“I’m happy, I’m good, I’m doing the thing every night,” says Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, on tour in support of Love Chant, his band’s first album of new material in 19 years. A maelstrom of melody and marauding guitars, it sounds both adolescent and grown-up – a lot like Dando himself.
Now happily remarried and residing in Brazil, the rumpled and jovial 58-year-old acknowledges that the ghosts - and addictions - of his wild youth hover nearby.
Or as he sings on In The Margin: ‘If periphery is what you give, I’ll leave you in the margin where I live.’ Zooming from a hotel room in Dublin, he says: “I have some rules I gotta abide by, and everything’s gonna be cool.”
The Lemonheads have 70 dates between now and December - that’s a lot of roadwork.
True. But look at Bob Dylan! He’s still out there doing it. Once it gets in your system it’s impossible to get it out. We’ve been playing a bunch of shows in a row over here, and sometimes I can’t hit the notes. People get up in arms about this shit, complaining about it on the internet. I’m like: “Dudes, you should have seen us in ’93, we were so much worse. I lost my voice every night back then [laughs].”
You sound really energised on the album.
Thanks, I love this record. We did it in Brazil, with Apollo Nove producing, at a studio that he built, and I think we nailed it. We had a lot of guests – Juliana Hatfield, J. Mascis, John from The Blake Babies. All my friends. We also had John Lennon’s compressor from Imagine on all the vocals!
The opening track, 58 Seconds, really captures the upside-down world we’re living in.
It’s like some demented sailor thing, a Charles Manson sea shanty [laughs]. It’s whimsical, weird, a little bit rocking and a little bit all over the place. So we had to put the song first, to tell people: “Okay, strap in. This ain’t gonna be all biscuits and gravy."
And now you’ve moved to Brazil. From your social media, it looks idyllic.
I feel like I died in the fentanyl epidemic because I’m in heaven now [laughs]. I love Brazil. And it’s been good for my songwriting, and my painting [Dando did the colourful sleeve of Love Chant]. I got married at the end of last year, and now I’m a stepdad.
Also, I got off heroin. Heroin disconnects you, makes you really afraid of death and stuff. It’s creepy as fuck. I didn’t want to feel that any more. A lot of my friends died from it, but I’m okay now. I got my track marks, but I don’t want to do that Charlie Parker thing any more.
How has your relationship with your fans changed since the nineties?
The way I see it, the internet’s never satisfied. It wants content. And I get real tired of feeding stuff into that void. You have to do it, for the fans, I guess. So I’ll try it for a little while longer. But if nothing changes, I’m not gonna do it any more.
What can you tell us about your upcoming memoir, Rumours Of My Demise?
The book is just a long magazine article to promote the album [laughs]. It’s pretty bad as far as facts go and shit. The pictures are the best thing in it. But I’ll be reading the audio book myself. I made sure to yell and scream every night for a week, so I could do it with a sexy voice.
Love Chant is out now via Fire Records.
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