Bruce Springsteen shocked fans with a surprise appearance during Alejandro Escovedo’s Saturday night performance at Asbury Park, New Jersey’s Stone Pony. Springsteen joined Escovedo on “Always a Friend,” a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” and “Faith,” a track from Escovedo’s new studio album Street Songs of Love that features the Jersey legend. According to Nj.com, the performance also marks the first time the Rock Hall legend has performed the Stones’ Some Girls classic. (Watch “Beast of Burden” up top, and “Always a Friend” and “Faith” below.)

The appearance marks Springsteen’s first non-charity show performance at the Stone Pony since a cameo at a Mike Ness concert in May 2008. He previously teamed with Escovedo in Houston in 2008, when Escovedo joined the E Street Band for “Always a Friend.”

Escovedo recently stopped by the Rolling Stone studio for an intimate performance of three tracks off Street Songs of Love (watch it here). Plus, check out David Frickes review of Escovedo and friends’ concert at New York’s Bowery Electric last week: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/david-fricke/blogs/DavidFricke_May2010/184113/38726

By Daniel Kreps -  Rolling Stone, http://www.rollingstone.com/

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/185222

Springsteen had performed “Always a Friend” once before with Escovdeo, at an E Street Band show in Houston in 2008.

“Faith” is from Escovedo’s latest album, “Street Songs of Love” and  Springsteen joins Esovedo on the song on the album.

It is believed this is the first time Springsteen has ever played “Beast of Burden.”  Reports say Bruce had two awesome guitar solos on the song.
It was the first Springsteen guest appearance (outside of private benefits) at the Stone Pony since he joined Mike Ness on May 17, 2008.

By Stan Goldstein – nj.com

http://www.nj.com/springsteen/index.ssf/2010/07/bruce_springsteen_joins_alejan.html

But for this night, Escovedo — who has four decades of fellow travelers and parallel souls to draw from, going back to his days in the San Francisco punk band the Nuns — put together a revue of old mates and newer friends to sing and play the current material. The tiny stage made for an amusing crush — guitarist Ivan Julian, once of Richard Hell’s Voidoids, soloing on “This Bed Is Getting Crowded,” seemed dangerously close to spearing Escovedo in the head with the neck of his instrument — and some guest singers, like Garland Jeffreys in “Faith,” needed crib sheets. (He didn’t need them for long; he soon threw ‘em into the crowd.)

But Escovedo freely shared the lead vocals and spotlight, and everyone who joined him either knew the Bowery the way it was — Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators took the wheels for a cover of the Rivieras’ “California Sun”; singer Jesse Malin held up his half of Escovedo’s “The Anchor” with a punk-urchin hat and hardcore-matinee bravado — or sang like they wish they had. The Texan singer Amy Cook shared the mike with Escovedo for “Silver Cloud” like a brassier, dusty Deborah Harry.

Street Songs of Love — the fantastic follow-up to Escovedo’s 2008 autobiographical masterpiece, Real Animal, and a sureshot for my 10-best list this year — is a record of straight-up rock songs and after-midnight ballads about the complexities of love and passing time. On the album, Escovedo sings “Down in the Bowery” — a reflection of his own life there in the Seventies and what he took with him, in memories and ideals, when he moved on — with his idol, the British glam-Dylan Ian Hunter. At Bowery Electric, Escovedo’s producer, Tony Visconti (who was present at the birth of glam with David Bowie and T. Rex) played acoustic guitar; James Mastro, from Hunter’s band, sang and picked mandolin. The result was a little less celebrity, but equally warm effect — an intimate reminder that the past isn’t always baggage.

Other guests included Escovedo’s Chicago pal, singer-giuitarist Nicholas Tremulis, and singer Fiona McBain of the group Ollabelle, who draped some country Nico around Escovedo in “After the Meteor Showers.” After Jeffreys took his mike and the gig deep into the crowd for “Faith,” Escovedo called it a night, swearing the cast didn’t know any more songs, then couldn’t help himself, calling everyone down for covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” and Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes.” Then he, his band and a big chunk of the audience went to the upstairs bar to watch the Letterman appearance. Outside, the Bowery seemed a little less foreign, a little more like home.

