Eels frontman E is as hard to categorise as his music, but he�s happy just being �a dumb guy searching for answers�. By Sean Bell

A MAN called E is telling me about the emotional landscape of a werewolf. It's that kind of day. "I wanted to write 12 songs about desire," he says in a measured drawl. "Different aspects of it, different angles And I was looking at it through the lens of this character who's a werewolf, and there's sort of this Dr Jekyll and Mr Werewolf' thing going on. He is desire in its rawest physical form. So it's like life - tender and terrifying."

E, the nom de plume of Mark Oliver Everett, is technically the lead singer of Eels, though the band have rarely seemed a group enterprise as much as E's elaborate and eclectic fancies brought vigorously to life. He is explaining the genesis of the band's latest album, Hombre Lobo, "which is who the Dog-Faced Boy, from the old Eels album Souljacker, has grown up into". I bring up Warren Zevon's song Werewolves Of London, commenting that it's good company to be in. "Yeah," E says fondly at the mention of a similarly complicated artist, now tragically gone. "It was about time for another good werewolf song."

Regarding the album, he's apologetic that there's not much to tell. When asked about the experience of recording it - which can be seen first-hand in the documentary Tremendous Dynamite, a DVD "making of" that comes with the CD's deluxe edition - he offers a kind of verbal shrug. "Mostly, just a lot of music-making. That's really all there is in my life. Make music, go to sleep, wake up and make more music." Strangely, I believe him.

So far, as we talk, there has been no appearance of the much-anticipated E of legend. As reclusive as he can afford to be, E was tagged by the music press with a largely unsubstantiated reputation for mercurial surliness as far back as the late 1990s, after Eels' Brit Award-winning debut album Beautiful Freak saw them pegged as a "next big thing". Such reputations are frequently overblown: E simply has a clearly defined sense of what he does and does not care about, as well as what Hemingway memorably termed a "built-in bullshit detector".

Analysing E by dissecting his music won't produce a personality - it'll unearth a multitude. The accepted wisdom is that Eels could have been earth-shattering, had they played the game and capitalised on their earlier success. Instead, much like Damon Albarn, E went off the reservation to do obscure, interesting work for the benefit of any aficionados who remained hardcore - and a polite goodnight to everyone else.

Their 1997 UK top 10 single, Novocaine For The Soul, was a beautifully constructed pop song that nevertheless emerged from the dark hinterlands of some very personal reflection; Electro-Shock Blues, the follow-up album to Beautiful Freak, even more so. A response to the death of his father (the quantum physicist Hugh Everett III), the terminal illness of his mother, and the mental illness and eventual suicide of his sister, the album was brilliant but tough for many to swallow. This, and the pattern it represents, is among the things that E does not care about.

Everyone knows that the fewer people are watching, the more you can get away with. Eels embraced all the variety that no studio recommends, from the requiem-on-guitar and scratched samples of Last Stop: This Town (on Electro-Shock Blues), to the country ballad with brass band accompaniment that was Grace Kelly Blues (from 2000's album, Daisies Of The Galaxy). If the albums seem eclectic, Eels' live shows are utterly beyond the scope of prediction, attuned only to E's mood - soul, punk, rockabilly, psychedelia, electronica, even the three-piece thrash-metal set that greeted fans at 2006's T in the Park. The only constant is the poetic honesty of his lyrics; the honesty of a man who sounds like he can't be bothered to pretend. Will audiences on any forthcoming tour be treated to more such reinterpretations?

"It's how I keep myself interested. The tragic part about being an artist is it takes a day or two to record the song, and once it's on the album, it's there forever - it'll never change. And the next day, you think of all the things you could do to the song, but it's now too late. So you're always dissatisfied in that sense. The nice thing about a concert is you can treat an old song like one you just wrote that day. So how do you want to play it today?"

E belongs to that rarefied breed of musical Renaissance Man whose shifting personalities tend to fluster the general public. He's not alone. Ryan Adams never fully recovered from the beating he endured for sneaking off to make an album of arena rock, most critics have given up keeping track of Bright Eyes' permutations, and even the most enamoured Magnetic Fields fans treated Stephen Merritt like a child with attention deficit disorder when he unveiled a Chinese opera. E, for better or worse, just uses his own taste as a guide.

"I enjoy it because that's the kind of music fan I've always been. I always enjoyed going to a concert and having my expectations defied. Some other fans find it disappointing, but I'll never understand that. I wouldn't bother going to a concert that I thought was going to sound exactly like the record."

One factor other than talent that keeps the band bobbing in the collective consciousness is that, around the turn of the century, it seemed as if every other movie was incomplete without an Eels song on the soundtrack - from American Beauty to Shrek, from Holes to Yes Man. E is cheerfully bemused by the phenomenon: "It's just something that happened. It's always unsolicited - some directors who are fans of the music will come to us." Does the Shrek money comes in handy? "The royalties don't hurt," he admits, "and the more secure you can be in that area, the more you can be free-willed in your artistic pursuits."

It is that same free will that makes Eels such a tough fit for those who make their bread and butter squaring circles. Despite the enthusiastic categorisations of the music press, there are few musical "movements" any more - and, even if there were, it's hard to see how Eels would fit into any of them. Does it ever feel isolating?

"I think it's a good thing - for us, anyway," E says, with the ghost of a chuckle again. "That's all high-school clique stuff, anyway. If it leads to artists pushing each other to go further, out of healthy competitiveness, it can be useful; but other than that, I'm happy to not be part of the scene'." But are there any artists he would be proud to associate himself with? "Well, I'm an old guy whose tastes are similarly old. If Bob Dylan calls, you say yes. Doesn't matter what he wants to do. Rob a bank? Okay Bob, I'll bring the ski masks.'"

Politics comes up in conversation, because previously it has featured in Eels' music with only the lightest and most oblique of touches - though this is a man who deliberately dressed like the Unabomber on the cover of 2002 album Souljacker. How is he finding Obama's America?

"It's pretty exciting. It still feels so weird to have a president that you like. And it's been really hard on all the American comedians - there's nobody to make fun of now. I sympathise. Obviously, we want a better world but you might have been working on something which made slightly more sense in a world that wasn't so good. And now all this hope and optimism has screwed it up. Honestly, I'm more interested in the politics of the backyard."

He pauses, then sighs. "I'm just a rock singer. I don't have any answers. I'm just a dumb guy searching for answers." All things considered, there isn't much else to say.

Hombre Lobo is released on the Vagrant label tomorrow