Playlist: Making ‘album under your own name’ keeps Escovedo going

resignation — the result of a guy singing about 40 knock-about years as a professional musician.

Escovedo will play his first solo show in Houston next week, which is interesting because he was born in San Antonio and because his brother Alejandro has made a comfortable living in Texas with his expansive take on rock, pop and roots music.

The younger Escovedo had a different route.

Like Alejandro, Escovedo was born in Texas, but he was about 6 months old when his family relocated to Southern California. There he grew up immersed in the music that interested his older siblings. Two of his brothers played percussion with Carlos Santana. Alejandro got his start in a San Francisco Bay Area punk band. But Escovedo also found himself listening to his sisters’ albums.

“Everybody talks about my brothers,” he says. “My sisters had just as much influence on the music that would matter to me.”

They helped put him under the spell of the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and David Bowie.

As a teen, Escovedo co-founded a band, the Zeros, which was a much loved West Coast punk band, making bracing music akin to what the Ramones were doing on the East Coast, though the two bands were unaware of one another.

Much as the Ramones were scrappy kids from Queens, the Zeros were Mexican-American kids raised on rock ’n’ roll trying to find their own way to update it. Escovedo recalls the band staying at the Tropicana hotel in Los Angeles, where Tom Waits lived. They didn’t become friends, but, he says, Waits admired them as “the Mexican kids with the beautiful pointy shoes.”

Zeros songs were efficient punk-rock tunes, but they had melodic hearts. Escovedo and his band were not minimalists nor deconstructionists. They sought commonality among various strands of popular music: pop, rock, girl groups, country, soul.

After leaving the Zeros, Escovedo eventually returned to Texas, though he had few ties to the state.

“What I knew about Texas came from what I heard from family members and from watching ‘Giant,’ ” he says.

He started a band with Alejandro and Jon Dee Graham, the True Believers. Though raised a Californian, Escovedo will always have a tight Texas connection because of the True Believers, who burned a reputation for themselves through a three-guitar, three-singer, three-songwriter approach that was part punk, part roots rock and yet neither. The band made two records, one of which got shelved, and proceeded to become a legend more than a band. At that point, Alejandro started a successful solo career (see sidebar), and Javier worked in other bands.

“Things can get complicated when more than one person is steering the ship,” he says. But outside the Believers, Escovedo didn’t throw himself into executing his own music. Over the past few years, he’d do reunion gigs with old bands including the Zeros and the True Believers, but a proper Escovedo album didn’t materialize.

“There wasn’t anybody screaming for a solo album, but I was forced into it in a way,” he says. “Everybody gets older. But they’re not as gungho about doing stuff. The only way to keep you going sometimes is to do an album under your own name. So I did that.”

Escovedo finally made “City Lights,” a buzzing pop record. “My plan was to leave it at that,” he says. “Then I decided to do one more.”

He laughs. “I guess it’s like having one more drink. You know you should stop, but I didn’t. So now, I’m shooting for five. Five albums. That sounds like enough, right?”