By David Fricke - rollingstone.com

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/david-fricke/blogs/DavidFricke_May2010/184113/38726

On Monday night, the ex-punk, ex-alt-country singer tore through 90 minutes of rootsy garage rock and touching folk ballads at the Middle East in Cambridge. The half-empty club represented the same size audience the Texan has been playing to in Boston for 25 years.

“Isn’t T.T. the Bear’s around here?” he asked, remembering gigs he played at the club next door. “I think the first time I played in Boston was ’76 or ’77 at the Rathskeller with the Neighborhoods.”

A scatter of cheers went up when he name-dropped local heroes and the long-gone Kenmore Square club. But the applause for the dead past was faint compared to the hoots Escovedo got for his very alive set.

Called “old man’s” music by his 18-year-old son, Escovedo’s tunes felt fresh and timeless. From the choppy-but-poppy opening chords of “Always a Friend,” he sweated energy and showed big love for his trade. Through the punk sneers of “This Bed is Getting Crowded,” “Anchor’s” great big hook and the angry stomp “Tender Heart” – all from his excellent new album, “Street Songs of Love” – he kept up with any teenager’s pace.

The set finally relaxed with “Street Songs.” Displaying Escovedo’s love of New York City’s gutter glam scene, the tune is both sexy and covered in warts, like Lou Reed dressed up in a tailored suit and silk tie.

Escovedo knows that’s how it comes off. This is a guy who wears his influences on his cool, crisp black sleeve. He loves Reed and the Ramones, Mott the Hoople and Bruce Springsteen. And he works hard – even for crowds that aren’t growing – to do his idols (and peers) justice.

Two worthy breaks from the bar band numbers came on “Sister Lost Soul” and “Down in The Bowery.” The slowed-down, acoustic “Sister” was an on-the-verge-of-tears tribute to late guitarist Stephen Bruton, a Texas legend who produced several Escovedo albums. Written for his uppity son, “Bowery” was a ballad challenging his kid to be even more of an irreverent rebel rouser.

Then it was back to the rock. The Sensitive Boys – guitarist David Pulkingham, bassist Bobby Daniel and wicked hot drummer Hector Munoz – and their leader crushed “Chelsea Hotel ’78” with pulsing feedback and pounding skins. On “Castanets,” the club crowd shouted back the chorus – “I like it better when she walks away!” – at the smiling singer. And “All the Young Dudes” – the almost requisite Mott the Hoople cover – had a charged Escovedo begging his fans to sing louder and louder.

“C’mon, I’ve been wanting to do this for so long,” he said egging everybody on.

From the Rat in ’77 to the Middle East in 2010, Escovedo’s rock ’n’ roll heart keeps beating. Even if it’s an old man’s heart.

By Jed Gottlieb – The Boston Herald

http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/music/general/view.bg?articleid=1269177&srvc=rss

Not Al. To hear him exploding out the gate on Street Songs of Love with material that recalls classic raveups from the Stones, Mott the Hoople and the Clash is to bear witness to the eternal fountain of (mental) youth that rock ‘n’ roll has always represented. Small wonder that a couple of other bonafide survivors, Bruce Springsteen and Ian Hunter, neither of whom has ever indicated a desire to fade away quietly, turn up on a pair of tracks to contribute guest vocals. Here, the cat sounds positively possessed: the anthemic, Mott-like “Anchor,” which boasts a biting guitar solo (courtesy longtime axe foil David Pulkingham), randy-but-right female vocal harmonies and a string of memorable lyric metaphors (“If your love was a ship/ I’d pull your anchor and christen it” goes one particularly juicy one); punk romp “Silver Cloud,” which actually sounds like a Clash outtake; swaggering manifesto “Faith,” with its Keef-styled meaty riffs and, in lieu of a cameo by Mick, The Boss growling into the mic at just the right spots.

True to the album title, these are songs about affairs of the heart, the joys and aches alike. Escovedo, he’s had a few, and there are moments of sheer bliss (“First time I saw you I thought I must have dreamed you up,” he exults, in the raucous, pounding “Tender Heart”) alongside paranoia-fueled angst (“This bed is getting crowded/ Baby, something feels wrong,” from “This Bed Is Getting Crowded”). And there are also moments of such poetic beauty that you want to go grab the nearest stranger and jam your earbuds onto his head:

“She said her first love was her last

So she cries when she hears Johnny Cash

All she wants to do is fall apart with me

All I want is to fall apart with you…

We know that nothing ever lasts.”

