Aging & Wisdom Quote by Evan Dando

Evan Dando isn’t just listing influences; he’s planting a flag in a very particular version of rock history where taste functions like identity. The Velvets, the Stooges, the Modern Lovers: three bands that all sound like someone discovering electricity in a garage, each one allergic to polish, each one more famous for opening doors than for topping charts. By anchoring the memory at 14, Dando points to the age when you don’t “appreciate” music, you swear allegiance to it. That’s the subtext: this isn’t nostalgia, it’s a chosen lineage.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Huge fan” is blunt and unglamorous, the opposite of the mythic artist origin story. Then he upgrades to “my three favourite bands,” as if the teenage fixation never needed revision. The kicker is “I never get sick of ’em,” a casual line that carries an aesthetic manifesto: the best rock doesn’t wear out because it’s not built on novelty. These records endure the way blunt truths endure; they’re simple, nervous systems exposed.

Context matters, too. Dando, frontman of the Lemonheads, came up in an era when alternative rock was constantly being repackaged into marketable cool. Name-checking these three is a way of refusing that cycle, insisting on a rawer canon: songs that sound underfed, impatient, a little dangerous. It’s also a subtle defense of his own sensibility: melodic, yes, but loyal to the messy, street-level intimacy that those bands made sacred.