Well, it's been a while. Some seven years on from the last Lemonheads album, it's a fractionally mellower Evan Dando who ambles back into the spotlight. Perhaps this time, the focus will be less on his exotic rock'n'roll appetites, and more on the continuing excellence of his music.
Perhaps. The trouble is, Dando's past looms large on 'Baby I'm Bored'. "All my life, I thought I needed all the things I didn't need," he sighs on 'All My Life'. "You stayed awake for 14 days, and then you slept a week," he chides himself on the pointedly titled 'Why Do You Do This To Yourself?'. For 'The Same Thing', the truth comes out: "I can't believe how far I slid, but secretly I'm glad I did."
The gist, then, of 'Baby I'm Bored' is a kind of rueful reflection on the excesses of Evan Dando. He was always a hedonist unusually free of self-pity, one who took drugs out of a lust for life rather than as a means to escape from it. And these 12 lovely songs reflect that: the madness remembered with a wry smile instead of anything as melodramatic as regret.
It's a little more complicated than it seems, though. Dando has always had the appearance of a singer-songwriter, but in The Lemonheads he was a champion collaborator and appropriator. On 'Baby I'm Bored', too, his confessions are penned, at least in part, by a host of other people. Two of the finest songs, 'Hard Drive' and 'All My Life', are written entirely by Ben Lee, who also collaborates with Dando and his long-time songwriting accomplice Tom Morgan on 'The Same Thing'. Lee is an interesting case: a young Australian singer, now on the periphery of The Beastie Boys' circle in New York, who first came to prominence when, aged 14, he wrote a song fantasising about what it would be like to be Evan Dando. The innocent fan gets hired to articulate the mature Dando's nostalgia: it's a irony that both must have taken much pleasure from.
'Baby I'm Bored' is the album Dando's fans hoped he would return with. Essentially, it sounds like The Lemonheads grown up: fuzzy, skilfully-constructed indie-rock with a gentle undertow of country. So Howe Gelb and Calexico figure amongst the supporting cast, and Dando gets to exercise his Gram Parsons fixation once again on 'Why Do You Do This To Yourself?'. He's also lucky to have survived the '90s with his voice intact - that warm, deep and easy way he has with a song is as beguiling as ever.
Maybe, too, he's lucky to have survived the '90s with his life intact. But Evan Dando would never be so corny as to make a big deal of the fact. He took drugs and made great records about it. Now he's stopped and has made a great record about how he used to take drugs. A good deal, one suspects, all round.
