E leans heavy on his music

E says his new album is a compilation of 'a lot of highs and lows'.

Buttoned up in his denim jacket, sporting a full beard and his beady eyes bespectacled, Mark Oliver Everett - or just plain "E" - looks out of place in trendy Beverly Hills. And he knows it.

"I live over there, beyond the smog," he says, pointing out the window from the seventh floor of the Mondrian Hotel.

Everett wanders round the room looking lost, marvelling over the free soft drinks, bottled water and fruit on offer.

"This is a different world. I don't come over here often, this is really a different thing for me. Baywatch is that way, out west. And 30 minutes' drive is where I live and it's a different world. It's not like what you see on TV, it's an old neighbourhood, it's more real. But I'm not really influenced by any of it, I've never been part of a scene. I just don't really get out of my house very often really."

He's happy to make music under his nom du rock The Eels and hang out with Bobby jnr - who is not only his dog, he's part of the band having contributed howls to the song Last Time We Spoke on the Eels' new album, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.

Bobby jnr wasn't allowed to come today. "He's like Ray Charles, a talent but not allowed in a hotel like this. He has to go to special pet hotels and it's wrong, he's fighting it and he's going to be a pioneer.

"When I bought him home from the pound I didn't know he had any talent apart from looking cute and pooping. But hounds have this thing in them where certain sounds force them to react, and they have to sing.

"One night he was sitting there on the floor in the studio with us and I was playing the mellotron and singing something and then he got into the coyote pose and did this beautiful, 'Owwwwww'.

"We froze, we looked at each and we knew we were in the presence of a star. If someone comes over to my house, be it Bobby jnr or Tom Waits [who also features on the album], if they got a talent I'm going to put them to work. There's no free supper at my house. I thought it might be kind of corny at first but it worked out well," he smiles.

It's no surprise that Blinking Lights ... is a double album - 33 tracks, more than 90 minutes - of E wizardry. Even though he doesn't think he had it in him, somehow, after sampling the sad brilliance of 1998's Electro-Shock Blues or 2003's Shootenanny!, you get the feeling he's always had it in him.

"I was always one of those people who was biased against the idea of double albums. [But] I'd been working on the idea of a Blinking Lights ... album for years, and kept shaping it into different things and it was never working as a single disc. It wasn't until I started thinking of it more like a film - being fully aware that it's not a film, that it was a record - [that it worked].

"The key to it for me was thinking about a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey. No one knew what to make of it when it first came out because everyone was used to the usual follow-on linear dramatic thread movie experience. This was a movie where you were just asked to feel it, not to think about it. That was the key for me and that's when I started to do the instrumental stuff, the little vignettes between songs and I realised it needed more space and it needed to be a more relaxed pace and over two discs.

"But," he says, heeding his remark about double albums, "it's really not that dense as far as double albums go."

There's a spooky vibe to the album and E admits that "maybe [it's] because I'm living with a bunch of ghosts".

He's been hit by a string of family deaths including his cousin Jennifer, a flight attendant on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11. His mother died of cancer in 1998 and his sister committed suicide in 1996. He says that if it wasn't for music he probably would have ended up like his sister. "Music is everything to me. There's a lot of pressure on music in my life. I put a lot on its shoulders."

But through all of this, the man, who confesses to the autoharp being one of his favourite instruments ("It sounds like a sped-up guitar."), is a remarkably upbeat character. He has a cheeky laugh and jokes about how every major city in the world should build a monument to Blinking Lights ... because "that would only be right".

"I've had some mixed dreams," he says, "but there's been a lot of good things and that's something I wanted to reflect on this record. It's not all good or bad, it's just a lot of highs and lows."

As he says on the first single off Blinking Lights: "Hey man, now you're really living ... ."