Before recording WONDERFUL, GLORIOUS, the last EELS album to be released, EELS leader Mark Oliver Everett called the band together to record a group of highly personal songs at his Los Feliz, California studio. Finding the process uncomfortable, he decided to take a break and reconvened with the band some months later to record what became WONDERFUL, GLORIOUS, an album full of spontaneous band collaborations. After that albums release and subsequent 73 show world tour, the band returned to what they had started all that time ago. The resulting album, THE CAUTIONARY TALES OF MARK OLIVER EVERETT, is an extraordinarily vivid and intimate document of a personal struggle. Its inspired by something I went though, Everett says. Someone I lost, by choice, and later came to regret losing. It wasnt until I started to look at my role in it that it began to feel like I was getting somewhere worthwhile. The experience transformed me. This is the musical version of that experience. Im hoping it could maybe serve as some sort of example for others. To learn from my mistakes. Quite different to the previous EELS release, and in contrast to the high-octane rock n roll of the last EELS tour, THE CAUTIONARY TALES couples a bare-bones lyrical intimacy with a live orchestra of cello, viola, violins, bassoon, English and French horn, clarinet, flute, saxophone, trumpet, musical saw, glockenspiel and celesta that lends a stunning backdrop to the brutal insights of the lyrics.