Mark Oliver Everett
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Mark Oliver Everett (born April 10, 1963) is the lead singer, guitarist and keyboardist of the pop band Eels. Also known as E and Mr. E, he is the son of physicist Hugh Everett III, originator of the many-worlds theory of quantum physics. In childhood, Everett developed a love of toy instruments, a love which would continue later in life and provide an integral part of his idiosyncratic musical form.
After discovering his father dead in his study, Everett moved at the age of 19 from his family home in Virginia, resettling in California. Everett began his musical career with two independently released albums: A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop. The pseudonym E was used for both of these early recordings.
Everett's sister, Elizabeth, committed suicide in 1996, and in 1998, his mother died of cancer. As part of his path to overcoming these painful events, Everett used some of Elizabeth's poetry, written while she was in a psychiatric institution, to form a large part of the lyrics for what many consider to be Eels' most complete album to date, "Electro-Shock Blues". This dark release, alternating furious energy with strikingly authentic desperation, was followed by 2000's "Daisies of the Galaxy", which had a gentler sound that indicated Everett's spiritual recovery had begun.
In 2000, Everett underwent a spiritual retreat, during which time he was forbidden to write or speak. Finding himself inspired, Everett broke the rules of the retreat and wrote the lyrics for the eels' Souljacker album. At the retreat, Everett also met the woman who would become his wife, a Russian dentist. In addition to his immediate family being fully gone after his mother died in 1998, Everett's cousin Jennifer was a flight attendant on the plane that struck the Pentagon during the September 11, 2001 attacks ([1] (http://www.eelstheband.com/eels_blinkinglights.asp)).
Everett is a master of studio recordings, and his early solo work and Eels collaborations were hailed by critics for their innovative combination of various instruments and styles. Everett has used everything from toy piano in his early "Symphony for a Toy Piano in G Minor" to hammers on a radiator as percussion in 1998's "Cancer for the Cure." He is, despite his constant denials, almost certainly the man behind MC Honky, who released the album I am the Messiah in 2003. Claims that MC Honky is actually an eccentric, fiftysomething studio rat specializing in hip-hop-flavored "self-help rock" and who according to his official bio was involved in engineering Frank Sinatra’s 1968 album Gunga Din should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least because there is no record of any such album.
Rightly or wrongly, he has a reputation as a troublemaker; the Eels official website claims that Everett responded to a request for a quote for the dust jacket to Kurt Cobain's posthumously published diaries with: "Please don't do this to me after I kill myself." It wasn't used.
Right now, Eels and Mark Oliver Everett are on tour promoting a new album titled Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.de:E (Musiker) nl:Marc Everett sv:Mark Oliver Everett