#22, “Climbing to the Moon,” Eels (1998)

150 Favorite Songs: #22, “Climbing to the Moon,” Eels (1998)

Mark Oliver Everett, who performs as Eels, didn’t exactly write this song. I mean, he did, in that the melody, which is certainly the loveliest of his career and one of the prettier melodies anybody else ever wrote, too, is his. The gently-strummed acoustic guitar that opens and runs through the song is his, too, as and he’s more or less responsible for rest of what you hear when you listen to “Climbing to the Moon.” The hammond organ that adds so much texture to the song is Jon Brion’s, but it was Everett’s idea to bring him in, so you can credit him with that, just like you can credit him with bringing in T-Bone Burnett to play the bassline that comes in as the song starts to fill out, or for the banjo that picks up halfway through that Grant Lee Phillips plays. You can give him credit for the hook, too, which really is just incredibly beautiful, a sad-but-triumphant masterpiece that sounds like the way it feels to decide to try—at what, who can say, but it is the sound of making the active choice to try, to me, the sound of wounded resolve. It moves me every single time I listen to it, and I’ve listened to it hundreds of times in my life.

But it’s not entirely his, because the lyrics were mostly written by his older sister Elizabeth, things she wrote or said to him when he would visit her when she was hospitalized with depression just as his career was beginning to take off. Everett was close with Elizabeth, and as his band was getting played on MTV, he found her on the bathroom floor, having just swallowed a bottle of pills. (The incident inspired a song on Electro-Shock Blues, where “Climbing to the Moon” also appears, called “Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor.”) She was hospitalized and she would write to him, and talk to him when he would visit, and say these things that are very hard to hear, and then eventually she wasn’t hospitalized anymore and she tried once again to kill herself, and that time it worked.

And he took those things that she had said and written and he arranged them all into a song. Lines about handing a note to a sympathetic nurse to smuggle out to her brother, about the trauma of institutionalization and how it’s getting hard to tell where what i am ends and what they’re making me begins and the faint hope of spending a Saturday together, laying in the grass and watching the sky, as something to look forward to. got a sky that looks like heaven and an earth that looks like shit, she wrote to him, and that, I suppose, passed for hope in her life, until she died.

I love “Climbing to the Moon” for reasons that have nothing to do with the history behind the song. I love it for that melody and that proudly defiant chorus and the way that Jon Brion, who knows better than anyone alive how to add an organ that will elevate a song from something pretty to something transcendent, makes my heart swell. I love it because I can sing along with it and feel a little braver when I’m sad, a little wistful in a way that is similar to being happy when I’m not. I love it for that banjo that gently plucks its way through the final thirty seconds, when the song is just an instrumental coda and I get chills as all of these instruments come together to make me feel things. I didn’t know the back story the first few hundred times I listened to “Climbing to the Moon.”

But when I listen to it now, it just hits me that the song is, in some ways, his sister’s suicide note, and he honored her pain and his love by building the most powerful song he’d ever write out of her words, transforming her pain and his own so that it became hopeful instead of despairing. I don’t know if he thinks of it that way, but I think it’s one of the lovelier ways to remember someone who endured so many years of wanting to die—to present their words and their viewpoint as something that can bring hope, and to offer that to anyone who finds the song when they need it. “Climbing to the Moon” works absent any of that context, and that’s the most powerful thing about it. But the reason it can make me cry almost any time I hear it is because it just sounds like love.