(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 8 February 2026 1:00, UK
On January 20th, 2026, Evan Dando brought the latest incarnation of his rascally alt-pop band the Lemonheads to a taping of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. It was the group’s first performance on an American late-night talk show in 30 years, and, as no insult to Dando and his cohorts, that passage of time was evident.
Dando, once the smirking, long-legged pretty boy of 1990s rock, is 58 now and a bit more lumberjacky in his presentation, but overall, he looked and sounded good performing an old Lemonheads classic, ‘My Drug Buddy’. It’s impressive that he’s still around at all, considering how much his various drug buddies sent him spiralling into decades of heroin addiction. The fact that Dando has now been clean for several years and singing those beloved songs in good form was fairly heartwarming.
It was everything else going on around the Lemonheads that made the whole thing a bit jarring. These noble slacker heroes of the Bill Clinton era didn’t look quite right boxed into a shiny new clip on TikTok, and they certainly didn’t need the consistently annoying Jimmy Fallon inserting himself into their set, as the snickering host bounded over to sing harmonies on Dando’s microphone with the same energy as a little girl at Disneyworld hugging Princess Elsa.
After watching this, I did what I imagine a lot of middle-aged people do after seeing one of their old favourite bands reunite in the present day. I went time-travelling back to the Lemonheads’ heyday to remember what they were like without the undercurrent of time contextualising everything about them. Ironically, you have to be fully nostalgic sometimes to actually remove nostalgia from the equation, if that makes any sense.
And so, via YouTube, I returned to my childhood living room and the boxy TV set on which I used to stay up and watch The Late Show with David Letterman; the original 12:30am programme Letterman hosted on NBC from 1982 to 1993. Specifically, I’m watching an episode from 1992, when Dando and the original Lemonheads were the musical guests. Evan is magically 25 now, and he is 1992 incarnate: long hair, oversized coat, indie band T-shirt, and an unprofessionally blasé but charmingly authentic “aww shucks” attitude. He’s here to promote the Lemonheads’ new album, It’s a Shame About Ray, which Letterman holds up in one of those long rectangular CD boxes that only existed in this brief era.
The plan was to play the band’s big hit of the moment, their loosey goosey cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’, but Letterman tells the audience that he personally asked Dando to switch up at the last minute and play the album’s title track instead (apparently it had something to do with some beef between Letterman and Paul Simon).
“Thanks for intervening,” Dando says from the stage, interrupting the host with zero sense of self-awareness.
“You didn’t wanna do that one?” Letterman replies from his desk, taking the unorthodox pre-song chatter in stride.
“I didn’t know what I wanted exactly,” Dando says, “But I’m glad to be doing this one, cuz I wrote it. Right on.”
Letterman then makes a joke about giving Evan advice about his outfit, as well, to which Dando sarcastically replies, “You’re just the guy to give it to me,” before tearing into a fantastic, buzzing rendition of ‘Ray’, with Letterman’s longtime bandleader, Paul Schaffer, lending a hand on acoustic guitar.
Unlike Jimmy Fallon’s fawning interaction with Dando, this one felt lively and interesting, right on the edge of prickly, and it fed perfectly into the Lemonheads performance, which now looks like a great testament to the best aspects of the early ‘90s, when weird people and their noisy songs were getting daily mainstream attention. This wasn’t grunge. It was more like a ‘90s version of the Replacements with a smooth, baritone vocalist; a north star for rockers with pop sensibilities in the age of flannel.
“It was our time,” Dando told the St Louis Post-Dispatch in 2012, looking back at 1992. “If you hang around in show business long enough, you got a shot at making a dent, and this was our shot. We made a unique record that was different from the stuff that was happening around then. . . . None of us thought we’d get to a place where that was happening, but it was fun getting your shot.”
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