Love Quote by Evan Dando

A musician name-checking Joyce isn’t just a flex; it’s a subtle claim about taste, craft, and the kind of melancholy he wants to live in. Evan Dando’s “For me, it’s all about The Dubliners… I love ‘The Dead’” reads like a personal compass point: when the noise drops out, he’s drawn to a story that turns quiet social observation into an emotional gut-punch.

The specific intent feels less like literary criticism and more like affiliation. Dando’s whole aesthetic with the Lemonheads leans on understatement, clean melodies, and a sadness that arrives sideways. “The Dead” is exactly that kind of engine: a dinner party, small talk, little slights, and then the devastating reveal that the past is still singing louder than the present. By choosing Joyce’s most accessible, humane work rather than the high-wire difficulty of Ulysses, Dando signals a preference for clarity and feeling over virtuoso opacity. It’s the rock songwriter’s Joyce.

The subtext is also about romance with the ordinary. The Dubliners treats routine life as worthy of art without sentimentalizing it. “The Dead” especially offers Dando a model for how to make a room, a mood, a season do the heavy lifting. Contextually, this sits in that long 90s/alt-rock tradition of artists grabbing canonical literature to frame their own sensitivity as serious, but Dando’s pick isn’t macho-posturing; it’s a confession of being moved by the story’s final snowfall, that soft, leveling image of everyone’s longing, equally covered.