The conversation with Evan Dando begins with sensory overkill. As soon as his camera is turned on, Dando withdraws his hand from the Zoom phone – and without warning hits the strings of his acoustic guitar, which is lying on his lap.
He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t sing, but intones a song: “Confetti”, his Lemonheads classic. This is how you always want to be greeted – with music and a beautiful panorama.
A blue sky stretches above Dando’s head, framed by palm trees. Dando now lives in Brazil, in the jungle half an hour from São Paulo. It sounds like a cliché, but he now reminds me a little of Marcos Valle in the 1970s: wheat-blond, unkempt, hippie-like hair, full beard.
Well, because of the beautiful music, the weather, the women?
“No way,” says the 58-year-old, tracing his flawless upper row of teeth with a finger and explaining: “I had my teeth remade. In the USA it costs $200,000, here it’s only $30,000.”
Dando has lived in Brazil since 2023. But not just because of the dental treatment, but to prepare for the first Lemonheads album since 2006 – “Love Chant”. And because of love. More on that later.
From success to dependence
His dry reference to the new teeth connects him to his old world – the American one, the one of drugs. The drugs came with the success, the bad teeth with the drugs. With “It’s a Shame about Ray” in 1992, Dando achieved the breakthrough he hardly thought possible; it was the fifth Lemonheads album. It happened in the first year after Thurston Moore’s proclaimed “The Year Punk Broke”, which in reality marked not punk but the triumph of grunge. Nirvana and Pearl Jam dominated: loud, angry, dark.
Evan Dando came six months later, turned to pop-folk and loved life – optimism, camping holidays, drugs, but not out of fighting demons, but out of joy of life. Dando was the nineties model of the long-haired handsome boy with a melancholic look. Soul Asylum or the Crash Test Dummies had less talent, but more success thanks to simple songs. Then came crack, then heroin – and the crash.
The “poster boy of grunge” became a victim; after 1996 he hardly released any music. On Cameo, he offered personalized greetings from his garage for $176. He needed money. “Zero heroin here in Brazil,” says Dando. “People aren’t really into that. I’m clean anyway.”
Between clarity and chaos
Apart from the occasional joint. He talks constantly, sometimes erratically, often in a stream of consciousness in which thoughts overtake one another. Thoughts that produce brilliant sentences: “Mudhoney? Heroes! Let’s face it: Mudhoney are like Nirvana – without money. Everything after Mudhoney just didn’t count. A bunch of paranoid weirdos, that was the grunge movement. And musically so simple. The main thing is no wah-wah, right? The grunge boys also found Boston and Lynyrd Skynyrd good.”
Mudhoney are like Nirvana – without money: puns that will hopefully also be read in his memoirs “Rumours of My Demise”, which will be published in November.
A new album and old companions
The new Lemonheads album “Love Chant” was created together with old companions from the nineties – J Mascis, Juliana Hatfield – and fanboys like Adam Green. It combines harsh punk (“58 Second Song”), ironic glam (“Wild Thing”) and Dando-typical, Gram Parsons-oriented melancholy (“The Key of Victory”).
Dando sounds hoarser than before, which is because of the crack. “Kurt Cobain and the others… were always screaming. But I can’t scream.” He also talks about the real laws behind grunge’s apparent “fuck capitalism” attitude: “The last time I worked with J Mascis, I literally threw the money down his throat. Four thousand for four guitar solos.”
Today that has changed: “This time he recorded more than four solos. And all of them for free.”
Between exile and rebirth
In the Brazilian highland jungle, Dando is reminded of the beloved Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles. However, he doesn’t want to go back to the USA: “Only hate on the streets there. I said in 1992 that the country was getting worse and worse. People are killing themselves because of parking tickets. I’m used to exile. It may be that Brazil is taking on China and Russia. But is it so much better in America?”
He remembers a poster that hung in his childhood bedroom and quotes James Joyce almost in full – a testament to his mental clarity: “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve what I no longer believe in, be it my home, my fatherland or my church – whatever it is called. And I will try to express myself as freely and fully as I can in some form of life or art, whereby I only want to defend myself with the only weapons I allow myself: silence, banishment and cunning.”
Dando smiles: “I don’t accept silence. But I accept banishment and cunning, at any time. I’ve been in exile many times.”
A life in the jungle
Exile could be worse. His current house belonged to Renato Teixeira, one of Brazil’s most popular sertanejo singers, whose biggest hit “Romario” was made famous by Elis Regina in 1977. Dando shows his plantation with holiday homes on his cell phone: “A life like a James Bond villain. A recording studio on a hill, only accessible via a crazy steep driveway.” And everything is affordable: “In America you wouldn’t even have a motorhome for that.” The connection breaks down – power failure. Dando is too far away from the house.
