Mark Everett of Eels: ‘They tell you what per cent of patients die during the surgery. You just try to dwell on the percentage who don’t’

Bundy has entered the room, followed closely by Manson. “There you are,” says Mark Oliver Everett, the man otherwise known as E, who is at home in Los Feliz, California. He pauses as one of the dogs growls and whines. “Sorry,” he says. “He needs to go out and murder something.”

Bundy and Manson regularly feature on the social-media pages of Eels, the band Everett has fronted since 1995, their unusual names a testament to their owner’s dark humour.

“I’m not a small-dog guy,” he says. “They weren’t my idea to get, of course. My wife at the time said she wanted to get them, and I realised that I wasn’t going to win that one, so I just went along with it. And what happened was, the pandemic hit right after getting divorced, so I was holed up with these two little dogs all day and night – and I think I got Stockholm syndrome and fell in love with my captors.” He sighs dramatically. “And now I’m just their biggest fan. I don’t know how I could live without them.”

The eternally wry Everett is on the line to talk about Eels’s 15th album. He is about to drop a bombshell. In an open letter to fans on the Eels website, the 61-year-old reveals that he had open heart surgery last year, after yearly check-up scans – influenced by his own father’s death, of a heart attack, at 51 – found an aneurysm in his aorta. “And if I didn’t replace it soon it was bound to explode and make me feel symptoms of … death,” he wrote. “Probably sometime in the next few months. This isn’t related to what happened to my father, but it was because of him that I found out about this.”

He added: “They cut through my pecs, sawed through my breastbone and stopped my heart on the table. They put in a new aorta. Either I made it, or I really am in a parallel universe now,” he wrote, referring to his father, the quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, who proposed the “many worlds” scientific theory. “Either way, all good.”

Everett wants to clarify a few things, most notably that Eels Time! was not directly influenced by his health scare. “The album was made before the surgery, but I knew it was coming, so it was on my mind,” he says. “Just getting older makes time come to the forefront of your mind a lot, because you’re acutely aware that you have less of it available to you in the future.”

Throughout it all, he aimed to stay positive. Eels Time! is not a mellow album, but it does have its moments of reflection; lines in the song Time (”There isn’t much time now / What’s the fear, well, I like it here with the ones I love so near”), and If I’m Gonna Go Anywhere’s references to living in the moment, are particularly poignant given his experience. “They tell you what percent of patients die on the table during the surgery, and you just try to dwell on the leftover percentage of people who don’t die, which is much larger,” Everett says. “Then you’re just happy you get to keep living longer than if you hadn’t done it.”

Irish fans may have been surprised to hear, when the album was announced, that it was “recorded between Los Feliz, California, and Dublin, Ireland”. “Well, it was remotely,” Everett says. “I wasn’t there, but I did a couple of the songs with my childhood friend Sean Coleman, who lives in Dublin. We grew up together in the suburbs of Virginia, and we’ve known each other so long that his older sister used to babysit me.”

The album tracks And You Run and Let’s Be Lucky were recorded in Coleman’s studio in Dublin. “It was something that all musicians learned how to do in the pandemic,” Everett says. “Recording remotely was not something we had totally discarded, but we did so some in-person [sessions] for the first time since the pandemic on this record, too.”

An unexpected influence on Eels Time! was Everett’s involvement in the soundtrack for Prisoner’s Daughter, the 2022 film starring Kate Beckinsale and Brian Cox. Tyson Ritter, the All-American Rejects singer, who is now also an actor, and appeared in the crime thriller, “sent me the song he’d done for it, and I really liked it, so I sang on it with him – and then that led to me doing a small acting part in the movie, as well, where Tyson beats me up,” he says, laughing. “We started working on another song [Lay with the Lambs] for the movie, and halfway through I thought, This is too good: I want this. ‘Can I hijack this for the next Eels album?’ and he said ‘Sure!’ – and we ended up doing five of these songs that ended up making the album.”

I had the great luxury of having no expectations and no hope when I was young. I really couldn’t imagine any kind of future, let alone one where I’m putting out my 15th album

—  Mark Everett

Everett went through a period of retrospection last year when some of the earlier Eels albums were reissued on vinyl. Such events, he says, can prove unexpectedly nostalgic. “I had a listen to [2005′s] Blinking Lights and Other Revelations all the way through when they reissued it a couple of years ago, and I was not expecting what an emotional experience it was for me to listen to it,” he says. “It was also exhausting, just remembering all the work we put into it. But I was really happy, ultimately; I really felt proud of it, when it was over. So my favourite might be that one. I know a lot of people say Electro-Shock Blues, and I wouldn’t argue with that, either. Those two, I think, certainly, are two of the best. But y’know,” he says, deadpan, “I mean, hands down, this new one is the greatest thing us or anyone else has ever done.”

His son Archie, who is almost seven, doesn’t have an opinion on his father’s eclectic back catalogue, nor on his standing in the indie-rock world. “He doesn’t care,” says Everett, chuckling. “Bruce Springsteen put it best when he said, ‘No kid wants to see 20,000 people applaud their parents. Booing? Maybe.’” He laughs again. “They just want you to be Dad. It’s too weird if you’re something else.”

He has contemplated writing a sequel to Things the Grandchildren Should Know, his superb memoir from 2007. “But the problem is, everyone that I wrote about in the first one was dead. And everyone who’d be in the second one is still alive, so I’m just waiting for them to die – and then I’ll write it.”

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It seems as though Mark Oliver Everett is pretty content these days. What is he most proud of? “I’m very proud of my son, and my dogs, in that order. And y’know, I’m proud of just becoming a nicer person over the years. That’s the nice thing about getting older – if you’re lucky. I guess some people get more bitter, but I think a lot of people, like me, get nicer. Soften the edges a little.”

He pauses. “I had the great luxury of having no expectations and no hope when I was young. I really couldn’t imagine any kind of future, let alone one where I’m putting out my 15th album. It’s miraculous to me, and I’m always pinching myself with what luck I’ve had, that I get to do this. So I like where I am. I’m a happy guy.”

Eels Time! is released on E Works Records