Less than two weeks after the following interview was conducted, Mark Everett's mother passed away from cancer. Her death came two years after his sister committed suicide, and a dozen years after Everett found his father dead from a heart attack in their Virginia home. Everett, better known as E, singer/songwriter for the Eels, has chronicled this tragic tale in Electro-Shock Blues, a brilliant and thought-provoking album that sets meditations on mortality to music that's rich with life. "It's the Motown formula," says E, "Sad lyric, happy music. When you put those two things together, something magical happens."

As the follow-up to 1996's Beautiful Freak, the Eels' sophomore effort defies market pressure with songs about cancer, mental illness and funerals - hardly, as Casey Kasem would say, good "long-distance-dedication" material. However, one thing's for sure: while songs like "Electro-shock Blues" may be hard to listen to ("Feeling scared today/Write down I am o.k./A hundred times the doctors say/I am o.k./I am o.k./I'm not o.k."), they're equally hard to forget.

How would you describe the new album?

Cancer rock. (Laughs) I can see the commercial now: "The kids are digging cancer rock!" It would be just us and Lou Reed.

But the down side is doing interviews where you talk about death all day long.

Actually, I don't mind talking about death; I find it very interesting. And although I wish I didn't have to do interviews, it's worth doing if it's gonna help people get into the album. I honestly do think this is a record that needs a little bit of explaining. It's the kind of record that you need to listen to a few times before it really sinks in -- but once that happens, I think it can be really rewarding.

There are some intensely personal moments on this record, especially in regard to your sister. Was there any second-guessing going on in the studio about where to draw the line?

There were times when I wondered about how the rest of the world was going to react to certain things, but I wasn't worried about it. I have songs that are five times darker than the darkest stuff on this record, but I don't put them out because they don't offer the world anything. Some of those songs have no redeeming quality other than that they're just me venting my rage. I'm not interested in making everyone listen to that. I promised our new manager that there won't be any death songs on the next record and he said, "I'll believe it when I see it."

Did anyone at the record company [DreamWorks] try and talk you out of making such a dark record?

The label was great, but I played a few demos for management early on and they begged me not to do a record like this. They said it was cancer for the career, that I would alienate all the people that bought our first album. But I really believed in this record -- it felt good to me. That was when I realized I had to stand up for myself, and so we parted ways with that manager.

I'm not interested in being an "alterna-rock god" -- I want to make something good and real. This isn't a record about death, it's a record about life, and about realizing how short life is and deciding to enjoy as much of it as you can. Nobody wants to discuss subjects like mental illness or cancer or death because they're afraid of it. Death is the one thing that we really don't know anything about. Nobody knows for sure what happens, but they want to -- they want that answer. And because there's no kind of scientific proof, we find it scary. I wanted to take some of the scariness away by singing and talking about it. Once you become familiar with it, it's not the enemy anymore.

You've done a handful of live shows so far this year. Does it seem like the audience understands where you're coming from?

It varies depending on where we're playing. Some nights it's obvious that most people are tuned into it, and then once in a while it's obvious that they're not. We're in a period of transition here. All the people that came to see us a couple of years ago want to hear "Novocaine for the Soul" because that's the song that was pumping out of their jeep speakers back then. Those people might be disappointed when they come to see us because I'm not gonna let them mosh to these songs. If you sit down and pay attention to these songs, there's a good chance that you'll leave the show feeling really good about your life. I don't want to rob people of that by having them mosh. Not that I have anything against moshing -- I think it's a good way to vent -- but we're doing something different here.

What did your mother say when she heard the album?
She knows what it's about and she's fine with it because she knows that's what artists do. She's always been very supportive in that way. But I won't play the record for her. Some of these songs, like "Electro-shock Blues," are based on writings my sister had done while in a mental hospital. I think stuff like that, things about my sister, would just be too traumatic for my mother.

And it's not too heavy for you?
Well, I just came back from visiting my mother the other day, and she gave me some childhood pictures of me and my sister, photos I'd never seen before. Now I've been through a lot of sadness in my life, and at times it's been really hard. I've been a very angry and bitter person for a long time, and I'm coming out of it now because I've been working on it for so long. And when I look at these pictures of my sister and listen to these songs, I feel good about it all. I feel proud of myself for making something nice out of all this.

Are you prepared for the onslaught of fan mail that you will undoubtedly receive from people who share in suffering such horrible tragedy?
That's already started to happen and I'm flattered by it. A kid came up to me in Holland recently and told me that the record came out on the day of his mother's funeral. He said that it meant a lot to him and that's pretty heavy. It's a good feeling to think that your music can comfort someone like that. Good things can come out of tragedy.

Anyone wishing to make donations in the name of Nancy Everett should send them to: City Of Hope, 1500 E. Duarte Road, Duarte, CA 91010.

MICHAEL MOSES
(December 10, 1998)