Underrated Favorites Vol 1: Come On Feel The Lemonheads
Volume One in a series of posts about underappreciated albums that I happen to love.
Being a music fan means irrationally loving1 albums that most other people could take or leave (usually leave). Part of that is just a matter of the random unaccountability of taste and another part of it is the unpredictable intersection of a half billion other micro-factors—personal experience and timing and music and lyrics and mood and chemistry and mental health and an object of affection’s favorite band2 and more.
I have a few albums I’m certain I love more than most people3. A few of them4 are actually a sort of immediate, on-demand litmus tests for friendship.
The world isn’t throwing big anniversary parties for some of these albums like they do for undisputed All-World albums like, say, Sgt Pepper or Pet Sounds or OK Computer. But if you want to get the job done and pay tribute to these underloved gems5, sometimes you’ve gotta do it yourself. Be the change/album retrospective you want to see in the world, right?
So let’s talk a bit about The Lemonheads’ 1993 album Come On Feel The Lemonheads6.
Come On Feel… was the follow-up to The Lemonheads’ breakthrough It’s A Shame About Ray, which had broken through on the strength of, yes, chief Lemonhead7 Evan Dando’s knack for punky/poppy hooks but more for their cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”8 (a cover that Dando himself admitted to recording under record label duress and with both eyes fully rolling).
Those are the only two Lemonheads albums I ever owned. And I mostly bought It’s A Shame About Ray because the girls I hung out with all loved “Confetti” with its repeating “He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her, if he could've.” The general world consensus is that Ray is the band’s peak and fan favorite. I like it quite a bit (my song on that record is when Dando’s Gram Parsons fandom combines with his indie rock side on “My Drug Buddy” though, even if I’m not really on the same page as its narrator and the song was a prequel to some of the, uh, behaviors that ultimately derailed the Lemonheads’ career)
I’m a Come On Feel guy all the way. Warts and indulgent Rick James cameos and failure to become Nirvana9 (a plus, in my book) and all.
It took me awhile in life to realize that being a fan of an artist doesn’t mean you have to love all their work, that I can just be a big fan of one of their works. So my love for Come On Feel may not transfer over to their entire catalog (though I do love frontman Evan Dando’s cover of Victoria Williams’ “Frying Pan”), but I’ve got a fervent love for one piece.
To prevent this from devolving into a yawnful, track-by-track analysis, I’ll skip the runaway hit (“Into Your Arms” and its streaming count >12x the next most-streamed song) and just highlight two songs:
“The Great Big No” is such an airtight pop song. The sing-song-y and punk-paced verse that transitions into a pseudo-dissonant chorus that feels almost like a pause, underscoring the lyrical theme of nothingness and kind of providing a musical, unresolving version of the titular “no.” Lyrically, it’s got some nice pre-emo stuff in there: “just let me walk away” has got all kinds of Taylor Swift Singing Along With 20,000 Of Her Best Stadium Friends energy to it. I bet Dando had been waiting for the right song to drop the lyric “indigo guy” into and this was the one. The entire song clocks in under 3 minutes and has all the rises (from 2:12-20, the way the outro kicks in after the “Everyone knows everything” bridge and its repeated “Great Big No” refrain and Dando’s “WHOA!”…c’mon…rock was invented to do stuff like this) and falls (at 0:20, the harmonic descent of Dando’s background “Whoa-oh-oh-ohs” in each prechorus) and breaths and breathtaking you need. The outro introduces10 the album’s sneaky secret weapon: Juliana Hatfield and her album-shaping background vocals. Similar to Neko Case’s voice elevating the New Pornographers’ records, Hatfield’s distinct seraphic voice provide the perfect almost-fragile foil for Dando’s blunt-force dude voice11. She’s all over the album, giving it just the right dose of vulnerability and charm, and it makes a huge difference (though it’s actually the Go-Go’s—and everyone’s 80’s crush—Belinda Carlisle12 (!) on “I’ll Do It Anyway.”13)
“Down About It” is another fantastic demonstration of Dando’s straddling of pop and punk. It starts out with a raucous, distortion-heavy, smashy run through some nice poppy chords before Dando comes in with candy-coated intro melody that also acts as the song’s chorus (50’s songwriting at its finest). Then a pace-shifting b-section ( at 0:29, “she's gonna give me all the time I need to finish it / And if I can't, I'll sleep over”) that’s not really the chorus, but more a crafty way to turn us around back into the intro/actual chorus melody. And then, just as the you think you’ve heard the chorus enough, what do they do? They bring in that secret weapon again: Juliana Freaking Hatfield. Fine, yes, I would in fact like to hear the chorus a time or two more, thank you. Two minutes and 15 seconds and the song is wrapped. No filler.
Speaking of time, over the course of the whole 15-song album, only two songs go over 4 minutes long. And 11 of them are three minutes or shorter! Pop-punk concision, baby. Nobody’s gonna accuse Dando of being his generation’s greatest lyricist14 (there are some cringey moments for sure) but that’s not the point. For the most part it’s bubblegum—made for a moment.
