Evan Dando is no closer to discovering what makes himself tick than he was as a teenager, but he isn’t losing sleep over it.
He’s making a living playing music, which suits him just fine. “It’s what I always wanted,” Dando said Monday from Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where he was prepping for the solo tour that brings him to Victoria on Saturday. “To scrape a living out of this.”
At the moment, he is writing songs for a new album, although he’s unsure when it will land or what shape it will take. The lanky, blond-maned singer is still the primary songwriter and frontman for the Lemonheads, the Boston-bred group he co-founded in 1986, though he also tours and releases music under his own name.
That appears to be his preferred mode of working these days. “Unless you have a band that’s really happening, it can be a pain,” Dando said. “I enjoy [playing solo] a lot because you can do what you want.”
He has collaborated in recent years with performers ranging from Dinosaur Jr., Ryan Adams and MC5 to Grammy-nominated soundtrack composer Jon Brion. But those experiences — typically hodgepodge for Dando in their genre-jumping — haven’t made his vision any clearer.
If nothing else, Dando is grateful to control his own decision-making these days. He was far from an autonomous entity during the peak of the Lemonheads, a once-scrappy punk group whose popularity was such, in 1993, that Dando found himself on People magazine’s list of the most beautiful people in the world.
With that came expectations — and assumptions. Dando was linked to a number of actresses and female rockers, among them Courtney Love, Bijou Phillips and Kate Moss, which strengthened his gossip-column stock. The lustre soon faded after a series of publicity missteps and candid interviews by Dando hurt the band’s legitimacy, something he now regrets.
“At one point, the record company was really excited, and I would do whatever they said for a while, in the hope of getting some part of our music heard. It’s a weird game, the music industry. It’s easy to lose it — if not your soul, then your direction and credibility.”
By 1994, Dando had grown tired of the attention. In 1996, he was in rehab.
He continued to make mistakes before eventually righting his ship with 2003’s Baby I’m Bored, his debut solo effort and first studio recording in seven years. Dando said he is able to look back today without too many regrets. “Just like the listener has to separate the artists from the art, you have to separate your work from your life a little bit,” he said.
Dando owes his success to the 1992 Lemonheads album, It’s a Shame About Ray, and its surprise cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson. Dando was never the biggest fan of his own hit version, saying it was recorded almost as a lark. Martin Scorsese used the song during a climactic scene in his 2013 film, The Wolf of Wall Street, but even that couldn’t turn Dando’s frown upside down.
“Mrs. Robinson was a total anomaly,” he said. “It was not a song we ever covered [before the recording]. We had some good song choices going there for a while and that screwed everything up.”
Song choices have always been key to Dando’s success. When he was high on the charts two decades ago, it was often with the help of other songwriters, a rare sight for that era. Dando said he never shied away from co-writing with others or covering their music outright, having first tasted success with the Lemonheads through a 1989 cover of Suzanne Vega’s Luka.
Fittingly, the most recent Lemonheads recording was 2009’s covers-only album, Varshons. “They are either songs I like or don’t like, it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “When I hear a song, I immediately want to learn it, whether it’s annoying or I really love it.”
Dando, he of the short-attention span, is both an erratic performer and unpredictable interviewee, qualities that make him an intriguing musical entity. That is reflected in the cover songs he chooses to perform and record, a list that includes everyone from Cole Porter, Charles Manson and Buddy Holly to KISS, New Kids on the Block and ABBA.
He was one of the earliest alt-rockers to trumpet the late Gram Parsons, an unheralded country pioneer who become famous well after his death. Dando and the Lemonheads first covered Parsons on their 1990 recording, Lovey, a fact that often goes unreported by the music press.
Dando probably would have improved his stock had he paid attention to such trends, especially during the alt-country boom of the late ’90s. Dando said he would rather be happily out of the loop than chasing trends, especially if it meant sacrificing a part of his soul in the process.
A solo country record has been on Dando’s backburner since 1989. Does he think it will ever be completed? “I don’t know,” he said, drifting off in thought. “I’ve gotta do it soon.”
Evan Dando performs an early show at the Biltmore, May 9, with guest Sarah Johnston. Doors 7 p.m. Ěý
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