E of The Eels | TapeOp

Mark Oliver Everett is the one constant behind the Eels, an L.A.-based "group" that's been releasing record since 1996. His work always carried a "studio savvy" sheen to my ears, so when I heard there were a couple of compilation albums coming out I pestered the heck out of a publicist to obtain a face-to-face interview with E. The Useless Trinkets CD features 50 rare and unreleased tracks plus a DVD of an obnoxious Lollapalooza set. The Meet The Eels Vol. 1 collection is a "greatest hits" of 24 songs with a DVD of music videos (with hilarious commentary.) How lucky I was to be invited over to his instrument-filled home/studio in the Hollywood Hills and hang out with E and his fine pooch, Bobby, Jr., while we fielded reader's questions (thanks guys!) and I probed into E's musical mind.

I'm going to start you with some fun stuff — questions from our readers. The first question is, "Can you ask him how the recording and mix process has changed for him over the years and why he's made the choices he has?"

Yeah, is that saying I'm doing something wrong?

It also says, "How did his ear evolve and what did he not hear when he started that he hears now and vice versa?"

That's a good one. I can answer that. For the first question, I can date it all the way back to starting on 4-track cassette, which I did obsessively for ten years. That's all I did. It was literally in my closet. I remember the big day when ADATs came out and then I had 8- track and that was an amazing luxury. Then computers came along and I resigned as my own recording engineer. I could probably still make a pretty nice sounding thing on an ADAT if I went back to that but I don't even know how to turn the computer on. At that point I decided to say, "All right. You're just going to be the artist and let someone who knows what they're doing run the computer." It's nice because it freed me up to just pay attention to one side of things instead of trying to do all the jobs myself. I still do like to go into a traditional recording studio and record on 2-inch tape whenever possible, but the best is the combination of the two, I think, when you can have some of that tape warmth, but the editing possibilities from the computer. Therein is the arc of my technological recording process.

How do you work differently now and what do you hear differently?

What I hear differently is interesting in terms of mastering. One of the things I was happy to do for these new CD collections that we just put out is re-master stuff. In the early days I didn't know what the hell I was doing in terms of mastering. I was always listening on speakers that weren't giving enough bass response. I had no idea what I was doing. As a result, a lot of our earlier records have way too much bottom.

You would tell the mastering engineer, "Give me more low end" and send it back and stuff?

Right. Over the years I slowly learned about having a neutral listening place and I finally developed a keen sense of having a more compact band sound instead of making it so bottom heavy or top heavy. I got a sense of how to make it hotter and tighter to the point where I feel like I'm kind of an expert on it, now. I'm sort of obsessive about it. Most artists, I think, spend a day or two mastering and then they're like, "Okay, that's good." Our last album — the Blinking Lights [and Other Revelations] album — took three months to finish mastering of almost constant work.

Who did the mastering on that?

It went through a couple of people but the guy who finished it ultimately was Dan Hersch [at DigiPrep] who masters a lot of the Rhino box sets and stuff like that. That's mostly what he does. I figure if he's good enough for the classics, he's good enough for me.

I was visiting him last year and he was mastering something for you that had heavy revisions.

Yeah, I've definitely put him through the paces. He actually lives a couple of houses away. He does home repairs for me, as well.

So he did the mastering on the compilations that came out? How long did that take you?

Not that long, surprisingly. I think he was scared. The re- mastering went smoothly. The music is from different eras. I think one thing we noticed, and we knew this would happen, is the process got easier as we went along because [songs were] in chronological sequence on both of these collections. The hard stuff was the early stuff, when it was really fat. At the end we didn't need to do anything to the modern stuff — that was as good as [the songs] were going to get.

That's an interesting process. Going back and listening. Did it give you revelations about how you worked differently over the years?

Yeah, mostly in that sense of, "Wow, I made everything so tubby." I've heard stories about some mastering labs using some of my records as a reference point for "this is what it should sound like." I was always aghast. Are you kidding? No! Use something tighter.

Did you hear stuff in the arrangement and recording styles that you felt you had moved on from?

Yeah, in the early stuff. I think it is a good sign if you hear stuff from your past that makes you wince a little. It means you've grown, hopefully — learned some things.

What ways do you feel you have grown in the studio as far as changes in sounds and arrangements and things like that?

