Echo Dancing

My personal best of the year list is not yet fully fleshed out, so I am not ready to share one just yet. I don’t have a favourite album of the year yet … am oscillating between Cassandra Jenkins, Vera Sola, Nia Archives and a few others from day to day, but haven’t found „it“ yet. One thing seems quite sure: It’s not going to be one of the old guys. Unless I end up choosing Charles Lloyd or Bill Frisell or even Franck Vigroux, which might easily happen for very personal reasons. I just don’t know yet.

However, I would like to share my „(Re)Discovered“ section today. As I mentioned a while ago, I was quite intrigued by Alejandro Escovedo’s 2024 album, which is a collection of completely revised re-recordings of songs from across his extensive back-catalogue, going back as far as the distant 1980s. I am not familiar with his work as a member of various rock groups before he started making solo albums in 1992, so that will be one of my next undertakings. For now, I managed to get hold of copies of all his solo albums (a few special projects not included), from Gravity (1992) to The Crossing (2018). And I like all of them quite a lot. I noticed that the music reviews website Allmusic.com rated all those albums with at least 4 or 4.5 stars (and readers/listeners agree, as their ratings prove), so it’s difficult to choose where to start if you’re new to Alejandro Escovedo’s music. So arguably the best place to start might be Marc Maron’s knowledgeable and passionate hour-long podcast episode with Alejandro, traveling through the man’s life and work at some rousing speed.

Judging from a quick, superficial look at his albums, one might get the wrong impression that all of that was basically about just the same type of music, as it’s mainly some sort of Americana / roots rock with a few folksy or bluesy elements here and there, and even occasional Latin tinges. Nevertheless, his songs are always quite personal and are at times infused by his background as a native Texan with Mexican roots, as well as by his private experience as a single parent, when his first wife died early in the 1990s, not long after they had become parents. Ten years later he almost died from a serious illness, and with insufficient American healthcare he was not able to pay for the treatment, so friends and admirers of his work recorded a double album of their own Escovedo covers to raise money for him. Por Vida: A Tribute To The Songs Of Alejandro Escovedo was released in 2004, containing 32 songs performed by great musicians including Lucinda Williams, John Cale, Vic Chesnutt, Steve Earle, Calexico, Cowboy Junkies, Howe Gelb, Ian Hunter, Ian McLagan (of Small Faces and Faces), M. Ward and even a reunited Son Volt, among many others. So that might also be a nice place to start entering the Escovedo discography … though I guess the originals are always better.

The first two – and very personal – albums, Gravity (1992) and Thirteen Years (1994), were re-released, with a second disc of nice live recordings, when the original label went out of business; as was the third album, With These Hands (1996), which had been a step up to a more renowned record label, Rykodisc, though that work relationship didn’t end up being as financially successful as expected, leaving him without a label for a few years. While the first three are really intriguing, I guess it’s fair to say that A Man Under the Influence (2001), was another step up, as Mark Deming summarizes: „if love and loss still remain Escovedo’s favorite themes, like Hank Williams or Leonard Cohen he seems to have something new and telling to say about them each time out; each of this album’s 11 songs is worth hearing, and the cumulative effect is nothing less than stunning. No one who’s heard Escovedo’s work doubts his status as one of the finest singer/songwriters of his day, and he’s never been heard to better advantage on disc than on A Man Under the Influence.“

Continuing to maintain a high level of songwriting, the next album, his first after his near-death illness, was a truly great, versatile and complex collaboration with producer John Cale, The Boxing Mirror (2006), featuring some of Cale’s viola playing [I strongly recommend checking out Thom Yurek’s enthusiastic review („The Boxing Mirror reels and struts, waltzes, and falls down, but always gets back up again. Rock & roll music has been extended in the various articulations of these songs. In the 21st century, this is what singer/songwriter albums are supposed to sound like. The Boxing Mirror is brilliant, and it is his masterpiece.“)], followed by three albums with producer Tony Visconti, Real Animal, Street Songs of Love, and Big Station (2008-2012), all of which are somewhat more straightforward rock music, thought with a lot of diverse stylistic elements, considerate details and great guitar playing. Songs like Sally was a Cop, Too Many Tears, San Antonio Rain and Chelsea Hotel ’78 are even better live in concert and were among the many highlights of the concert I attended in a small bar in rural Texas, halfway between San Antonio and Austin, this past October.

In 2016 Escovedo released his first solo album on good old vinyl and several earlier albums were released on vinyl for the first time: Co-produced by former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, Burn Something Beautiful gives more room for captivating guitar textures and sounds. Apparently the songs reflect on a number of personal and health issues and a move away from Austin to somewhere either around Houston or Dallas (depending on which information is correct here), together with his second wife, Nancy Rankin.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, to Mexican parents as one of 13 siblings, and having spent his teenage years in California, where, as he says, he experienced more racism than he had in Texas, before he left the sunny westcoast for a few years in New York City when he started out becoming a punk musician and then lived in Chelsea Hotel during the late seventies, when Sid and Nancy lived and died there, Escovedo has a lot to say about the United States. And he tells a lot of it in his 2018 album, The Crossing, a semi-autobiographical song cycle about two young immigrant boys, one Mexican, one Italian. The music on this album is again quite different from what Escovedo had done before, as it was developed and recorded in Italy in collaboration with Italian Antonio Gramentiere and his band Don Antonio. As often, interesting guests can be discovered on these 17 songs, such as Wayne Kramer(MC5), James Williamson (The Stooges) and Peter Perrett. Two or three years later, Escovedo and Don Antonio recorded a Spanish version of the whole album, La Cruzada.

For now, I am looking forward very much to the release of the live album Alejandro Escovedo recorded in Austin over three nights in October, with Charlie Sexton and Britt Daniel (singer of the Austin band Spoon) guesting during encores of covers of Neil Young, Velvet Underground, Mickey Newbury and Bowie songs, roughly two weeks after the concert I attended. The newly recorded 14 songs on Echo Dancing provide quite different takes on the originals from across Alejandro’s body of work, but most of the other songs that I heard live in concert also differed in interesting ways from the original studio versions. I remember Sally was a Cop and Dear Head on the Wall and a number of great guitar solos very vividly and have become quite a fan of this man’s work during my trip across the American Midwest this fall.