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Apr 26, 2025 By Arden Green

Recorded over a span of six years, Eels’ first double album and sixth overall release Blinking Lights and Other Revelations serves as frontman and creative mastermind Mark Oliver “E” Everett’s magnum opus. By 2005, nearly a decade following the release of their modern classic Beautiful Freak, the versatile Los Feliz-founded indie pop tragedians completed the ultimate vision of their ever-luminous leader, throwing expectations of accessibility and conciseness to the wind. Sonically, Blinking Lights finds the group synthesizing 1996’s Beautiful Freak’s arty hipsterish quirks and the dreamy midnight mourning of 1998’s Electro-shock Blues—which remains the group’s finest achievement—with the “out-of-left-field” acoustic optimism of of 2000’s understated Daisies of the Galaxy and gritty raw-nerve, narrative-focused bombast of 2001’s perplexing Souljacker. Upon its completion, Blinking Lights appeared to be a diverse survey of each stylistic lesson learned by E and company over the previous decade. The album’s eclectic palette, viscerally explored across its 33 tracks, ultimately allowed E to tell his life’s story in such an intimate tone while leaving room to accommodate its epic scope. Accompanied by such friendly luminaries as R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebsatian, and the inimitable Tom Waits—perhaps the aging E’s creative godfather—Eels successfully revamped the maximalist indie concept record, with their frontman establishing himself as one of the scene’s most daring and ingenious songwriters.

Disc One’s gentle opener “Theme from Blinking Lights” introduces the melancholic dreamscape against which E’s biography is played out, guiding the listener into the notoriously mercurial musical polymath’s prehistory for a lulling minute and 44 seconds before segueing into lively dream pop anthem “From Which I Came / A Magic World.” Here, E details the circumstances of his birth to influential albeit controversial physicist Hugh Everett III—best known as “father of the multiverse” in honor of his influential “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics—and his long-suffering wife Nancy. A satirical celebration of infant joy and fresh life, in which “Every moment’s built to last / When you’re livin’ without a past,” E rasps of “long days and dreamy night,” depicting the awe and wonder of newborn soon to be crushed by life’s harsh realities. “Say hello to your new son,” sings E. “Well he sure is havin’ fun / In a magic world.” This nebulous tone is swiftly shifted by the subsequent “Son of Bitch,” on which E documents a dysfunctional childhood, unhappily caught between his troubled mother’s emotional distance and his bitter, alcoholic father’s abuse and neglect. “Down on my knees,” recalls E, “Begging God please,” after being sent to live with his grandmother.

No stranger to familial trauma, a teenage E later discovered his father’s body after the elder Everett collapsed from heart failure at age 51, while E’s older sister Elizabeth would die by suicide and his mother from breast cancer the following decade, both incidents occurring within two years of one another. These traumas have informed the brunt of E’s work both as a solo artist in the early ’90s and as frontman of Eels, with Blinking Lights resembling an attempt to at last find some semblance of peace. These attempts are especially evident in the album’s more ethereal cuts, all of which buzz with a certain acceptance. Among these are included the sparsely acoustic “Blinking Lights,” on which E declares his fragile optimism: “One day I will be alright again,” as well as the ghostly instrumental “Marie Floating Over the Backyard,” on of the album’s analog-inspired instrumental fragments, and gorgeous neo-psychedelic ballad “In the Yard, Behind the Church,” both of which resemble striking odes to mortality and nostalgia, one final attempt to touch what will ultimately remain intangible. It’s these melancholy moments that suit E best, once the cynical rock and roll pretension has been stripped away and he is free to “rest the night away.”

Elsewhere, sinister jam “Trouble with Dreams” and deceptively upbeat Tom Waits collaboration “Going Fetal” pay tongue-in-cheek tribute to depressed disillusionment and anxious hopelessness, E gleefully spouting lines such as, “Trouble with dreams is they don’t come true / And when they do, they can’t catch up to you” and “You’re gonna love it if you give it a try / You just lay down like you’re gonna die.” However, Disc One’s numerous moments of hard-rocking misery are counterbalanced by delicately crushing confessions that rival even Electro-shock Blues’s most vulnerable moments. On the hazy, piano-centered “Suicide Life,” the nearly middle-aged E laments the passage of time, singing, “Wake up in the night and think of all the years / Falling from the ceiling and covering your ears,” and addressing his strained relationship with his late father on “Understanding Salesman.” “Daddy don’t let me down this time,” he pleads, “I’m all alone inside my mind / And it’s a small thing that I must prove to you.” These sentiments culminate in the heartbreakingly bleary suicide note “Checkout Blues,” with E confessing, “Everyone is scared of me, and I’m scared of me too / Never know just what I’m going to do.” The track, which ends with E uncertainly pledging to try his best to “hang on,” asking, perhaps in vain, “Am I stronger than the curse?”