I guess that's an ongoing process. You're always, hopefully, getting better. For me, if I have a gift, it's looking at the picture of what all the parts are adding up to and I think I've gotten better at that from doing it so much. That's the hard part about being the leader. The buck stops here and you always have to wade through all the individual players and parts. Everybody wants his or her spotlight and you always have to give everyone a dose of tough love and say, "I know. I understand. It's just not what's going to work in the big picture."

You seem to use a lot of contrast, say a very small, tiny drum sound and another instrument against it that's very open and full. Are you conscious of this?

Yeah. That's one of the things that makes mastering such an ordeal in my records are the certain dynamics that go on. Some of my songs are dynamic in a way that can be a little bit of a challenge — especially getting the whole album to sit right from song to song. That's where it gets complicated.

In the past you've worked with quite a few people as co-producers, like John Parish, Mike Simpson and Jon Brion [ Tape Op #18 ].

And I'd like to work with all those people again. There are probably a bunch of other people I'd like to work with, too. I guess I like to work really fast and part of the problem is I get really inspired suddenly and the next day I want to start the album. If you want to work with some producer you really admire, they're like, "Oh, I'll pencil you in for 2012." I just can't wait. I always like the idea of working with other producers and I always want to but more often than not I end up producing them myself out of convenience. Maybe not just convenience but also out of — I usually end up feeling like I have a strong idea of what I want to do. I throw myself into these situations where I surround myself with talented people and it seems like we don't need more help than we already have.

Who do you call for engineering with the sessions that you do at home?

I have a few people. A guy named Ryan Boesch. Koool G Murder is sometimes in the band and works as an engineer often — those are my main guys these days.

You can call them up at a moment's notice and say, "Hey, can you make it down here"?

Sometimes yes and sometimes no. The problem is a lot of times these guys are working with other people and I get put on the back burner because they're too busy.

Do you have some system of 4-track or something similar you can use to throw ideas down?

I did recently plug in an ADAT for the first time in fifteen years and did some recording by myself, which was really fun and harder than I thought it was going to be — I had forgotten how it all works. It's become harder to record myself now because I'm so rusty. I did do that out of a need for a challenge.

Was that to capture something?

Yeah. I did some recording on my old 4-track cassette, too, because I had this romantic notion of man alone in the basement like it was in the old days — I'm sure I hated it back then. I realized a lot of my methods of recording myself were just dead reckoning — just twisting the knob until, "Okay, that sounds good." — but not really knowing what I was doing.

Do you ever use Pro Tools to move stuff around or restructure and rearrange? Oh yeah. I'll use it for anything you can think of. It's amazing, the things you can do. It can be part of the writing process now. There are kind of two different kinds of songs. There are the songs that you write traditionally on an instrument and then there's the stuff where the computer becomes your co-writer.

Do you find yourself mixing at home here or taking it out to places?

I've never understood the concept of giving stuff to someone else to mix. I think it's unusual, maybe because everyone I know records and then they mix. The whole time I'm recording, I'm mixing. I'm always trying to shape it up into the best song it can be and that's how I know when it's done — when it doesn't need anything and it feels finished. It's mixed at that point. I don't ever go back and say, "Let's mix it now."

So, what people might leave to be the rough mix, you finish it off at that time.

Yes, and I always do it one song at a time, beginning to end, and then go on to the next one — pretty much without fail. There are exceptions, because sometimes there are logistics involved with string parts or something and you have to wait, but for the most part it's start to finish, song by song.

Do you find that the recording process is a large part of the arrangement process too? Do you lay down more stuff than ends up on a song or a track?

Sometimes. Occasionally something happens where I'll lay down a bunch of instruments on a song and I'll think I'm getting to the end of it. Then I realize it's kind of too crowded and I end up muting everything in the end and go, "It's just better with guitar and vocal."

The studio as a place to try ideas.

Yeah, it's so much fun.

It seems like you're collecting a lot of instruments here.

Well, there's also a storage area off premises. I can't buy any more instruments because there's nowhere to put them, so that's good.

When does it stop?

I'm running out of ideas of instruments that I don't have, but every once and while... I went to Guitar Center recently — where I haven't been in a million years — to see someone play who was doing an in-store thing, and I came across this tenor guitar, which I had never even heard of! I picked it up and it seems like no matter where you put your fingers, it sounds awesome. It sounds like you're automatically Joni Mitchell. It's so exciting for me to find an instrument that I'm not familiar with. All those guitars on the wall downstairs are all there because they all have a different sound — not just a different guitar sound, but most of them are strung differently — like one is an electric Nashville strung or one is an acoustic Nashville and one is a twelve string and one is a baritone — they're all there for a different sound. It's not like a bunch of regular guitars that have subtly different sounds — they're all drastically different-sounding things.

Do you find that a new instrument or a different tuning opens up doors in your songwriting?

Yeah! That's why I'm excited about getting that because that's going to make me do something I haven't done before. It has to, with that thing. I wouldn't know how to play something I've already done on this new instrument. That's the beauty of it. I have no idea how you're supposed to play it, which is the way I've dealt with all the other instruments in the past. They told me what notes it was tuned to when I bought it and I put a Post-it on the back with a note so I would know how to tune it.

Let's get to another question from the readers. "What's your opinion of ear candy? Does it add depth? Is it distracting? He used to have a lot more sound and extra atmosphere to his recordings and I don't hear it as much anymore."

There are different kinds of ear candy, I suppose. In the early days of the Eels there may have been more overtly noisy, toy boxy things going on and I still think there's plenty of that going on. On the Blinking Lights... album I kind of got into this big, ghostly reverb thing that may glue it all together in a subtler, sophisticated way. You know, I'm older.

Here's another reader question: "The Eels are his gig but he's collaborated with lots of other producers: The Dust Brothers, Jon Brion as well as T Bone Burnett in the past. Is playing nice with others fun or frustrating?"

That's a good question. I'm not known for my people skills, and that is another reason why I end up producing myself a lot. What I did with T Bone Burnett and Jon Brion — they actually weren't producers on this one song I recorded with them. I very wisely hired a band full of producers and got a bunch of free production. I had T Bone Burnett on bass — normally people don't call him to play bass — and Jon Brion playing guitar and organ and I just sort of sat back and let them produce it for me without them thinking — because they can't help it. That's my insider's tip. You ask them to do something that they're not normally asked to do and they're all flattered and think, "Cool. Someone appreciates my bass chops" and meanwhile you're getting something that would've cost a million dollars for three hundred dollars.

You have plans to do that in the future?

Well, I'm glad you reminded me about it. I forgot that I did that. It's a great idea. I should pick some million dollar, big- named producer that I want to work with and say, "Let's record ten songs. I want you to be the session pianist."

You could put George Martin on piano.

That's a great idea.

Someone else asked: "Will we see anymore side projects like MC Honky?"

I've always wanted to work on another MC Honky album. He has sent me some of the stuff he's been working on and it's really cool stuff, but who's got the time? That's the problem. He has to want to help himself first. Once I know that he's really in and wants to do another album I would love to do it, but I sort of have my hands full with my own thing.

What's on the horizon now?

I have one album finished and I'm halfway through another one. The problem is I like making them more than putting them out. I'm not in a hurry to get back on the treadmill of putting them out, particularly because I just put all these other projects out and I'm going on tour just as if I had a new album out anyway.

Who are you working with lately as a label?

It's weird. I've been on three labels, technically, but it's all really been one label. It's all been Universal. I've worked with a lot of the same people that I've worked with for fifteen years or so around the world. It's one of those great Wilco kind of stories where I get paid to leave one label and then paid again to come back to it, basically. It's a pretty great way to make a living, it turns out. The label I'm on is Vagrant, which is through Universal, which DreamWorks was and Polydor was.

You mentioned producers you'd like to work with in the future but what would be a short list of some people like that?

I'd really like to work with John Parish again, and Flood, who I haven't worked with but who John works with a lot. I'd love to make a whole album with Jon Brion sometime. It's something we always talk about and never do. I don't know. There are probably a lot of people out there who would be interesting. It's good to throw yourself into some different situations, but meanwhile I just keep coming up with ideas that I can't stop myself from doing on my own or with the guys I've been working with for the last few years. All this stuff of writing a book, making a film about my father and stuff like that sort of gets in the way — and then putting out retrospective compilations and going on tour. Who has time to work on anything new?

I remember Elliott Smith once telling me that he really didn't care for doing publicity, doing interviews, touring and playing shows. He would have rather been writing and recording.

That is exactly how I feel. That is definitely the best part. It's an exciting time and it's so much fun to be creative and to go to bed at night and feel like there is something there that didn't exist before. When you're writing and recording, every day is so different and exciting and new.