Susan's House (Eels)

1997 in music may be predominantly remembered as the year in which the Britpop bubble finally burst (thanks to the less than stellar reception of Oasis's third album Be Here Now), and as the last year of the Spice Girls' streak of pop invincibility (before Geri Halliwell's departure from the band the following May) but I have to admit that I wasn't paying attention to any of that. I was still a snot-nosed kid at the time, largely indifferent to the music press, and my 1997 was defined overwhelmingly by two releases, both of which simultaneously fascinated and unsettled me without me ever quite being able to pinpoint why. The first was "Your Woman", a classic slice of gender-bending indie pop from British-Indian techno artist Jyoti Prakash Mishra (better known by his act name, White Town). The second was "Susan's House" by Californian alternative rock band Eels, aka that song melding a creepy spoken word monologue about social breakdown and despair with an incongruously elegant piano melody (sampled from Gladys Knight and The Pips' "Love Finds Its Own Way"). Whenever it started playing on the radio I would feel equal parts dread and excitement - dread because so much about the song frankly terrified me (the robotic monotone of the protagonist's running commentary, that bizarre interlude in which the song halts abruptly to allow a non-sequitur cheer and followed by an equally non-sequitur "wow!") and excitement because, good grief, was that piano melody pretty, and the singer's intermittent yearning for that mysterious Susan sounded so haunting and plaintive to my tender ears. I went out and bought the CD single, despite the cover art (black and white images of a young girl doing innocent young girl things like cradling plush toys and picking flowers, except she had a miniature house where her head should be) spooking the hell out of me. For a long time, it constituted the entirety of my experience with Eels, for it took me several years to delve any further into the band's discography, and in the interim, it just sat there, an oddity without context. With hindsight, I suspect the song touched such a nerve with me because it spoke subconsciously to my own pre-teen anxieties and uncertainties at the time. I didn't realise it, but Eels had given me a perfectly gift-wrapped anthem for traversing the rocky road from childhood into adolescence. The road ahead was about to get weird and frightening, and this song knew all about weird and frightening roads.

Despite the deceptive title, "Susan's House" is about the journey rather than the destination, and we fade out with the narrator still not having arrived at the titular location. Likewise, we never learn who Susan is, just that she appears to live in, or adjacent to, a bad neighbourhood, where arson, murder and drug dealing are a facet of everyday existence, and that the protagonist sees her as diametrically opposed to all of the hurt and sorrow he has to wade through in order to reach her. Susan did have a real-life muse - Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett (better known as E) has confirmed that she was inspired by a girl he knew at the time, and that "Beautiful Freak", the title track from the song's album of origin, was likewise about this Susan. The road to Susan's house is simultaneously beleaguered by the ghosts of a troubled past and a terminated future, as reflected in the mentally ill homeless woman still haunted by the destruction of her house three years ago and the dead boy lying on the pavement outside a donut shop. There's also the kid who attempts to sell the protagonist crack and the old couple arguing inside The Queen Bee (hardly a vision of aging gracefully; the reference to the "sick fluorescent light shimmering on their skin" makes them sound almost diseased). I note that all of the people the protagonist encounters are either the young or the elderly, which begs the question as to where all of the adults who'd fall between are in all of this? In their living rooms watching Baywatch, I suppose.

It's in the final verse, where the protagonist encounters a teenage girl (apparently not older than seventeen) en route to the local 7-Eleven with a baby in tow, that the song takes a somewhat sour turn, shifting from haunting desolation into something mildly disdainful. The protagonist is clearly troubled by the thought of the girl being a parent at such a young age, and attempts to reassure himself, unsuccessfully, that the she and the baby are in fact siblings. In some respects, this portion of the song seems quite quaint from a contemporary perspective, in that seventeen hardly registers as the most shocking age at which to infer teen pregnancy (I'm sure you could go a lot lower), but more bothersome is that this is the only point in which the protagonist conveys anything resembling moral superiority to any of the people he passes. Whereas he does appear to have a genuine sympathy for the crazy homeless lady and fifteen-year-old murder victim from the earlier verses, here there's the vaguest inkling of contempt seeping into his commentary. The red popsicle brandished by the teenage mother is blatantly intended to convey immaturity, a reminder that she is still essentially a kid herself, but unlike the other characters encountered, there's not really a sense that these two are suffering in any way from their predicament. E simply gives us the image of a seventeen-year-old girl with a baby and proceeds to play upon our worst prejudices regarding teen parents. On that note, what are we to make of the monologue's closing line, "And I keep walking"? This line is repeated for emphasis, suggesting that we are intended to pay particular heed to it. There's a definite air of the protagonist turning a blind eye and purposely choosing not to get involved in any of the problems he happens across, either because he feels powerless to change them or he simply doesn't care to get his hands dirty (I've met at least one person who believes that the protagonist is the father of the girl's child, hence why he is so keen to keep moving, but I have to say that I doubt it, since he plainly doesn't know her from Adam). At any rate, he sees himself as a foreigner in this hotbed of coke, Baywatch and adolescent sex and is looking to remove himself from it as quickly as possible.

As a kid, I remember being strangely convinced that this guy never actually reaches Susan's house. Between you and me, I'm not convinced that there even is a Susan (the fact that she had a real-life muse notwithstanding). Rather, I suspect our protagonist is fated to keep wandering through this urban wasteland ad infinitum, desperately yearning for some kind of release or redemption to reveal itself - hence, the final line "And I keep walking". He could be trekking down this dark road for a while yet. The song struck me as being simply too eerie and pessimistic to warrant a happy ending, no matter how beautifully beguiling that piano hook was. But perhaps the piano hook itself acts as a clue as to the overall hopelessness of the situation; if we look to the lyrics of "Love Finds It's Own Way", we'll see a song that describes a couple whose relationship has lived through serious hardship, which is likened to a road "paved with tears and pain." The possibility of becoming lost or stranded on this road was entirely real ("If it hadn't been for your believin', we might still be stumblin' in the dark"), but we are assured that the redemptive power of love is strong enough to overcome all obstacles ("Love finds its own way, it needs no guiding light"). In some respects, "Susan's House" plays like an inversion on this very scenario - the protagonist is a lost soul still stumbling in the dark by the end of the song, and his faith in the titular Susan, while undeniably sweet, is hinted to be somewhat misplaced. After all, there's a troubling naivety in his presumption that making it to Susan's house will somehow make all of this hardship go away ("make it right", in his words). Strip back all of the elegance and we are left with the half-impassive laments of a restless nomad who sees himself as apart from this world and stays largely detached from the harrowing scenery he passes (the most emotion he expresses is in describing the indignities inflicted on the young man's corpse by paramedics). Does love find its own way? Perhaps, but "Susan's House" presents an unsettling vision of what gets left behind on the way in question.