Alejandro Escovedo: New Dancing Days

Escovedo has had a remarkable life, starting with the family he was born into. His father played in mariachi bands, two older brothers were in Santana, and a niece grew up to become Sheila E. By his late teens he was catching Hendrix, Buffalo Springfield, and Gram Parsons concerts; in his early 20s he followed the Stooges and the New York Dolls. In his first real band (the Nuns), he opened for the Sex Pistols at their last concert ever. Later he helped start the cow-punk movement with the Kinman brothers in Rank and File, and he brought raucous rock and roll to Austin with his band the True Believers. Over all that time he also had five children and three marriages, and he suffered through drug problems, the suicide of his estranged second wife, and the death of an older brother.

More than anything, those final two tragedies informed the direction of his career when he finally went solo, in 1992. There's no denying the strength of those first two albums: serious and melancholy, they present a seasoned craftsman carefully experimenting with mainstream styles in uncommercial ways. All the same, his lyrics were often baldly melodramatic ("My love is a scar that I wear for you/Like a crown of thorns"), his simple choruses were repetitive, and his vocals were more than a little dry and colorless. His life story inevitably made his work more moving, but in the cold, cruel world-at-large, Escovedo was just another ambitious singer/songwriter, and all his romantic drama registered only as pretension -- especially among uptight Northern bohemians raised on amateurism and irony.

His new With These Hands is an admirable advance. Released on Salem's Rykodisc, the album pushes the boundaries of his Austin style for something broader that doesn't leave behind his past. It isn't all the way there -- in many ways I still prefer Thirteen Years -- but after 20 years in the biz, it represents an impressive new start for this 45-year-old veteran. Whether plumbing the autobiographical family problems of an aging musician or the imaginary family problems of a 21-year-old misfit, he reins in his flights of metaphor with better-defined story lines. From the rousing pop chorus of "Put You Down" to the perfect folk-country melody of "Nickel and a Spoon" (sung in a duet with Willie Nelson), his songs are fuller, catchier -- even his hard rockers hang together better.

When his five-piece band played Mama Kin last week, however, both new material and old sounded wooden; not even a cover of the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" broke completely loose. I blame Escovedo's flat vocals, his lifelong shyness, and the band's over-precise arrangements (with cello and violin, no less). Escovedo, on the other hand, seemed to blame the crowd's unwillingness to dance (he made a couple of gentle quips about it). Fair enough, I guess -- New England's puritan legacy can certainly be a drag. But now that he's out of Texas, it'll be his job to deal with these problems. Maybe he could ask Sheila E. for a few dancing lessons.

-- Franklin Soults