Evan Dando has revealed that he is now sober aside from LSD, while confirming the release date for his upcoming memoir and teasing new music from The Lemonheads.
The soloist and Lemonheads frontman is due to publish his delayed book Rumours Of My Demise on May 1, having first announced the project in 2020. Pre-order it here via Blackwell’s.
A new interview with Dando in The Independent noted the release date, with the musician also speaking about being clean of street drugs for the past two years. Dando, 57, credited this new lifestyle to moving to Brazil and getting engaged.
However, he claimed that he doesn’t consider acid to be in the same league as other illegal drugs. “I think acid is OK once in a blue moon,” Dando explained, revealing that he had dabbled in Polish LSD in Brazil.
He even admitted to “scamming” doctors into prescribing him ADHD medications, despite him not having the neurodevelopmental disorder.
Additionally, Dando confirmed that he has almost finished a new Lemonheads album called ‘Love Chant’. “It’s really psychedelic and heavy and then quiet, and it’s all originals,” he said of the record, which will follow on from 2019’s ‘Varshons 2’ – the Boston band’s 10th full-length effort.
Looking ahead to the future, Dando explained: “I know that I’m a good person, and whatever’s going to happen to me is OK. I’m, like, really chill.”
Elsewhere in the article, it was said that the musician had been using serious drugs since before The Lemonheads began in 1986.
Evan Dando performs live with The Lemonheads. CREDIT: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty
“I was using as much as I could find,” Dando recalled. “We had a good coke dealer in our high school.” He also looked back on how he wanted to try heroin because of Keith Richards and William Burroughs.
“I was in a lot of pain about my parents’ divorce [when he was 10],” he said. “It was before puberty. I never saw my dad during puberty, and that fucked me up a little bit, I’d say. I tried to get whatever it was I wasn’t getting from my dad from people in general [when The Lemonheads got famous], which was definitely dangerous.”
The Lemonheads released two singles in late 2023 and early 2024 with ‘Fear Of Living’ and ‘Seven Out’, respectively. Dando also touched on the group’s next album when speaking to Cinema Chords last month. He told the publication that ‘Love Chant’ would be out at some point in 2025.
“‘Fear of Living’ will be on the album too,” Dando said. “We re-did that song. We have 12 songs on that but we also have another in the can. It’s like a misused situation. I made demos for about a year and a half and played all the drums and everything so that the band wouldn’t play it too raw or anything.”
He added: “I brought my band down to Brazil and we recorded at this guy’s studio called Roy Cicala. He did the John Lennon records, so we have, like, the condenser from ‘Imagine’. And we have all this great gear, and it sounds awesome.”
An official synopsis for the Rumours Of My Demise memoir reads: “After Kurt Cobain‘s passing in 1994, everyone expected Evan Dando to be next. Rising to fame in the 90s as frontman of the Lemonheads, he was infamous for his decadent lifestyle, from his extensive drug-taking and partying with Keith Richards and Kate Moss to sleeping on floors in his punk days and crashing at Johnny Depp’s house in Hollywood. But despite the rumours that are constantly circulating about him, he has lived to tell the tales.
“Following decades of the press wanting to label him and fit him in a box, Rumours Of My Demise sees Dando tell his own story. Reclaiming the innocence and exuberance of his early days and encapsulating the spirit of the era, this candid autobiography presents a portrait of an artist who lives wholly for his music, and one that makes no apologies for doing so.”
In 2023, Noel Gallagher spoke about an unreleased collaboration with Dando, which led to a feud between the two singer-songwriters. According to Gallagher, the song was called ‘Purple Parallelogram’ and was written during the peak of Oasis‘ fame in the ’90s.
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