( – “Fall Apart With You”)

It’s also a precisely-paced album that provides a subtle yet insistent dynamic flow. Five songs in, on the heels of a brace of rockers, comes the insistent yet gentle reverie of “Down In the Bowery” (the one featuring Ian Hunter); and then a couple of songs later comes a spooky slice of New Orleans-flavored swamp rock, “Tula,” one of the highlights of the set precisely because it’s unexpected and so different from the rest of the record. There’s also a lovely instrumental, “Fort Worth Blue,” to close the record, and in its nocturnal, subtly Spanish ambiance (just Escovedo and Pulkingham on guitars, plus distant percussion) it supplies the perfect coda; worth noting is that the arrangement was inspired by the late Stephen Bruton, who frequently worked with Escovedo, and the meditational vibe is profound.

Escovedo and his band the Sensitive Boys worked out the new material over a series of regular weekly gigs in Austin, building the songs from the ground up, acoustically, then gradually fleshing them out. But credit for much of the album’s thematic and sonic cohesion, no doubt, is due to producer Tony Visconti, behind the glass for a second time following the commercial and critical success of 2008′s Real Animal; he and Escovedo are clearly simpatico in the studio, in tune with one another both generationally and philosophically. Also returning for an encore is Chuck Prophet, who while not playing guitar as he did last time co-wrote fully half of the album, testimony both to the vitality an outside vision can bring to a project and to Escovedo’s keen instincts in sussing out a valuable collaborator. (Tellingly or not, the album’s heaviest tunes – “Anchor,” “Tender Heart,” “Faith,” “This Bed Is Getting Crowded” – bear the Escovedo-Prophet songwriting credit.)

Still, Street Songs of Love represents as pure a distillation of Alejandro Escovedo Mk. 2010 as one could imagine or hope for. That sweet taste you get in your mouth while you’re listening to this record? That’s the nectar of triumph, my friends.

By Fred Mills – blurt-online.  http://www.blurt-online.com/

http://www.blurt-online.com/reviews/view/2261/

By Raoul Hernandez – The Austin Chronicle http://www.austinchronicle.com/

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid%3A1055705

Being in the right place at the right time meant I was able to see Escovedo work his unique magic in a wide-array of formats — solo at the Cactus Cafe, unleashing the mighty 13-piece Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra at La Zona Rosa and rocking loud and sloppily on his 40th birthday with his fierce, ragged garage band, Buick McKane, at the appropriately named Hole in The Wall.

Twenty years later, Escovedo is nearly a legend, with a catalog of classic albums like “Gravity,” “A Man Under The Influence” and “With These Hands” that fearlessly blend Bela Bartok and Iggy Pop; Townes Van Zandt and The Velvet Underground.

Lyrically, Escovedo has laid himself bare over and over, discussing his many lives and losses; honoring his parents, his siblings and his seven children from various wives; and, with 2006′s “The Boxing Mirror,” chronicling his near fatal bout with Hepatitis C.

His brand new album, “Street Songs of Love” (which is dedicated to the recently deceased Bruton) is just what it’s title claims, a collection of pieces that look at the biggest subject of all from multiple perspectives.

The record drops Escovedo’s trademark string section in favor of another fierce quartet, this one not ragged but absolutely right.

The album is produced by Tony Visconti (who helmed Escovedo’s last release, “Real Animal,” as well as albums by David Bowie, T. Rex and U2). It features duets with Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter and Bruce Springsteen.

It’s a great record, but like his others, it doesn’t hold a candle to the man and his band onstage.

Escovedo and the Sensitive Boys (guitarist David Pulkingham, bassist Bobby Daniel and longtime drummer Hector Munoz) co-headline a concert with Kathleen Edwards at the Calvin Theater on Tuesday.

If you need any further urging to go, here’s half a dozen snapshots of Escovedo onstage over the years in the Capital Region and Western Mass.

1986: QE2, Albany. Before he went solo, Escovedo fronted the three guitar attack of the True Believers. Simply put the Troobs were the kind of band that made people want to move to Austin. Former QE2 owner Dave Shortsleeve maintains that their only local gig was the single greatest night of music in Albany. Ever.

