Evan Dando

A grievous, grievous angel is he. When the Lemonheads' final record, Car Button Cloth, converged with alt-rock's 1996 nosedive, our erstwhile Lemonhead was well on his way to becoming a legendary crackhead. Fans of his sweet, deceptively simple (some say just simple, or even saccharine) melodies worried about him the same way fans of Elliott Smith's doomed love poems rightly doubted their hopeless troubadour's ability to say when. For much of the latter half of the decade, Dando was nowhere to be found. When he showed up on a New York stage with Giant Sand and Vic Chesnutt in 2000, many in the audience gasped. That night, Dando treated the crowd to a rusty but still sexy baritone, moving tentatively through some tunes from his upcoming record, whose title would mock the glamour of fame, the mystery of his absence, and the Dionysian promise of drugs: Baby I'm Bored.

His first official release, though, was a live-show recording, 2001's Live at the Brattle Theatre/Griffith Sunset, which contained a few Lemonheads favorites, some works-in-progress, and covers like Victoria Williams' "Frying Pan" and the Louvin Brothers' "My Baby's Gone." On Bored, released in 2003, the songs -- lushly midwifed by producer Bryce Goggin -- can be quite lovely, though anyone who was expecting the alt-pop of yore probably had his own boredom issues to contend with here. The disc drifts into Elliott Smith solipsism on fragments like "Why Do You Do This to Yourself?" But the twisty narcissism of songs with titles like "The Same Thing You've Thought Hard About Is the Same Part I Can Live Without" prove that Dando's own brand of wicked deprecation is still in effect. The collaborations with Ben Lee, "Hard Drive" and "All My Life," have a kind of mundane grace that nods to both the serenity and teetering frustration of life off the pipe. (LAURA SINAGRA)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide