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Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a series of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so long to get noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You inject for a long time and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is particularly resilient, but you can barely see it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Only joking!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a person who has used numerous substances going from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently had it all and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to a bar. In the end, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into random digressions. It's understandable he has stopped owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is extremely all over the place. I just want to read all information at once.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my life, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing quite well so far.” Now 58, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He decided it was time to give up after a disastrous performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I think some people were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But now he is about to launch Love Chant, his debut record of original band material in nearly two decades, which includes flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this kind of hiatus in a career,” he comments. “It's a Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have standards about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I am.”

The artist is also releasing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a wry, heady, occasionally eye-watering account of his experiences as a musician and user. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering his disorganized conversational style. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a good company. And it positions me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to do since I was a kid. At school I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period before existence got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended Boston’s prestigious private academy, a liberal establishment that, he says now, “was the best. It had few restrictions except no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group contracted to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream folk-inspired sound. This change occurred “because the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like Mad, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to do their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the album their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his somber croon. The title was derived from a news story in which a priest bemoaned a individual called the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the only one. At that stage, Dando was using heroin and had developed a penchant for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine anointed him among the 50 sexiest individuals alive. He cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of enjoyment.

However, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he delivers a detailed description of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a hostile audience who jeered and hurled bottles. But this was minor next to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances