The new album, his first in six years, is a career-spanning collection that sees Escovedo reinventing and re-recording his previous work and revisiting rarities from his '80s Austin groups Buick MacKane and The True Believers.
Speaking by phone from Driftwood, Texas, about 40 miles from Austin, Escovedo says, “Everything's good, man. The dogs are happy. I'm happy. No problems over here. The weather's nice too, man. It’s supposed to be 71 degrees, although I don't think it'll get to that.”
Escovedo recently celebrated his 73rd birthday by playing a concert with more than a dozen artists including Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Shakey Graves and Robert Earl Keen.
“This is a show that I've been doing for several years now, where I do a big show every January around my birthday,” Escovedo says. “I asked everyone to choose a song that had inspired them, that was by a Texas artist, and then to play a song of their own that reflected that inspiration. …I really wanted to show this diversity in Texas and the community of Texas musicians.”
Austin may be the artist’s music home, but it wasn’t where Escovedo wanted to debut the new material live. He chose Austin for the album’s release show on March 29, but Fort Worth was picked for the love.
“I think I just wanted to go out and start playing this material in front of people in Texas,” Escovedo says. “I love playing in Fort Worth, so we decided to do it. Our keyboard player is from Denton. His name is Scott Danbom [of Centro-Matic].”
The new material is a lot harder than what we have seen from the musician in recent years. Much of Escovedo’s work in the last decade has gravitated toward the Americana genre, but he has always preferred to zag when everyone else is expecting him to zig.
“Why is it harder? It doesn't seem like something you would do,” he says. “Probably people wouldn't expect me to do this. And for those reasons alone, it was a great opportunity to do that. It's not like I'm walking into a type of music or sound that I'm not familiar with.”
Escovedo’s musical history traces back to San Francisco punk band The Nuns, who opened for the Sex Pistols at the infamous Winterland Ballroom show. The band moved to New York City and lived in the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen were their neighbors.
“It was always part of something I listened to and loved," Escovedo says, referring to the hard-driving, chaotic music that defined this time in his life. "I mean, the only reason I ever played music in the first place was because of Brian Eno and The Stooges. So [playing this way] makes sense to me. I'm very comfortable with it.”
What doesn’t make sense to Escovedo are genre labels.
“Labels are put on us,” he says. “I've never gone out and said, I'm an Americana artist. I've never gone out and said I was a punk rocker. I never went out and said I was a country-punk guy. Those labels were created to identify what we were doing, but a lot of times they were misplaced. When I was in Rank and File, we were trying to marry the sounds of bands like The Clash and Waylon Jennings. It's always been about trying to find these different elements to put together to create something new.”
It is with that same spirit of combining disparate musical elements that Escovedo approached his own material in the creation of Echo Dancing.
“I wanted to look back and pick out 18 songs that I loved in my catalog and recreate them in a way that was completely different than the first cast of that sculpture or song,” he says. “We found all sorts of cool ways to express it. ‘Sensitive Boys’ became a solo piano with voice, and I thought that was really effective. ‘Castañuelas’ became a — I've never done cumbia, but it's kind of cumbia. The Buick MacKane song, ‘John Conquest,’ became even harder than what we used to be as Buick MacKane, and Buick MacKane was a full-on rock ‘n’ roll onslaught, Detroit-influence kind of rock band. I just found that, looking back, I found a new way forward somehow.”
“I'm really, really, really in love with this record, and I don't always feel that way about my records, but I really am.” – Alejandro Escovedo
tweet this
This new way of looking forward may be difficult to truly define, but the process of creating an album in this way has given Escovedo a renewed excitement for creating music.
“I'm really, really, really in love with this record, and I don't always feel that way about my records, but I really am,” he says. “And it's exciting for me because it's going to be presenting it in a different way. And it's funny because we've been playing a few songs off this record in our set, and sometimes I sound almost apologetic to my audience, like, ‘We're doing this thing, but don't be afraid of what it’s going to be.’ But I don't feel that way. I'm very confident about the material and the songs, and I think they hold up. And I think, if you've got open sensibilities, it'll ring true with a person.”
Escovedo will continue digging into his past in his next project, which is already in the early stages of development.
“I know this is going to sound corny, so please bear with me, but it's going to be about friendship,” he says. “I decided that I would write not only about the friends I've had, but also questioning, how great of a friend have I been to people and what does friendship really mean at the end? And that includes romance and relationships with women and friends and all kinds of things. …I'm writing about Judy Nylon right now. The song is called ‘Judy Nylon,’ and I'm writing about her and how important she was to me, the things she taught me.”
As the project develops, Escovedo anticipates that it will become a deeply emotional album complete with a lot of soul searching, but he believes that it is this practice that has kept him going for five decades and will keep him going into the future.
“It's just being alive, man,” he says. “It's just keeping your ears open, your antennas up and finding love and beauty in a lot of different ways. I just never feel like I'm done learning. I never feel like I'm done expressing. It’s still as vital for me as it ever was. Even more so I think now, because I know what I'm doing, I know where I want to go with a lot more confidence than I had when I was first writing.”