1995: Valentine’s, Albany. Frustrated with a gaggle of noisy bar patrons yakking through David Perales’ violin solo, Escovedo pulled his band off stage and into the poolroom for an impromptu acoustic set (highlighted by a take of Peter Case’s “Two Angels”) that was simply mesmerizing in its intensity and focus.

1996: Union College, Schenectady. The air looked heavy with rain that never came. No one minded that Escovedo’s outdoor show at the Music Haven was moved inside to the Memorial Chapel at Union College. The leader responded by making his music feel like a sermon, sensing the history of a room that previously held his own heroes like Patti Smith, John Cale and Bruce Springsteen.

2000: Valentine’s, Albany. Now with a sparse trio consisting of pedal steel and keyboards in addition to his own guitar, Escovedo coughed up expected bits like Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and Hunter’s “I Wish I was Your Mother,” but took everyone by surprise with a tender reading of Van Zandt’s “Tower Song,” as could be sung only by one who knew him personally.

2005: Revolution Hall, Troy. Escovedo has never made a secret of his abiding love for Mott the Hoople, or Bowie for that matter. With True Believer Jon Dee Graham back by his side on guitar, playing the ageless Mick Ralphs’ lick from “All the Young Dudes,” Escovedo channeled all the beauty and gutter glory of glam. He’d lived the drugs and decadence (he was Sid Vicious’ neighbor at the Chelsea) and come out triumphant on the other side. “I’m a dude now,” indeed.

2007: The Iron Horse, Northampton, Mass. One can only imagine what Escovedo thought while watching Warren Zevon die a very public death. His own sickness still echoing in his bones, Escovedo and Pulkingham stood in the middle of the crowd, without microphones and offered Zevon’s “She’s Too Good For Me.” Escovedo sang through his tears and the audience listened through theirs.

By Michael Eck – A freelance writer from Albany and a frequent contributor to the  Albany Times Union – http://www.timesunion.com/

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=950588&category=ARTS

GET IT ON! The new disc joins Escovedo’s noirish and glitter sides — a rock-and-roll album that can match his beloved T. Rex singles for pure exhilaration.

As a songwriter, Alejandro Escovedo is steeped in deep, brooding, film-noir Americana. But he’s also a devout fan of cheap-thrill glitter rock, especially the fast and flashy singles that T. Rex and Mott the Hoople made in the ’70s. If you can reconcile that musical contradiction, you’ve got the key to his career.

For the better part of 30 years, Escovedo kept his poetic and glitter-rock sides separate, even forming a separate band, Buick Mackane, for the latter. But that’s changed in the past half-decade, which has given the Austin-based songwriter a whole lot to write about: a near-fatal bout with hepatitis C (which inspired 2006′s cathartic The Boxing Mirror) followed by a rediscovery of his rock-and-roll past (2008′s Real Animal, which included songs about his early bands Rank & File and the Nuns). Now he’s found romance, and the new Street Songs of Love (Fantasy) is just what the occasion calls for: a rock-and-roll album that can match his beloved T. Rex singles for pure exhilaration.

But instead of accepting happy endings, Escovedo celebrates the messiness of love and a new lease on life that comes without guarantees. “Sometimes you gotta lose it just to find it just to lose it again,” he notes during “Faith,” putting some real-life ambiguity into an otherwise rousing anthem (complete with guest shout-along from Bruce Springsteen). On the disc’s standout ballad, he asks only to “Fall Apart with You,” romance and danger going hand in hand. And on “This Bed Is Getting Crowded,” he asks, “Are you here with me, or are we both here with him?” — a line that New York Times reviewer Jon Pareles found puzzling, but a common enough question when you and your partner both have the ghosts of past lovers hanging around.

Seventies echoes pop up like guardian angels throughout. A female chorus beckons on “Meteor Shower” (cue Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle”); Mott’s Ian Hunter turns up to sing a verse on “Down in the Bowery,” and “Fall Apart with You” has the backstreet NYC feel of Mink DeVille. You’d think that producer Tony Visconti — who helmed T. Rex’s glory days and Bowie’s Berlin trilogy — would seal the throwback deal, but he does just the opposite. The sound is live and sweaty, true to the album’s origins, when Escovedo broke the songs in during a weekly residency at Austin’s Continental Club.

