Art & Creativity Quote by Evan Dando

There’s a quietly unromantic honesty in Dando’s workflow: the “experience” isn’t sacred, and the song isn’t a diary entry. What he hoards isn’t confession but language. He draws a bright line between living and logging it, then admits the real compulsion is elsewhere: collecting stray phrases the way some people collect guitar pedals or ticket stubs. It’s a portrait of songwriting as scavenging, not revelation.

The subtext is practical and a little defensive. By downplaying autobiographical note-taking, he sidesteps the expectation that a musician must constantly turn life into content. The “very decent memory” reads like a shrug at the cult of authenticity: I was there, I remember it, but I’m not packaging it for you in real time. Instead, he’s building a private toolbox of lines, ready for the moment craft demands it.

That last turn - “the right rhyme and everything” - matters. It’s a reminder that the emotional charge listeners hear is often the product of engineering: the right sonic fit, the right internal click, the line that lands because it’s shaped to land. Dando frames songwriting less as inspiration striking than as searching, sorting, matching. In an era that romanticizes rawness, he’s admitting the pleasure (and the control) of assembly: a song isn’t just what happened to you; it’s what you can make happen with words.