You never know what you'll get when you attend an EELS concert. One year it's vocoders and synthesizers, the next it's gritty garage rock. None of this is designed for the sake of versatility so much as it is for answering the deep-rooted creative needs of EELS leader Mark Oliver Everett, aka E.

"I'm not going to make a polka album just because I can. It's not in me, not this year, anyway, and I'm not doing different things to try to dazzle the audience with my wide horizons. There's just some stuff in me that needs to come out," says the man The New Yorker describes as "a hypertalented misfit."

Cut to April, 2005: Everett releases the highly acclaimed EELS Blinking Lights and Other Revelations double album and assembles his most ambitious version of the EELS yet: a seven piece band consisting of Everett backed by a string quartet and two multi-instrumentalists juggling lap steel, guitar, upright bass, mandolin, musical saw, melodica, celeste, pump organ, piano, and a trash can and suitcase percussion set.

"After the last tour (2003's two-time globe-circling Tour of Duty) I was exhausted and didn't feel like touring anymore," Everett says. "Sometime after finally finishing the Blinking Lights album, I was smoking a cigar out in my backyard one night, just sitting there with my dog, Bobby, Jr., and looking up at the smoke I was puffing up into the air. I started to imagine an EELS concert that was unlike anything I'd done before, one where I could smoke a cigar during the show. Where there wasn't even a drum set, and the nucleus of the band was a string quartet. I saw lots of old, antique keyboards: a celeste, pump organ, upright piano, melodica... and a musical saw. Chet played some beautiful saw parts on some of the Blinking Lights tracks. Once I thought of the saw being on stage, I started to get excited about the idea and couldn't stop myself from making it happen."

"And the weird part is - it all worked. Usually when you record a show, it's always the wrong one, it's always on a bad night. But when we were done, we all agreed that it was a great night and that we were glad we had captured it."

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. blinking lights (for me)
2. bride of theme from blinking lights
3. bus stop boxer
4. dirty girl
5. trouble with dreams
6. the only thing i care about
7. my beloved monster
8. pretty ballerina
9. it's a motherfucker
10. flyswatter
11. novocaine for the soul
12. girl from the north country
13. railroad man
14. i like birds
15. if you see natalie
16. poor side of town
17. spunky
18. i'm going to stop pretending that i didn't break your heart
19. suicide life
20. losing streak
21. hey man (now you're really living)
22. things the grandchildren should know