“The label was telling me, ‘We want you to make a rock record,’ ” he recalls during a phone call from Austin. “And I said, okay — give me an example of what that is. And they came up with all these weird things — the Replacements, okay, but there’s a lot of beautiful ballads there. Exile on Main Street — same thing, tons of ballads. So I decided it’s more about the attitude and how you play things rather than the tempo.”

Explaining his attraction to the glitter era, he notes that “it’s really where I got a lot of my philosophical outlook on life. You had people like Bowie and Ian Hunter and Marc Bolan, who were trying to say something about the people around them and the world they were part of.”

In terms of writing, the after-effects of his illness — specifically, his no longer being able to drink — also prompted a smoother flow of songs. “It affects me when I socialize, that I can’t partake in the same things as the people around me. But I find that I can communicate more directly with my musicians, and give a more honest representation of the music. In my head, I’m not sick anymore, so that carries through to the rest of life.”

By Brett Milano – The Boston Phoenix.  Published July 13, 2020 - http://thephoenix.com/Boston/

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/music/105199-glam-makeover/?page=1#TOPCONTENT

Just what the hell is it going to take? That’s the longtime pressing question nearly two decades into the solo career of Alejandro Escovedo, at least for those of us who have been really listening and wowed time and again for most if not all of the last two decades. Will his new album, Street Songs of Love, released last week on Fantasy/Concord, be the one to finally at least lift him to a level of popularity that approaches what his musical merits?

Look up “critical darling” in the Dictionary of Rock and you’ll see Escovedo’s picture. His career has come to all but define the term for the modern age, especially its conundrum of the disparity between the deserved high praise for truly exceptional creative achievement and his rather low general public profile.

This writer is hardly the first one to ponder the issue. Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke already asked it a number of years ago: “What does it take to make this man a star?”

“You know… I have no idea what it would take,” Escovedo says. “Let’s face it, there aren’t many 59-year-old pop stars.”

On this spring morning in Austin, Escovedo is nonetheless garbed like a rock’n'roll dandy when we meet at 11 AM on the trendy South Congress Avenue strip: tight pants that look as if they were painted onto his lanky frame, a stylish vest buttoned tight, porkpie hat topping it all off. The look fits, as he has lived the rock life as fully as anyone since his musical career began with The Nuns in the mid 1970s. And even before then as a teenaged fan who bought into the dream as a faithful front-row follower of bands like The Faces and Mott The Hoople.

To review some major points on the Escovedo timeline, after The Nuns and time spent as the guitarist in country punk pioneers Rank and File, in the mid 1980s he started the aptly named True Believers, his Austin group that aimed to become an American über-rock band with a frontline of three singer/writers/guitarists: Alejandro, his brother Javier and Jon Dee Graham. They started out hopefully with a Rounder Records indie deal that got bumped up to a major label alliance with EMI. Then on the verge of the release of a second album that captured the band’s sprawling live power not heard on their first, EMI dropped them. The band eventually sputtered to an end.

Following time writing new songs during which Escovedo also humbly worked at Austin’s Waterloo Records, he debuted on his own in 1992 with Gravity – a stunning work of musical and lyrical literacy that marked him as his own quantity with a stylistic breadth and power of vision that sparked an ongoing trail of stellar reviews from the very first one (which this writer happened to pen) that continues apace today. If superlatives could be deposited in the bank, he’d at least be a wealthy man.

Then there was his near-fatal health crisis from the effects of Hepatitis C in 2002. It sparked an outpouring of fan contributions and benefits by his musical peers and admirers to help the uninsured Escovedo cover his medical bills and support his family, as did the two-CD tribute album Por Vida featuring artists like Lucinda Williams, Ian Hunter, Jayhawks, John Cale, Son Volt, Los Lonely Boys, Steve Earle and Calexico. It all raised consciousness of Escovedo’s merits far enough to help him win a major label deal with EMI’s Back Porch imprint.

