Everlast: From Embers to Ashes and Back Again

Everlast has been famous, broke, celebrated, written off, Grammy-winning and homeless after fire took his house.

More than three decades after “Jump Around” changed everything, he’s still here — and he might have made one of his most personal records yet. There are two things Everlast likes to remind himself. Whatever is happening is inevitable. And this too shall pass.

At 57, those words carry a little more weight than they might have once.

The Irish-American rapper, singer and songwriter — born Erik Francis Schrody — has returned with Embers to Ashes, his first album in eight years and a record that finds him exactly where he has often been at his best: somewhere in the dust between hip-hop, blues, Americana and rock ’n’ roll.

Produced by Yelawolf in Nashville and mixed by legendary engineer Chris Lord-Alge, Embers to Ashes isn't particularly interested in nostalgia. This is Everlast looking at where he's been, what disappeared along the way and what remains when the smoke clears.  And there has been plenty of smoke.

In 2018, Everlast's Los Angeles home was destroyed in the Woolsey Fire. Then came the pandemic. Then divorce. Life, as it tends to do, kept moving.

Those years sit heavily underneath Embers to Ashes, an album filled with characters dealing with heartbreak, regret, survival, anger, forgiveness and the sometimes uncomfortable business of getting older.

But the record actually began much earlier. Back in 2015, Everlast was in Berlin when he went to see Yelawolf play. That night Yelawolf told him that, one day, he'd like to produce an Everlast record. A decade later, they finally did it.

The two reconnected in Nashville, with Yelawolf taking the producer's chair and encouraging Everlast to open the doors to collaboration, including working with songwriter David Ray, whose credits include Jelly Roll and Teddy Swims.

The partnership worked. “I let him just steer the ship, and he nailed it,” Everlast says. The album was then handed to Chris Lord-Alge. “When we sent the album to Wolf, he wrote me back and said, ‘I’ve never in my life said I have no notes.’” Everlast's reasoning for surrounding himself with people at the top of their game is considerably simpler: “When you don’t want to think about it, you hire the best people.” Fair enough.

Everlast has lived enough lives for several careers. There was House of Pain and 1992's enormous “Jump Around” — a song that still has the ability to turn a room into chaos within seconds of its opening horn stab.

Then came another Everlast entirely. His 1998 album Whitey Ford Sings the Blues and its defining single “What It's Like” brought acoustic guitars, blues, country and folk storytelling into a world that still had one foot firmly planted in hip-hop.

He later won a Grammy with Santana and continued occupying a musical space that never really fitted neatly into anybody else's box. But success isn't a straight road. On the new song “Stones,” Everlast sums up part of that journey in one line: “We went from champagne and crystal glasses to drinking cheap whiskey out of plastic.” That distance — between having everything and watching things disappear — runs through Embers to Ashes.

Perhaps the line that best captures where Everlast finds himself today comes from “Losing Man’s Game.” “There’s a freedom in being broken.”

The track brings together an unlikely but somehow completely logical crew: Andy Frasco, Amigo the Devil and DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill — the same Muggs who produced House of Pain's “Jump Around” more than three decades ago.

Elsewhere, “My Hollywood” looks at the absurdities of success and failure in the entertainment business, while “Stones” travels from self-loathing towards something resembling forgiveness.

Heartbreak gets its own chapter.

“Love Don’t Heal” and the deceptively upbeat “Broken Heart for Hire” move through the familiar stages — hurt, anger, numbness and whatever comes afterwards. But Everlast has always been at his most interesting when he's telling somebody else's story.

“Never Coming Home” enters murder-ballad territory, while “Happy You Can Cry” looks at freedom through the life of a woman whose luck has largely run out. They're songs from the same American storytelling tradition where the characters aren't heroes or villains. They're just people trying to get through the day.

Then Everlast turns the lens back on himself. On “1987,” he remembers hanging around the west side of the San Fernando Valley before any of this happened. Before House of Pain. Before “Jump Around.” Before the Grammys. Before he made a record with Ice-T. Before millions of albums, world tours and all the strange baggage that arrives with success.

It's the sound of somebody looking back at the moment just before life took a very different road. And then there's the title track. “Embers to Ashes” isn't really about triumphing over adversity in some neat Hollywood sense.

Life rarely works that way. Sometimes things burn. Sometimes they're gone. And sometimes you keep walking.

Everlast's gaze isn't confined to his own history. “Rubber Bullets,” written while watching the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, is a ghostly protest song built around the stark observation that rubber bullets can kill.

“Lies” takes a different route, carrying the atmosphere of friends gathered around a backyard fire while the rest of the world disappears for a while.

Then there's “Peace of Mind,” a collision of down-home blues and big rock ’n’ roll that finds Everlast taking aim at modern life's endless noise and our various attempts to escape it. Eventually, though, the record arrives somewhere quieter.

The closing “Young Man” finds Everlast occupying a position he probably couldn't have imagined back in 1992. The elder. The guy with some miles behind him. The father looking at his two daughters and trying to pass along whatever wisdom he managed to pick up while making his own mistakes.

It would be easy to tell Everlast's story through the numbers. The records sold. The Grammy. House of Pain. “Jump Around.” Whitey Ford Sings the Blues. “What It's Like.” Santana.

But numbers don't really explain why Everlast has lasted.

Maybe it's because beneath the hip-hop, blues guitars, beats and gravelly baritone, he's always written about something remarkably simple. People. People getting lucky. People screwing up. People losing everything. People falling in love with the wrong person. People getting angry. People getting older. People trying again.

More than thirty years into his career, Embers to Ashes finds Everlast still documenting all of it. The difference now is that he's got a few more scars to write about. Everything is inevitable. Everything passes.

But some things stick around.