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Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and indicates a series of faint marks running down his forearm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially tough, but you can hardly notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”

The singer, former indie pin-up and key figure of 1990s alternative group his band, appears in decent shape for a man who has used numerous substances going from the age of his teens. The songwriter behind such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and completely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to a bar. In the end, he orders for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. I desire to read everything at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed last year, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing quite well so far.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take acid occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to give up after a disastrous gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of conduct.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I believe some people were supposed to take drugs and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But now he is about to release Love Chant, his debut record of new band material in almost two decades, which includes glimpses of the songwriting and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I haven't truly known about this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is a lengthy sleep situation. I maintain integrity about my releases. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

The artist is also releasing his initial autobiography, titled stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, intense, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full given Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a good company. And it gets me in public as a person who has written a book, and that is everything I desired to do since childhood. In education I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an lawyer and a former fashion model – speaks warmly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a time prior to life got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. It had no rules except no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they released multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz left, the group largely turned into a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the group contracted to a large company, a prominent firm, and reduced the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock style. This change occurred “since the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can hear we were trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my voice could cut through quieter music.” The shift, waggishly described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for Dando’s writing and his somber croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the only one. At that stage, the singer was consuming heroin and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he eagerly embraced the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him among the 50 sexiest individuals alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the idea that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having a great deal of enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. His memoir, he provides a detailed account of the significant festival no-show in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who booed and hurled bottles. But this was minor next to the events in the country soon after. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances