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FeedSpree Music with J. DiDomizio: The Lemonheads
Courtesy of Stuart Goodwin
The Lemonheads at Shepherds Bush Empire, September 2005
The way I stumbled across The Lemonheads, was not unlike the process with which most of my musical discoveries occur. It was due to another band. In this case it was the Barenaked Ladies. While listening to the BNL’s song “Jane” I came across a reference to The Lemonhead’s lead singer Evan Dando and former bandmate Juliana Hatfield’s rumored intimate relationship. So off I went, tracking down any information I could about them and their band. How I had managed to avoid the heavy press that Dando, Hatfield, and the band was receiving is a mystery, considering the overexposure began with 1992’s now classic It’s a Shame about Ray and continued with 1993’s follow-up Come on Feel the Lemonheads. As it turns out, I crossed The Lemonheads’ path just as they were slipping off the radar in 1997, after a couple messy and chaotic records.
Nine years later after some time off and a solo record from Dando, The Lemonheads returned with a self-titled album. Listening to it you can hear that they’re making the same upbeat, welterweight, overcast songs, but their sound is tighter and more focused. The Lemonheads ends up reminding us why we liked The Lemonheads in the first place: they make fun, guitar-based pop songs that are catchy as hell.
Take a listen to one of their one of their songs off The Lemonheads, “No Backbone”, from a show in Philadelphia this past October.
In 2009, the band released Vashons, an album of covers with songs from such disparate acts as Gram Parsons, July, Wire, G.G. Allin, and Townes Van Zant. Despite the lukewarm response to the record by the media, nearly every song sounds like it was made to be played by The Lemonheads, even the often-covered Linda Perry (popularized by Christina Agulera) song “Beautiful”. Dando’s ability to make other people’s songs his own should come as no surprise, since it was a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” that helped their ascent in the mid-90s. That track was added on to the end of the second pressing of It’s a Shame about Ray, and was incidentally the first track I downloaded from Napster, way back in the day.
Recently, The Lemonheads have been touring with full sets of their classic 1992 album It’s a Shame about Ray. The tour is intended to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary, which is what brings them to the Town Ballroom this Saturday, the 14th. Here they are performing “Confetti” off of Ray, from the same Philadelphia performance above, showing how good they were, and how good they are again.
Joseph DiDomizio is a writer, filmmaker, and sometimes a musician. He has been writing about music, movies, books and pop-culture for several years. You can follow him on Twitter if you’d like.
