Texas rock legend revisits his past
Alejandro Escovedo swoops into a Dripping Springs coffee shop all sharp and sleek with rock star plumage: denim jacket, snap shirt, jeans, boots. A Stetson, skull ring and mirror shades add further flash. This, just 12 hours after he was on stage at Antone’s in Austin, celebrating the release of a new album.
At 73, with more than a halfcentury of rock ’n’ roll to his name, Escovedo doesn’t look the part as much as he lives the part of migratory musician.
The Antone’s show served as testament to both his legacy and restlessness. There, Escovedo served a set of familiar favorites that felt a little foreign. The show was the first in support of “Echo Dancing,” Escovedo’s new album. Unlike other artists of a certain age, Escovedo didn’t revisit his past for a stripped-down reintroduction to old songs. Rather he took 14 songs from the past four decades and radically reinterpreted them.
The album finds its center with “The Swallows of San Juan,” a song Escovedo first released in 2008 on “Real Animal.” No surprise the song would resonate so much with Escovedo 16 years later: It was inspired by birds that move from Argentina to the muddy walls of the Mission of San Juan Capistrano every spring.
“There’s a thousand worlds on the head of a pin,” Escovedo sings. Similarly, “Echo Dancing” roves worlds to be discovered in a set of lyrics. Records are, true to the name, a physical document capturing a specific set of actions in time and place. But songs are more shapeless. The new album’s title suggests as much: “Echo” implies repetition with decay, while “dancing” implies a spirited movement.
“It’s almost like the evolution, say, of a drop of rain that falls into the ocean and becomes a wave, then it goes back into the ocean,” Escovedo says. “I’m 73 now, so there are things you start to ponder more heavily than others, right?
“‘Echo Dancing’ was a way to look back at my catalog, songs I’d written, bands I’d been in, experiences I’d had, and shaping them in a way I hadn’t thought of until we recorded it. I was able to curate my own retrospective.”
Family business
The phrase “the party’s over” shows up in two songs on “Echo Dancing.” The song “Wave,” which opened “A Man Under the Influence” in 2001, closes “Echo Dancing” in its new clothes. A sense of continuity remains, though. A wave can serve as a greeting or a farewell. The song served the former once before. This time it serves the latter.
“Echo Dancing” purrs with the energy of renewal. The album holds a sense of discovery for old Escovedo fans, while also serving as a vibrant introduction to a musician with a mythological history. Escovedo’s standing as a Texas music legend has been pretty secure since he co-founded the True Believers 40 years ago.
But his story before that was full of movement, of new homes, of different music styles that came before.
His path to this new album is a story of rock ’n’ roll to be sure. But it’s also part of an immigrant story, a family story, a migratory pattern story.
He was born in San Antonio in 1951, but his family moved to California when he was 6.
Escovedo calls the move “a culture shock. To leave family, to leave a city in which being Mexican was welcome. To go to a place where the John Birch Society flourished, where Nixon was from. We were behind the Orange Curtain.”
Teachers struggled with his name. They wanted him to be Alex E.
“I think that’s why I have so many of these songs with references to the importance of a name,” he says. “I was proud of my name.”
When Escovedo calls music “the family business,” he’s not overstating it. His father played music and was a fan of ranchera, conjunto and cowboy songs. His mother was a big band enthusiast. His older brothers Pete, who is a living legend at 88, and Coke, who died in 1986, were percussionists with notable credits in rock and jazz. His younger brothers are also musicians. And Pete’s children — including daughter Sheila E(scovedo) — are also successful performing musicians.
Escovedo thought the field was crowded with family, “so I turned to juvenile delinquency instead, which is a pretty good occupation to have if you eventually want to become a rock star.”
Escovedo says he didn’t really lean into the family business until he was 24, when he joined the Nuns, a punk band that started in San Francisco and later nested in New York.
At age 30, he started writing songs. He thinks “The Rain Won’t Help You When It’s Over” was his first. Around that time, he returned to Texas and joined Rank & File, a roots punk band. He references the early California punk days in “Sacramento and Polk,” an “Echo Dancing” song that first appeared on “Bourbonitis Blues” in 1999.
Austin in the 1980s was a perfect fit. Escovedo says he was surrounded by storytellers: Townes Van Zandt, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Rich Minus, Blaze Foley, Lucinda Williams.
“I still thought I was going to be a writer or a filmmaker,” he says. “But then and there, I gained some confidence with my writing. I realized it was like filmmaking: I was just telling stories in three-minute songs.”
What’s in a name
Escovedo spent much of the 1980s with the True Believers, a three-guitar monster of a roots rock band that also included his younger brother Javier. After the True Believers split, Escovedo next emerged in 1992 under his own name and a new sound. “Gravity” was somber folk music with an electronic buzz beneath it. “Thirteen Years,” released a year later, found him adding a string section.
He doesn’t mind the “roots” label but bristles some at “Americana.” “My albums never get put in rock, where they should be,” he says. “I get world music, Latin, salsa, Mexican music. All based on my name, which became this thorn.”
Thorn or not, Escovedo turned his name into a brand of its own. The path he’s traveled since 1992 has been both far-flung and cohesive. Some albums are folkier, others more informed by his ’70s glam rock past. The writing is sharp and cinematic.
If he was late getting to the family business, Escovedo used that to his advantage. Music lifers often spend their 50s and 60s in a creative wilderness period. Escovedo’s output over the past two decades has been restlessly radiant.
His previous album, “The Crossing,” was built on a narrative about two immigrants, one from Mexico, the other from Italy. He made the record with two Italian musicians, Don Antonio and Nicola Peruch, who helped him set an atmospheric mood. Escovedo had a new set of songs he planned to take to Italy last year with the intention of recording with them.
But he found himself thinking about his song “Wave,” particularly a cover by the Arizona band Calexico that appeared on “Por Vida,” a tribute album created in 2004 to help Escovedo pay medical bills after he collapsed in Arizona following a show, his body ravaged by hepatitis C.
“They deconstructed it in such a gorgeous way,” he says. “With that in mind, we thought we might deconstruct and rebuild some of my other songs, to see what happens. It could’ve been a disaster.”
Instead, it became an exercise in interpretation. Some songs on “Echo Dancing” are more dramatically reimagined than others. All of them have been renewed by a different energy.
Escovedo quotes Leonard Cohen’s comment that aging “is the only game in town.”
“I agree completely,” he says. “The reality is what it is.”
But he doesn’t feel like surrendering to that game.
He finds himself reflective about the past but not immobilized by it. Escovedo has been writing down his story, too, without music. He calls it “a mythical memoir. You can shape your own myth.”
He’s been working on a oneman storytelling show with the Yellow Rabbit Theater company in Calgary. He says the theater company asked what he wanted from the experience.
“I told them I want the truth. I want some humor. I want to show some vulnerability. I want to leave a document for my children. I have seven children. Grandkids. Because I’ve had this migratory, nomadic kind of life, I’ve had relationships with their mothers, some of them not so great. They get some of the story. So I’m trying to give them my version of the story.”