Well, I’d say in the case of this new one, Tomorrow Morning, I go to a point in my life where, hopefully, as you start to get older you start to look around you and look at all the good things in your life and start to appreciate the good things in your life and that’s what was going on with me so it was the perfect time for that record.

C: You had this clear idea going but did you find anything changing? Did you find any of the themes evolving as you went through the process of recording each record?

E: In the case of Hombre Lobo and End Times I felt- I was happy to get them out of my system, as it were. [Laughs] And Tomorrow Morning was a perfect one to end it on because it just puts me in a good mood.

C: It is a pretty upbeat record. I was going back and listening to all three records in sequence and then going back to some of the older stuff. You said you had this concept going in but listening to them again, Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy kind of seem to pair together in a similar way. Do you see any similarities of thematic elements across multiple records from earlier in your career?

E: Not exactly. To me, they’re all their own thing. Daisies of the Galaxy certainly was somewhat more upbeat than Electro-Shock Blues but if you go back and listen to Daisies of the Galaxy you’ll find that it’s not that upbeat in its lyrical themes. There’s a lot of pretty dark stuff there. And I think Tomorrow Morning is really consistently upbeat.

C: Maybe one of the happiest things you’ve ever written?

E: I think it’s absolutely- certainly the most overtly and blatantly upbeat…

C: You’ve put out the complete trilogy of albums within a little over a year. Was it difficult getting them out that short of a span or was that always the plan, to get them released so quickly?

E: Yeah, that was always the plan and it was an experiment I wanted to try partly because after the Blinking Lights album came out in 2005, I didn’t put anything out for four years and I thought, “Well, I’ll make up for lost time and put them out a little faster.” I also always wanted to put out records at the pace they used to put them out at back in the 60’s when everybody would put out two albums a year.

C: Are we going to see this continue or-

E: No. [Laughs] It’s too hard, you know? These days, it’s a lot of work to work at that rate. I mean, it might happen again but I’m not going to keep doing it every six months,

C: There was a four year break between Blinking Lights and Hombre Lobo but it’s not like you weren’t doing anything. You wrote your autobiography, there was the documentary about your father (which aired in the U.S. as an episode of PBS’ Nova series), and you’ve done some soundtrack work like the score you wrote for Levity. Will you be doing any of those sorts of things in the near future or are you back to strictly EELS for the time being?

E: I don’t know. I’m at the rare point that I get to - every once in a while in my life where I’m at the tail end of a long-term plan that takes years to finish - I’m almost at that point now where I’m going to wake up one day and realize, “Oh, okay, everything’s done, now what?” And that’s exciting because I don’t get to do it very often and I have no idea what’s going to happen next.

C: This is the first tour you’ve done in a couple of years. Since you’re touring behind this trilogy, it’s safe to assume the bulk of what you play will be from those albums but are there older songs that fit thematically that you’re looking forward to playing at these shows, to weave in with the new stuff?

E: Oh, yeah. That’s one of the fun things: even though we have three albums of material that we’ve never played live before, it’s always fun to go back and take an old song and play it the way you would have written it today and treat it like a living organism that’s always growing and changing with you. That’s one of my favorite things about doing shows.

C: With Tomorrow Morning, there are a lot of different sonic elements compared to the other two albums in the trilogy like drum machines and the song “This is Where It Gets Good” becomes this six-minute long epic and the second half of the song is completely instrumental. What pushed you in that direction for this album?

E: That song itself just pushed itself. We didn’t set out to make a six-and-a-half minute song. We tried to create an environment for the whole album that encouraged experimentation. A lot of it was just spontaneous accidents that were happening in the studio and that one… that’s just where it went.

C: Do you think you’ll be keeping this sound as you move on?

E: I think that was the world we were in when we recorded it but I think we’re already out of that world and we’re on to something else now.

C: Do you have anything specific in the pipeline right now?

E: We’re concentrating on our live shows.

C: Your first album as EELS (Beautiful Freak) came out in 1996 and you’ve continued producing albums of high quality and you’ve also released live and rare material to fans outside of the proper releases but you’ve also seen the music business evolve over those 14 years. As we shift to more digital releases, do you see yourself continuing to release that sort of material?

E: Yeah, it’s hard to say how it’s going to go but I think it’s nice to have different options.