Mark Oliver Everett alias E is and remains a strange oddball. In his songs he finds the most poetic pictures for every situation in life, on stage he gives the babbling ramp sow. If you sit face to face with him, however, he pushes around as if he were ashamed of everything he does. He enjoys small compliments, sounds excited about what others say about his music, and rarely finds the right words to comment on his songs. Maybe he doesn't even need that on the new record. We've just finished his last CD "Wonderful, Glorious", when he takes "The Cautionary Tales Of Mark Oliver Everett" to the next big blow.
The two successive albums couldn't be more different. Just the self-confident glam rocker, Everett now retreats back into the labyrinth of his self-doubt and fears. But his moral stories are not as self-destructive as we know them from earlier Eels records. No, here two oppositely polarized cables are soldered which run through his entire work: Resignation and salvation. "That's exactly what I wanted," Everett sniffs from his big nose into his beard. "In life there are only very rarely these clear moods, which are reproduced in films or books, but also in song lyrics. I'm told we can only be one way or the other, but never both at the same time. I think that's bullshit. Even if you don't hear it, the songs were recorded with the same personnel as the last album. It was important to me to embody this attitude with exactly the same people."