Ironic, given that I’m still talking about it 30 years later.
Not bad for bubblegum.
One example. Songwriter Mia Grace told me last year during rehearsals for our Harvest concert that “Peace Trail” was one of her favorite Neil Young songs and—while I don’t get it entirely and maybe acted performatively shocked when I found out—I respect it (and have come around a little bit, to be honest). You love what you love and that’s that.
I once bought a Sonic Youth album at the Graywhale (a now-closed record store on 1300 East) solely to try to impress the cute goth-ish manic pixie dream clerk. I’m not too proud to admit it. I don’t think she was impressed. (There’s a good chance, knowing indie kids, that I bought the wrong Sonic Youth album.)
Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha’s debut solo album, Let It Come Down, is a good example. I’ve never met someone who loved this album that I didn’t like. Not even once. Interestingly, it was one of the albums—back in the CD era—that you would find stacks upon stacks of in the Used CD part of record stores (along with REM’s Monster, another album I love). Smashing Pumpkins fans bought it in droves and, then, when they found out it sounded nothing like Smashing Pumpkins but was more of a 70s Laurel Canyon folk-pop vibe, returned it in droves. (Their loss.) It’s so unbeloved that—last time I checked—you can’t even listen to it on Spotify or Apple Music.
Ian Cohen, on Come On Feel The Lemonheads’ Used CD bin status and on the quality of albums like Come On Feel by other would-be hitmakers like Flaming Lips and The Breeders:
”The album’s cut-out bin status isn’t necessarily indicative of its quality—there were also quite a few copies of Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, Last Splash, Star, and File Under: Easy Listening, records by indie darlings who’d scored an unexpected hit that didn’t quite prepare mall-walkers for their weirdness.”
James Iha / Let It Come Down
The Cardigans / Long Gone Before Daylight
Freedy Johnston / This Perfect World
Grant Lee Buffalo / Mighty Joe Moon
Morphine / Cure For Pain
Leona Naess / self-titled
Randy Newman / Bad Love
Elvis Costello / Brutal Youth
Joe Henry / Tiny Voices
Superdrag / Head Trip In Every Key
Jason Collett / Here’s To Being Here
Matthew Ryan Vs The Silver State
Marc Cohn / Burning Up The Daze
Dan Bern / New American Language
Cracker / The Golden Age
Lyle Lovett / I Love Everybody
Michael Penn / Resigned
(There are more where these came from. Don’t threaten my list-making heart with a good time.)
Don’t worry. These aren’t gonna be Import-Only or rare obscure free jazz live albums. I’m simply not that cool.
I tweeted about my love for Come On Feel The Lemonheads and this is what I got in return. Typical social media: aggressively jump into a conversation and make leaping assumptions, leading with your fists, then act surprised when someone—who you don’t know and didn’t ask for your Random Reply Guy hot take—didn’t love your aggression. The internet in a nutshell. Emphasis on nut.
The band’s lineup shifts constantly, the only constant being Dando.
Ian Cohen, in his not-all-that-glowing Pitchfork retrospective called the Come On Feel “a charm offensive by a band that was still largely known for a kitschy cover song, a nod to their ascending star and desire to capitalize on it
This was a real thing. The record companies wanted lightning to strike again after the surprise breakout of Nirvana. So every slackery rock kid with some distortion and pop hooks and promise suddenly shouldered the burden of being the next Cobain. There was one Cobain and only one. It’s obvious now, yes, but it was pretty apparent even then. Anyway, both Ray and Come On Feel sold about 500k each, which is nothing to scoff at, but when record execs have Neverminds in their eyes, nothing less is good enough.
Get it? Outro intros? Wordplay!
Not gonna lie. Blunt force dude voice is my favorite thing I’ve written in weeks.
Unless you were a Susanna Hoffs guy. Not that anyone had to choose. You can have your eternal flame and your heaven is a place on earth too, man.
Do the Lemonheads have the most diverse guest musician list of any 90s indie-rock band? Judge for yourself:
-Rick James (of Super Freak and Chappelle Show skit fame)
-Belinda Carlisle (of the Go-Gos)
-J Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr)
-Garth Hudson (of The Band)
-Karl Alvarez (of Descendants)
-Juliana Hatfield (of her own bad self and Minor Alps)
-Liv Tyler
-Kate Moss?!?
-Sneaky Pete Kleinow (of the Flying Burrito Brothers)
-Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (of Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan)
-Jesse Peretz (movie and tv director for shows like Girls, Nurse Jackie, Our Idiot Brother, and more)
He had some gold in there too, though. Teenage Angst Paul sure loved “Why can’t you look after yourself and not down on me?” though. And the simplistic “Patience is like bread, I say / I ran out of that yesterday.”
This is definitely the better of the two known albums. Although I have to admit that I only owned those first two. Although I do love the song The Outdoor Type from a few years later. That's a great one.