Eels Frontman E Says Words With Friends, Beyonce Were Inspiration For New Album ‘Extreme Witchcraft’

Mark Oliver Everett, the artist formally known as E, was not planning to make an EELS album in 2021. He’d released his 13th studio Earth to Dora in late 2020 and was parenting a four-year-old during a pandemic. But “out of the blue,” he says,  a text arrived from filmmaker Mark Romanek — who had directed the very first EELS video, 1996’s “Novocaine For the Soul.”

“I hadn’t heard from him in years,” says E, 58, who recalls that Romanek “reached out to tell me he’d been listening to our Souljacker album a lot — which was interesting because he hadn’t directed any videos from that album.” On that blistering 2001 album, which produced such signature EELS songs as “Dog Faced Boy” and “Fresh Feeling,” E had worked with John Parish, longtime PJ Harvey collaborator. E had met Parish backstage when both appeared on the British TV show Top of the Pops and they had remained friends over the years.

“He usually comes to a show when we’re in the same town and often joins us onstage,” the singer/songwriter explains of his ongoing relationships with Parish. “I have fond feelings for Souljacker, and I thought it would be interesting to see what John Parish and I might come up with 20 years later. So I checked in with him.”

The timing proved fortuitous — and the resulting album, Extreme Witchcraft, came together “very organically and quickly,” in a matter of weeks. Although the record was finished last year, it finally gets its release this Jan. 28 (via [PIAS] and his own E-Works label), with the Lockdown Hurricane tour of Europe and the United States planned to begin in March. “I really want to do some rocking after two years cooped up,” he says.

The songs on Extreme Witchcraft — the title was inspired by Beyoncé, as he explains below — will give E and his band plenty of opportunity to do so. The album is studded with crunchy, saturated guitar hooks that would make fellow distinctly bearded rocker Billy Gibbons jealous (check out “The Magic”). But even at its most musically visceral, Extreme Witchcraft moshes with mindfulness, thanks to E’s Rashomon-style lyrics that tend to look at love, loneliness and life from more than one perspective.

Shortly before the album’s release, E spoke to Billboard about his collaborative process with Parish, the inspiration behind certain songs, owning his catalog, and the proliferation of science-fiction and superhero movies that employ the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics developed by his late father, the physicist Hugh Everett.

How did your collaboration process with John Parish work?

It was a different process because of the pandemic, although similar to how we started working on Souljacker. He’s in Bristol, England, and I’m in Los Angeles. The way we worked for most of it was he would send me a jam that he worked up. It would often have a lot of the instruments that ended up on the final song, but it wasn’t ever structured like a song. If it was a jam that I responded to then I would set about structuring it. I would say, “Okay, repeat this part, and then add something to this part. Take away this part. Do a full mute here.” I would structure it until I felt, “Okay, I can write the melody and lyrics to this.”

It’s a bit of a painstaking process to do that via email in such drastically different time zones. It became this process where I’d have to roll out of bed at four in the morning to listen to the latest thing he sent me, so I could get whatever I was adding to it back to him before he went to bed. But then he flew to Los Angeles, and we did most of the album in my studio together. We were also joined for a lot of it by [producer/writer] Kool G. Murder.

This is a very guitar-forward album.

Some of the stuff he started sending me was on that John Parish basement, garage-y front, and then some of it was more not what you would expect. There’s one called “So Anyway” — that’s the tender side of John Parish. Musically, I wanted it to be a nice really straightforward melody and lyric that, in my mind, a classic ‘70s soul group like Gladys Knight & The Pips could sing. Our version was all fucked up because it was in the f–ked-up John Parish laboratory. So, the production and sounds are not something you would imagine Gladys Knight being involved with, but the bones of song are, I think.

What inspired the title Extreme Witchcraft?

A few years ago I saw a news story that Beyoncé was being sued by her former drummer, and among the allegations the former drummer was making against Beyoncé was that she practiced “extreme witchcraft,” which I found hilarious. If it was a story about Led Zeppelin, I’d say, sure, but Beyoncé, come on. I just filed it away, thinking I would call my next album that, but it didn’t really fit the Earth to Dora songs. I felt like it was a good fit this time because a lot of the direction I was giving John was — I was using buzz words like, “give me some voodoo” or “give me something witchy.” And then I was like, “Oh yeah, extreme witchcraft.”

“Good Night on Earth” contains the lyrics, “Everyone’s a critic/ “I can’t stand eels”/ So says Colin Firth.” What’s that about? 

A friend sent me a clip from the film Love Actually where the great actor Colin Firth says “I can’t stand eels,” and I thought, “That’s the opposite of love, actually.” So I put that in the lyrics — one of the unpleasant things about life before appreciating a nice evening. Let the record reflect that Mr. Firth drew first blood.

Where’s your head on this album: positive, negative, dark, light?

I don’t really know. It’s kind of a song-by-song thing — whatever the story is in each song. I’m not really making one big bold statement about anything as an album. If the album title was Good Night on Earth, you could say, “Oh, it’s an album about being thankful for the good things to appreciate during this tough time for all of us.” But that’s just what that song is about. I think it’s up to the listener to decide.

In “Learning While I Lose,” you write about taking a chance on someone, failing and as you put it, “hold your sides while you laugh and watch my heart break in half.” One recurring theme of your music is someone who’s unlucky in love but keeps on trying. You’ve had some personal experience with that, so I’m always wondering how much is autobiographical and how much is fiction?

The title song of my last album, Earth to Dora, was inspired by text messages I was sending to a friend. “Learning While I Lose” was inspired by playing Words With Friends. I’m getting very inspired by my phone — which seems appropriate, I guess, for this day and age. So, I was playing Words With Friends with this friend, who always trounces me. He’s kind of on the autism spectrum and is amazing at trying every different possible spelling for words that he doesn’t know even exist until he tries all the letter combinations. My mind doesn’t work that way, but I’m always fascinated when he comes up with these words that I’ve never heard of that score hundreds of points.

I told him, “I like to look up the definition of the word that you came up with that I’ve never heard of. I like to learn while I’m losing.” And then I wrote that down. I realized it’s been a philosophy of mine for my whole life. When I was little, I was a skinny little kid that was often one of the last kids to be chosen to be on the sports teams or whatever. So, early on, I adopted the philosophy of “Look, I’m not going to win. I’m just going to enjoy playing the game.” And that’s always been my thing.

Have you been in a relationship since getting divorced?

No, because when you have someone in your family who’s still too young to be vaccinated, it really complicates your personal life — because they’re so vulnerable and having someone new around becomes a big issue. My son is four-and-a-half, so he’s still six months away from being the age where he can be vaccinated.

Are any of the songs on the album inspired by your son?

People have been asking me that. I’ve tried to avoid doing the typical new father songs, but he does inadvertently inspire some stuff. He inspired the title of “Strawberries and Popcorn,” in that a lot of my meals lately just consist of whatever his leftovers are. One evening I realized that I hadn’t had anything to eat, and I was too tired to cook anything for myself. I looked on the kitchen counter and saw my son’s leftover strawberries and some popcorn from earlier in the day. I just thought, “Oh, f–k it. I’m just going to eat that for dinner.” I recommend it. It was a great sweet and salty experience.

But then the song isn’t about that. I turned the title into a tale of someone who’s found themselves newly alone and trying to celebrate the positive aspects of having their freedom. But then they also illustrate that it’s not all positive.

How long have you had your label E-Works?

That’s been there for many years. It’s not like I’m running a record label. It just means that I own my masters and license them basically.

Do you own the masters going back to your early work?

No, but for a pretty long time now I have. I don’t own the DreamWorks masters, but I do own all my publishing.

We’re seeing a lot of songwriters selling their catalogs for tens of millions of dollars to companies like Hipgnosis and Primary Wave. Is that something you’ve considered?

I don’t know enough about that stuff — and, of course, it’s always a thing that we artists always want to hang on to. I haven’t learned enough about it yet.

I don’t know if you watch many movies or TV shows, but I feel like so much of today’s entertainment is based on your father’s Many Worlds interpretation. Shouldn’t the Marvel Cinematic Universe be paying you royalties?

It’s true. He’s become a big force in entertainment, and it’s nice when he actually gets name-checked in some of the stuff. In one of the first episodes of Stranger Things, one of the kids mentions him by name. He’s also mentioned by name in a TV show called Devs. It’s nice when he gets some recognition — but unfortunately, I don’t get any royalties.

Have you ever seen the Akira Kurosawa movie Rashomon? When I listen to your music, there’s that element to it. There’s more than one perspective presented.

Yeah, there’s always another side. At least. Or in my dad’s case, infinite sides.