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About Alejandro Escovedo:
There are songwriters who sing their songs, and then there are songs who sing their writers. Alejandro Escovedo is one with his muse and his music. Over a lifetime spent traversing the bridge between words and melody, he has ranged over an emotional depth that embraces all forms of genre and presentation, a resolute voice that weathers the emotional terrain of our lives, its celebrations and despairs, landmines and blindsides and upheavals and beckoning distractions, in search for ultimate release and the healing truth of honesty. Sometimes it takes the form of barely contained rage, the rock of punk amid kneeled feedback; sometimes it caresses and soothes, a whispery harmony riding the air of a nightclub room, removed from amplification, within the audience.
His rise has been gradual, a steady incline rather than a quick ascendance, but it has deepened and burnished his music, made it closer to the bone, where it begins to break, deepening his insight and his ability to find that insight in performance. His tireless touring, and dogged determination to place one album after another, has taken him through many musical scenes, remaining the same persona within each, of an artist who doesn't settle for the easy way out.
"You just do your good work, and people care," Alejandro says over the phone beginning a promotional tour for his latest work, Street Songs of Love, his tenth solo album. "I always believed, when I was a kid, that if you just worked hard, you would find fulfillment. I think I got a lot of that from my father, and my brothers. A working musician is all I ever wanted to be. Hard work, to stay true to what you want to do, and then eventually someone would notice for that very reason."
As the nineties began, Alejandro began to chart his artistic growth through a series of solo albums that expanded his renown and heart-on-sleeve sensibility. It was while showcasing his ambitious theatrical song cycle exploring the Mexican-American experience, By The Hand of the Father, in 2003 that Alejandro was felled by a dangerous bout with Hepatitis C, which took him off the road and into recovery. During that time, a double-CD tribute album, Por Vida, rallied his friends and family around him. Participants included Escovedos like Pete, Javier and Sheila E., and appreciators like John Cale, Los Lonely Boys, Calexico, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Howe Gelb, Ian Hunter and the Jayhawks, all covering songs from Alejandro's considerable catalogue. Thankfully, by 2004, Alejandro was on the way to making a full recovery and return to performing and recording.
Alejandro had an intuition about how he wanted to frame Street Songs Of Love. Though he often shows up at gigs with a string section in tow, or has expanded his "orchestra" to a dozen pieces or more, "I knew I just wanted the two guitars, bass and drums format, that the strings would have to wait a while. In order to create and build some texture, I brought in voices," but other than that, the album is stark and streamlined.
"I began not wanting to talk about myself, just to write songs, cool pop rock songs." To that end, he devised an intriguing way in which to compose and arrange the album, which was to book a two month Tuesday night residency in Austin's Continental Club, where Alejandro Escovedo and the Sensitive Boys could build the album in front of a live crowd. "We would bring in three new songs every Tuesday night," he says of his modus operandi, "and we would play them acoustically first for the audience, and then I'd bring in the rhythm section, and slowly but surely we would add each piece, like the singers. I had wanted to bring in horns, but it never made it to that point. But still, the audience could watch the songs develop. It was interesting to see it grow and blossom. It started with the room half full, but it built until the last one sold out. Every week, it became more intense with the album taking shape in front of us organically, a work in progress...By then we weren’t thinking about the songs. They were a part of us already."
Thus became Street Songs of Love. |
