Are We Alright Again
by Eels

Album: Earth to Dora (2020)
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • Eels main man Mark Everett kick-started the songwriting for the Earth to Dora album with a text message thread to the band's lighting director Dora (hence the record's name). He continued writing collaboratively with other members of Eels, and by the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he had completed all but one track. This is the only song Everett wrote during the coronavirus lockdown.
  • The song finds Everett detailing his post-pandemic plans. He told NME:

    "In the early days when it was really getting bad for the first time. It's kind of like a quarantine daydream that I desperately needed to have. It's my fantasy of 'Oh, it's all over and now we can go out and do stuff!' It got a little extreme in my case, I'd go out and get high with birds and there's a marching band marching through the middle of the outro. I couldn't wait to try to make people feel a little more hopeful for the future. There's no time to wait."
  • Everett told UK newspaper The Sun he has faith in the post-Covid future: "History has always had periods where everybody says: 'this is the worst period in history.' And then it gets better. I have to believe it will do that."
  • Greg Barnes directed the video, which stars Mad Men's Jon Hamm as "a typical Eels fan finding solace in Eels' music." The one-take clip features the actor getting so lost in the music that he doesn't clock a robbery taking place directly behind him.

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