Evan Dando is now following you on Twitter

This is basically the funniest email I have received thus far in my life.

The first Lemonheads song I ever heard was Into Your Arms on cassette at a schoolfriend’s house when I was 12 years old.  I didn’t even like that girl much, but she did me a big favour that day.  I promptly requested a copy of Come On Feel for my birthday, a wish that was granted by my lovely grandmother.  I was in the habit of requesting strange/slightly inappropriate birthday presents from my grandmother, as a precocious preteen – my copy of Less Then Zero by Bret Easton Ellis is somewhat incongruously inscribed ‘to my darling granddaughter on her thirteenth birthday’.

Anyway, I listened to that record nonstop and bought a giant print of the album cover for my bedroom wall – you know the one, all hair and cheekbones; we cried at school the day we read that Evan had cut his hair.  I went to a weird all-girls school.  I miss the days when boys all had long hair.

I loved Come On Feel even more than most people love It’s A Shame About Ray, and I still do.  By the time I retrospectively bought It’s A Shame About Ray, Our Price had become Virgin Megastore – which, incidentally, is what the local boys used to call my school.

I believe Evan once said that the Lemonheads were a band for 16-year-old girls and their mothers – in the case of my mother and me, this was literally true.  We would listen to them in the car when she drove me to school in the mornings, both singing along, because it was the only music we could agree on.  She liked Nirvana’s Nevermind, but would always make me skip Polly.  She hated In Utero, which was my favourite, nearly as much as she hated The Smiths.

If we ever get into a car together and put The Great Big No on, we will probably both have the Pavlovian response of driving all the way back to my old school, and Steely Dan would not approve.

You know, people die; the moon falls out of the sky.  The internet gets invented.  Some things don’t change.  My mum and I still like to sing in the car together.  My grandmother still buys me the books and records I ask for when it’s my birthday.  Evan Dando is still a sexy shaggy dog with a friendly voice.

I am now 31 years old and Evan Dando is following me on Twitter.