Very sure this right here was the first song by Eels I ever heard. Despite ‘Trouble with Dreams’ not being an official commercial single from the band’s 2005 Blinking Lights and Other Revelations double album, a music video was made for the track. It was that which I came across on the TV one day. According to Discogs, the promotional single was released in October 2005, so I’ll say I saw the video around that time. Earlier that year, Weezer had released Make Believe. They were on the TV quite regularly. And seeing ‘Trouble with Dreams’, I thought this was a new Weezer song and Rivers Cuomo had grown out a beard. I was ten years old, just bear in mind. But, no. This was Mark Oliver Everett, known as E in the music business. It was the shared thick-frame glasses look that fooled me. And Eels were a totally different group altogether. Maybe saw the video a couple, three times more before it disappeared from circulation? Some years later I remembered the song existed, downloaded it right away, and now I’m here to relay my feelings about it to you.

There are a lot of rock songs I’ve written about on this blog. You think of rock songs, they usually have electric guitars in them. Those are the usual go-to instruments you’d find in those types of musical compositions. Not in ‘Trouble with Dreams’, though. I’d consider the track to be a rock song. But replacing what would probably be electric guitars, if it were your usual rock band doing the usual thing, are a variety of keyboards. A celesta, what sounds like a harpsichord, organs, choir vocals which I also think are keyboard generated. It’s all about the keys in ‘Trouble with Dreams’. Sets it apart from a lot of songs out there, or at least in the collection of tracks I’ve written and will go on to write about. In the song, E sings about wanting to be with someone he’s affectionate for, but he can only dream about such a thing and can’t imagine the relationship happening for real. His dreams seem to always leave him hanging. So while he fantasizes about this ideal get-together, in reality, he’s spending a lot of days alone and apparently a little stressed out. If you’re a dreamer and found yours have come true, E makes sure to warn that they may not turn out how you wanted them to. You can see where the trouble with them comes into frame.

I think the mood of the track is perfectly complemented by the visuals in the music video. The spooky, minor-key verses – consisting of the ticking of a clock, the circular riff on the celesta and descending melody of the bass guitar – do give off man-aimlessly-walking-through-house-at-night-with-candle vibes, as E does in the clip. And then the soundscape opens up for the brighter, major-key choruses, it’s daytime, you open the door and see the blue sky and sun, before realizing you don’t like the outside so much. You shut the door and go back to your aimless wandering around the house. I really like E’s voice on the track, how he starts off sort of all mumble-like, before ramping up the intensity for the next line and then really bringing out the melody what I’d guess you’d call the choruses. Has a fine husk in his voice, nothing like Rivers Cuomo. And I say ‘guess you’d call the choruses’ because those melodic parts just sound like the culminations of the respective verses they appear at the end of. By the time all the verses, of which there are only three, are over, there’s still two minutes of the song to go, so the band shake out the jams for the rest of the song out until layer-by-layer it dissipates and the celesta and bass guitar play into silence. Really enjoy this one. Good for a Halloween playlist. And I should listen to Blinking Lights… again one day. It’s been years since the last time.