A single note was all it took to peel away the miasma of rock’n’roll hedonism and tabloid iconoclasm that once threatened to envelop the blue-eyed Boston dreamer. Five years in all, label-less and buried under a pile of headlines and powders, Dando took a back seat in the limousine of fame, but unlike the late, great Hank Williams, emerged the other side, married and resolute. Evan Dando has weathered the storm, beaten out his exile.

And what you get is two halves of this reckoning; a live revivification of mostly Lemonheads back-catalogue, and a sobering set of folk and country covers - country never being more than a Nudie Suit away from Dando since the Lemonheads cut Patsy Cline’s Strange way back in ‘87.

As an interpreter of other people’s songs, in this case Fred Neil, Townes Van Zandt, Tim Hardin, John Prine and the Louvin Brothers, his voice leans like an old friend, knowing when to be faithful, when to be true. Without being overtly country in his phrasing, he shares a lot of the
same soul these great artists evoke; those subtle nuances of feeling that make the voice crack, hang or fold at just the right time. Bringing it all back home on the live disc, Dando invests old tracks such as Ride With Me, Stove, My Drug Buddy and Down About It with lessons learnt
far beyond the lines he once wrought.

The one new track, the Dando/Tom Morgan/Ben Lee penned The Same Thing You Thought Hard About Is The Same Thing I Can Live Without, aches with quiet intensity and augurs well for the forthcoming studio album. Despite a few glitches; the different vocal effects used on the EP, the
two versions of Neil’s Ba-De-Da, and the lack of between song intimacy, it’s a simple record that expands the notion of Dando as one of the great storytellers of the last fifteen years. When the sounds fade, the songs remain.

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