Disc One’s key cut, however, warrants its own paragraph as a testament to E’s brilliant songwriting vision—such a track could be none other than the wistful, ruminating reflection on age and modern alienation, “Railroad Man.” Here, E places himself among the ranks of his great rustic idols Tom Waits, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, that grim trio of strange men seemingly as out of touch with modernity as modernity is with them. “I feel like an old railroad man,” Everett sings, perfecting the emergent curmudgeonly gruffness in his voice. “Who’s really tried the best that he can / To make his life add up to something good / But this engine no longer runs on wood.” “Railroad Man’s” penetrating sense of outcast longing has yet to be reproduced so perfectly on E’s subsequent recordings, rendering it an extremely special staple of the ’00s experimental singer/songwriter movement. “I feel like an old railroad man / Gettin’ on board at the end of an age.” Everett concludes as his rusted locomotive vanishes into the sunset, “The station’s empty and the whistle blows / Things are faster now, this train is just too slow.” Should one come to doubt E’s songwriting power, please refer to “Railroad Man.”

Disc Two opens with the Beautiful Freak-esque “Dust of Ages,” as E turns his view to the present. He is “bloodshot and trembling” as the “dust of ages settles on [his] days.” The track possesses an especially strange beauty as E appears to awaken, declaring, “I’m not fuckin’ around anymore / I’m on my way.” This attitude of perseverance continues onto the following “Old Shit/New Shit,” on which E admits, “The psychic pain of living in this world / It’s overwhelming me again and again,” before giving himself to life’s small pleasures, realizing at last that he’s “tired of the old shit” and ready for “the new shit [to] begin.” The corny but blissfully irresistible “Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living),” Blinking Lights’ most commercially successful cut, eventually became a minor pop cultural staple in the mid-to-late 2000s thank, largely in part, to its appearance on the soundtracks to major motion pictures Just My Luck, Charlie Bartlett, and What Happens in Vegas, and demonstrates E’s willingness to fuck around and have a good time, even amidst a major depressive episode. Of course, he manages to balance this absurdity with heart on the cleverly Morrissey-esqe “Ugly Love” and triumphant indie pop number “Losing Streak,” the latter of which found success as an inclusion on Shrek the Third’s soundtrack.

Blinking Lights and Other Revelations’ final tracks pack punches unexpectedly affecting even for a record as tragic and cathartic as this. Orchestral dirge “The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight” finds E at his most downtrodden, singing, “I can’t live in a world that you have left behind.” The naked vulnerability here ups even Electro-shock Blues’s ante, its compositional bareness allowing E’s weighty lyrics to drive the song. “It’s not where you’re coming from, it’s where you’re going to,” he sighs in a moment of exhausted resignation, “And I just wanna go with you.” The cosmic sorrow of “Stars” is devastating in every sense and summed up perfectly in its conclusion: “The stars shine in the sky tonight, like a path beyond the grave / When you wish upon that star, there’s two of us you need to save.” Blinking Lights then concludes with the stirring “Things the Grandchildren Should Know,” whose title E would later borrow for his 2007-published autobiography. Over the following five and a half minutes, E describes his social anxiety (“I don’t leave the house much / I don’t like being around people / Makes me nervous and weird”) and his desire to love and be loved (“I knew true love and I knew passion / And the difference between the two”), as well as his desire to better himself, recover from his past and move into the future (“So in the end I’d like to say / That I’m a very thankful man / I try to make the most of my situations and enjoy what I have”). The song, and perhaps album’s, most poignant moment arrives, with E’s final lyrical address to “troubled genius” Hugh Everett III:

“I’m turning out just like my father
Though I swore I never would
Now I can say that I have love for him
I never really understood
What it must’ve been like for him
Living inside his head
I feel like he’s here with me now
Even though he’s dead”

Blinking Lights and Other Revelations marked the end of a crucial era in Everett’s career with Eels. Not only was this era arguably his strongest and most luxuriant, it coincided with a drastic shift within indie music as a whole. What was being done by the scene’s key players in the ’90s and early ’00s was giving way to fresh methods of younger artists and this scene, as it was known, gradually dissolved until what artifacts remained appeared as relics from another time. Truly, then, E was a “railroad man,” intelligently documenting the end of his own artistic age. A strange emotion is inspired upon listening to Blinking Lights 20 years on, perhaps within the writer of this retrospective due to his extensive history with that era’s Eels releases, but to any fan of ’00s indie music, the nostalgia here may also be rather palatable. Either way, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations remains an underrated artistic and spiritual triumph, Mark Oliver Everett’s bizarre yet infectious brand of indie pop as irresistible as ever.

www.eelstheband.com

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