The Eels Daisies of the Galaxy is bookended by two songs that fully capture a range of emotion defined for centuries by the dual masks of Greek drama. From the opening strains of a New Orleans funeral march on "Grace Kelly Blues," a brassy celebration of life in the face of death, to the sarcasm-laden chorus of "Goddamn right, it's a beautiful day" that peppers the closing "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues," the album exudes a ying-yangish sense that happy and sad are not mutually exclusive feelings.

It's (nearly) an optimistic album that finds head Eel E (once known as Mark Oliver Everett) washing his keyboard-driven hooks over a more diverse batch of songs than heard on the band's last outing, 1998's almost uniformly gloomy Electro-Shock Blues.

"Happiness and sadness are a part of life," says E. "But, there's a difference between feeling sad and being depressed. There's a very important distinction. Feeling sad is just like feeling happy. It's a part of life. It's an emotionally healthy state either way. But feeling depressed is what happens when you can't feel sad. This record [Daisies] doesn't have depression. That's the difference."

For E, it's been a difficult road to this emotional balance. The death of two close family members and the subsequent catharsis of Electro-Shock Blues made for a decidedly grave sophomore effort. The darkly beautiful album failed to capitalize on the success of the Eels' debut Beautiful Freaks, which featured the infectious alternative hit single "Novocaine for the Soul." Instead, Electro-Shock was a personal album full of scars and depression, and E's triumph at the album's conclusion helped give birth to the somewhat shinier Daisies.

"It has a lot of depression in it," E says of Electro-Shock, "but ultimately I think it's the most positive record I'll ever make because it ended up being a victory for me. A hard-won victory, which makes it more meaningful. [Daisies] is more upbeat in the sense that it's more about the living part of life, and Electro-Shock was more about the dying part of life."

The living part of life to which E refers is well covered with his latest album. From the playful whimsy of "I Like Birds" to "It's a Motherf#&!@r," which earned the album a parental advisory sticker ("It's ridiculous," notes E, "I don't trust people who don't use profanity"), Daisies mines a broad emotional terrain. It's a diversity reflected in the sonic palate. E called on friends Peter Buck and Grant Lee Phillips for the album. "I like to make records where you just don't know what's going on and you don't know who did what," he says, refusing to attribute particular sounds to any performer on the album. "In the old days you wouldn't get a track-by-track listing of who did what. I think for some reason that takes out some of the magic for me. My favorite sounds are sounds that you can't identify. If you don't know what it is, then it really makes a straight connection to your heart."

It's a sonic mad scientist-mentality that has carried over to his current touring unit, as he has tapped violinist Lisa Germano as well as a horn section for his live crew. "People are saying this is the band I always should have had," he says. "I've never had so much fun. I just came home last night after being in Europe two months and I wasn't homesick at all, which is completely new experience to me. I never enjoyed touring so much, and its all because of the band."

That's not suggest that E doesn't harbor any anxieties as a musician. Album releases terrify him. When asked if he ever thought about not releasing as desperate and personal album as Electro-Shock, he quickly responds, "No, desperation is my bread and butter. When I make a record, I can't fathom that its going to come out and that people are going to hear it or buy it. And I think in a lot of ways that's good. But when it becomes bad is when it becomes a reality and right before a record comes out or right before we go on tour, I do have great anxiety about that very issue. You know, 'What have I done?'"

E recorded a second album while producing Daisies, though he isn't certain about its release plans, claiming that he would like to use a portion of it on a subsequent project. "The sad thing to me is that record companies are very slow by my standards," he says. "By the time I put one record out, my mood has swung to a whole other place. A few months after we made [Daisies], I was in a completely different place and I felt like there's no way I can go out on tour with these songs 'cause it would be like acting. Luckily, they took so long in this case that I actually came back to the same frame of mind I recorded it in. Maybe it's a seasonal thing."

With his multitudes of anxieties and discontents, E doesn't rule out the possibility that he might head down a non-musical path. "I thought about going back to working at the gas station a few times," he says. "I've worked at a couple of gas stations. I think that I probably didn't like it at the time, but when I think about it now it seems very romantic to me. I think I might be one of those people that ends up packing it in one day, but you never know. I was an Exxon man for a couple of years. And also Mobile. I had a great Exxon experience really. Because it was this really old Exxon building from the Thirties; it was actually right outside the CIA. I'd tell you more . . . but I'd have to kill you."

ANDREW DANSBY
(April 15, 2000)