A few minutes later he is back online and holds a puppy up to the camera. He has taken on several sponsorships for lost dogs. Then he points to the main house: “The area here is great. Everyone wanted to live here. Josef Mengele also lived not far away, long before he drowned in the sea off Santos.” Then – without irony: “But he was never part of the music scene.”
Because the music scene definitely existed here in the jungle. Evan Dando has found ideal conditions surrounded by palm trees, snakes and lianas. Renato Teixeira, the seller of the country estate, is conveniently his father-in-law. In December 2024, Dando married his daughter Antonia and became stepfather to their three children. Dando regularly accompanies Teixeira at his concerts in the country, plays acoustic guitar and sings in Portuguese – even if he barely understands the language.
An unusual but likeable image: the son-in-law, wearing a flannel shirt, shuffling next to the grizzled 80-year-old legend, who is now sitting on a stool.
“Now say hello at least once!” Dando shouts to someone off-screen. Then Antonia Teixeira appears briefly in the zoom window. “She saved me,” he says. “I’ve known her since the 1990s. But I pushed her away back then.” It was the time when he was a heroin junkie. “She shouldn’t see me like this. But she waited for me. Waited for years. I’ve come a long way. And now we have so many beautiful things together. My God, just look.” Dando points the camera upwards: “These clouds.”
New beginnings under palm trees
Could he imagine composing Brazilian music himself, sertanejo or bossa nova? “Absolutely not,” he says. “My mother wouldn’t allow it. She says, ‘Evan, whatever you do, never do that David Byrne number with world music.’ And she’s so right.”
It’s Lemonheads songs anyway, not exotica performances from an American ex-pat that Dando’s audience wants to hear. And the lemonheads are in demand. “It defies all logic,” he says. “We last performed at the Enmore Theater in Sydney, sold out, 2,500 people, more than we’ve had in decades. The Roundhouse in London is even bigger, we’re playing there too. It’s been almost 20 years since my last album with my own songs.”
Between 1992 and 1993, with “It’s a Shame about Ray” and “Come On Feel The Lemonheads”, Evan Dando was one of alternative rock’s biggest stars alongside Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. Then he destroyed himself – the drugs, the 1996 album “Car Button Cloth,” which sounded like an outtake collection of the “Ray” songs. Would he turn back time if he could? “No, never!” he interrupts. “Nostalgia is a disease, right? Nostalgia was once even officially considered an illness. Soldiers suffered from it, like war trauma.” He laughs. “Well, I look back too. I should have done some things differently. ‘Never look back’ as a motto is also silly. Like an Alcoholics Anonymous slogan.”
Between past and present
After James Joyce, Dando now quotes Dylan Thomas. He knows his masters and recites poems like “Fern Hill” or “Poem in October”. “Thomas said: Childhood memories are endless, they extend our lives into eternity. He said it beautifully. But when I want to feel nostalgic, I open my laptop at night – and watch old kung fu films on YouTube.”
Dando says he’s not a digital guy, but sometimes he takes a look at streaming numbers. “I love this app with the green symbol, what’s it called again? Spotify! And what did I see? Our new single ‘Deep End’ is already in the Lemonheads top ten there. So!” As expected, “Mrs. Robinson”, the cover version of the Simon and Garfunkel classic, will probably always be at number one on the Lemonheads Spotify charts. Dando never wanted to play the song live – now on the grounds that the recording was a perfect one-take that couldn’t be repeated on stage.
Basically, however, he has made peace with “Mrs. Robinson”. The success of the cover version led to it being added to later editions of “It’s a Shame about Ray”: “At 29 minutes, the album was too short for our label anyway.” Global market interests played a role in the recording – it was about re-promoting Mike Nichols’ film “The Graduate” from 1967, in which the song was first heard. “We recorded ‘Mrs. Robinson’ for a Japanese company that had acquired the video rights to the film,” Dando says with a sigh.
“These people saw the Lemonheads as just a tool. We should get the grunge kids to buy ‘The Graduate’ on video.” But the kids weren’t stupid. When the fashion industry sent models in lumberjack looks down the catwalks in 1994, grunge became a brand – and the younger generation turned away. Then Kurt Cobain died.
The last poster boy
Martin Scorsese later used the Lemonheads version of “Mrs. Robinson” in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) – a black comedy about megalomaniacal Wall Street brokers. “So I became the poster boy for the decadence of the early 1990s!” says Dando. “But why not?” He looks down. The puppy yelps and wants to sit on his lap. He would have to put down the guitar for that. For a moment he seems to hesitate. Then he lifts the dog up – and places him on the strings.