The motility of something born afresh is there throughout Wonderful, Glorious, which will be released on Friday in Australia, to listeners still rapt with E’s musical vision after 18 years. In celebration, Eels are going on a pretty extensive tour, and in light of the musician’s comments on his last overseas circuit (which started out rather rocky but got its shit together around Glastonbury) I’m hoping the omens are all positive for the next two-and-a-half months. “I guess you could say it’s part of the excitement, that you just don’t know how it’s going to go,” E says slowly. He is quick to add, with a chuckle, “But of course it’s not that exciting when it goes terribly; it’s work! But just the fact that it could go south at any minute makes it exciting. ‘Cause it’s live, you know, it really is live with us. There isn’t anything but what you see, is what’s happening.”
What you see is E, his drummer Knuckles, plus The Chet, Koool G Murder and P-Boo surrounded by a jungle of instruments to create live the eclectic joy that is the band’s sound. “We all kind of pitch in with [writing],” E says, “but sometimes, you know, Chet or somebody else in the band will say ‘Hey, what if you did this or that?’ It’s very collaborative. It’s the same band from the last couple of tours, and the guys that made the record with me too, so it seems appropriate that they should all come out [on tour].”
Of the two songs that have been released, Peach Blossom already has an accompanying clip. It’s a classic romp; Reservoir Dogs meets Heavenly Creatures or some such thing, featuring a Manic Pixie Dream Girl leading E through pastures and pirouetting sweetly while he stumbles along behind. E is only into the filming as much as he needs to be, however: “Making these videos is like making little movies, and you find yourself being kind of an actor, and stuff that you didn’t sign up for originally, when you went to rock school. But it’s pretty fun. It’s fun because it’s a different part of the job.”
E’s take on film and its ability to show a controlled or otherwise picture is interesting because of a project undertaken by the BBC in 2007; the fascinating BAFTA-winning documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives gave viewers a very personal portrait of E’s relationship with his (deceased) father, Hugh Everett, a quantum physicist, who came up with the theory of ‘many-worlds’ – that is, that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an actual ‘world’. E admits he was initially confused as to whether he could trust others to capture this personal journey in that medium, film, which is not own his primary medium. “I mean you never know,” he says. “[The BBC] came to me and they said ‘Do you want to be a part of this?’ and I just thought, ‘I don’t know, do I?’” He does a raspy laugh and adds, “’Cause you don’t know if they’re going to do a great job or a terrible job. But they did a great job.” Perhaps it’s because E’s mind seems filled with these neverending and diverse musical ideas that the guy’s still something of an enigma, even when he does reveal things like his ability to be silly in his most recent clip or the dreadful but simply-delivered description of finding his father dead when he was a teenager in Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. The BBC did keep him involved in what was being collated as the production went on, but ultimately it was a decision made in the dark to get completely behind the documentary’s creation. “They sent me this outline, and then they met with me, and we discussed it at length, and then I just took a leap of faith and said ‘Mm-alright, I’m going to go on this journey and see where it ends.’”
The second track released from Wonderful, Glorious is New Alphabet, and it sounds as if its maybe about using new tools with which to break out of stalemate sort of environment. “I was just noticing that, I think people are often misguidedly trying to fix things in their life, or are trying to change other people. And I realised that really, if there’s something not working in your life all you can do is change yourself. You can’t do anything about anybody else,” explains E. “So if you want situations to get better your only hope is to change yourself… that’s kind of what the ‘new alphabet’ means to me.” Good advice from the chameleon man himself.
BY ZOË RADAS
