The Lemonheads
Love Chant
Fire Records
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At some point during COVID lockdown, Evan Dando lost his wallet. After many debaucherous years in New York City, he had moved back to Martha’s Vineyard, where he’d spent his childhood living with his dad off and on after his parents’ divorce. The goal was to get his teeth fixed and quit heroin, maybe not necessarily in that order. But since returning to the island in 2013, the years seemed to keep evaporating and things weren’t going according to plan and then, to make matters worse, he’d lost his wallet. So he put out an S.O.S. on Twitter, because that had worked before (he always seemed to be losing things), and then he waited. Sure enough, the manager at the Walgreens pharmacy got in touch with him—his wallet had been turned in by a customer.
Dando was so relieved and so grateful that he brought his guitar and did a little performance of a Lemonheads song right in the middle of the pharmacy. The manager filmed it and posted it to Twitter, and it got picked up by the various music publications. I remember seeing the clip at some point in my 2021 social-media scrolling, and feeling an odd mix of excited recognition—I hadn’t seen much of Dando over the past several years in the press—and sadness, possibly because he’d chosen “Confetti,” a song about his parents’ divorce that had always resonated with the ache of my own parents’ divorce in my teen years. Beyond that, something about the clip was slightly unsettling, even though Dando seemed to have aged fairly well—he was still rangy and handsome, with just a little more silver in his hair. His demeanor was worn-down and sad, though, beyond the delivery of the song.
For Dando himself, the clip was a jolt and a wake-up call. “What bothered me was how I looked, how I sounded,” he writes in his brand-new memoir Rumors of My Demise. “When I watched the video, I didn’t see me. I didn’t see Evan Dando the musician. I saw Evan Dando the heroin addict. I was trying very hard not to be that person. I didn’t like that person.”
Throughout Rumors of My Demise, released this month alongside the Lemonheads’ new album Love Chant, their first record in nearly 20 years, Dando recounts a lifetime of drug use beginning at around age 10. There was his parents’ aforementioned divorce, which hurt him deeply, as well as his debilitating sleepwalking, which eventually led him to seek relief—anything that would knock him out hard—in heroin. He also became a frequent abuser of crack, which was first documented by the British music press in 1993 when he was staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and trying to finish Come On Feel The Lemonheads despite losing his voice due to a crack binge. He sheepishly scrawled his answers to their interview questions on a yellow legal pad, and the incident would end up solidifying his reputation as a mess.
But his memoir, which Dando wrote with the help of Jim Ruland, isn’t all sordid tales of heroin withdrawal in the back of a police van or wiling away hours in a Manhattan crack den where rats regularly ate the carpet—although those certainly are a part of the tale. There’s also supermodels, and threesomes, and glamorous world travel, and extended hang-out sessions with Keith Richards. Far beyond the ’90s, Dando lived the life of a rock star to the fullest, even if the latest chapter saw him living in a trailer, losing teeth, and subsisting on Marlboro Reds and fast food he could barely chew.
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The sense one gets from reading Rumors of My Demise is that Dando is keenly aware of surviving far beyond what a lot of people expected of a famous ’90s grunge-era musician. Dando seems to be both in careful awe and in deep gratitude of that, even though his fame was no doubt a part of his damage. The media’s obsession with his golden good looks (he was embarrassingly deemed an “alternahunk”) meant his songwriting was never taken as seriously as it deserved. Now he’s completely quit hard drugs, although he still drinks and does “over-the-counter” substances (I’m assuming weed), according to a recent interview with Mark Yarm in the New York Times.
Love Chant, which was recorded in São Paulo, Brazil, where Dando lives with his new wife Antonia, reflects Dando’s gratitude, both in title and in his refusal to bow to nostalgia. The album maintains the unmistakable DNA of the ’90s Lemonheads, while also being unapologetically fresh and forward-looking—it’s a little more fuzzed out, a little more experimental, and unmistakably game to try something new. “I’m not ready to spend the rest of my career playing anniversary shows,” Dando asserts of the new material. “Once you get on the human jukebox circuit, it can be hard to get off.”
The Lemonheads have always been, as Dando concedes in his book, more of a collective than a band. Dando has been the Lemonheads’ one constant member, and each album reflects the band’s revolving lineup despite the fact that the sound is always very recognizably Evan Dando, whether punk-inspired like the earlier albums or power pop-infused like later ones. For Love Chant, Dando recruited bassist Farley Glavin and drummer John Kent, as well as guest appearances by others including J. Mascis and longtime collaborator Juliana Hatfield.
The album kicks off with the melancholy-turned-upbeat “58 Second Song,” a philosophical bop about the fairness, or unfairness, of life. “Deep End,” co-written with longtime collaborator Tom Morgan, is a jaunty, spiky track punctuated by psychedelic little spider webs of guitar. “In the Margin” is a careening break-up romp that jumps and jolts and is darkly cartoonish—it seems to be about leaving someone behind in a way that’s more performative than anything else. “Wild Thing,” co-written with Adam Green of the Moldy Peaches, is strutting and reflective in equal parts, and Dando’s voice takes a dramatic and baritone turn. “Be-In” is a little more mellow and reflective with a galloping interlude mid-way, and brings to mind Dando’s lament that, in the ’90s, he was often accused of being a “dippy hippie.”
Evan Dando’s memoir Rumors of My Demise is in stores now | Buy on Amazon
Twenty-first century concerns come into play with the sunny romp “Cell Phone Blues,” while “Togetherness Is All I’m After” features some of Dando’s best, most beautifully heartfelt singing paired with J. Mascis’ guitar stylings. It’s a stunning song, and definitely the standout on the album. “Marauders” is a groovy, chugging, thoroughly modern track that evokes a noble quest full of epic twists and turns. (There’s also a craft beer named after the song.) The titular “Love Chant” holds hints of ’60s psychedelia without being overtly throwback, while “The Key of Victory” is a reflective, country-leaning meditation on a life lived over several decades. The album ends on “Roky,” moody and jazzy and sometimes stuttering—“I’ve been hung on a cross / I’ve been nailed to the sounding board”—about relapse, and perhaps punishing fame, and finally coming out on the other side.
Love Chant is a vibrant and imaginative album that was well worth the wait, and there’s something deeply touching—especially to a longtime fan—about so many of Dando’s contemporaries and repeat collaborators coming together to help him craft a clean, triumphant comeback.
Notable Tracks: “Deep End” | “In the Margin” | “Marauders” | “Togetherness Is All I’m After”
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