Cale produced The Boxing Mirror in 2006. Then in 2008, the high-powered Bruce Springsteen management team of Jon Landau and Barbara Carr stepped in to handle Escovedo as he readied Real Animal for release. The collection of autobiographical songs was the fruit of a new songwriting collaboration with Chuck Prophet, and produced by Tony Visconti, whose work with David Bowie and T. Rex were essential building blocks of Escovedo’s musical outlook. His new managers pulled out a few big Jersey guns to help tout it: The Boss performing its single “Always A Friend” live and consigliere Miami Steve Van Zandt (a/k/a Little Steven) giving Escovedo major play on his Sirius satellite radio Underground Garage channel.

This time out Springsteen trades verses with Escovedo on the next to last cut of Street Songs. Bruce is one of two guest artists on the disc that serve as flagpole signifiers of what’s up on this release. Like Springsteen, Escovedo is a dedicated lifelong rocker of the highest order and best intentions. As with The Boss before Born To Run, he’s a treasure that deserves a wider hearing and rewards for his talent and labors.

Will that ever come? Who knows? But as the two sing on the song’s chorus: “You gotta have faith.”

***

On Real Animal, Escovedo sang/shouted in the opening line of its most smoking track: “All I ever wanted is a four-piece band!” Street Songs of Love is the record that fulfills that wish with an all but nuclear wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

He has played with a panorama of band configurations over the past 18 years or so. Most often it was a core guitars/bass/drum unit augmented by cello, violin and keyboards. He’s toured with a string quartet and in Austin in the 1990s would gather his Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra with horns, strings and additional percussion to fully flesh out all the musical dimensions of his melodic gifts.

Street Songs distills his band down to a molten core: longtime and ever more brilliant drummer Hector Munoz, magical discovery and secret weapon David Pulkingham on guitar, and new bassist Bobby Daniel. On the album and live (augmented by back-up singers), the combo Escovedo calls The Sensitive Boys simply rocks like God’s own favorite band.

“It’s mean, it’s swaggering. It rocks hard. It’s down to the essentials again: guitars, bass and drums, which is the intention in making this record,” Escovedo explains.

Visconti had “been pushing me to make more rock records,” he adds. “Real Animal was a rock album because he pushed that direction. It fit where we were going stylistically.”

And Street Songs bristles with such immediacy because everything was tested live and perfected before the tape rolled. Escovedo and crew did a nearly two-month-long weekly residency at Austin’s Continental Club late last year to work in the material. “T Bone Burnett told me something a long time ago when I was in The True Believers and we were just starting. I had heard Peter Case’s Blue Guitar record and I was just, wow, this is fuckin’ great. So I called Peter and said, I wanna make a record like this. And then I called T Bone and he gave me the most wonderful bit of advice: We weren’t ready to make a record. Go out and play for a year and make all the mistakes that you’re going to make on the road. And then come back and we’ll make a record. Of course I didn’t listen to his advice,” Escovedo notes with a rueful yet chuckling tinge.

The residency allowed him to “present new songs and develop them with the audience, with the band, with the singers. And then we took off and got in the van almost the following day [after the final Continental gig] – I think we had two days – and went on a three week tour that led us from Austin directly to the door of the studio,” he explains. “We played in Louisville on a Saturday night, we had Sunday off, Monday we were recording. Everything just lined up perfectly.”

And once it was time to track, the music barreled out quickly and powerfully. “We were really tracking like crazy fast,” says Escovedo. “We were doing four songs a day, some of them, just because we had played them for so long and we were ready, and we were so excited about the material. And we were really excited about the four of us just there with Tony. It was real intimate, it was very supportive. I played guitar a lot on this one. I didn’t play on the last one. I think it worked out to our advantage.

“It was just a feeling I’ve always had about making records,” Escovedo says of the approach. “And we’re a live band, man. That’s what we’re about. I think we make great studio records. But we’re not a band that stays home. We’re on the road constantly.” That’s also how Escovedo has made his living as well as cultivated his small yet devoted – and steadily growing – following. And if any record matches the conversion experience of a sizzling Escovedo show, it’s Street Songs of Love.

“I think Real Animal is where we finally got the rock and the strings together. I’ve done that for a long time, and I think for the kind of material I was writing and what I was saying in the songs, the strings were essential. And now I just wanna just party in a way, I just want to have a good time. And nothing makes me feel better than to play electric guitar… loud.”

And he’s found the perfect guitar foil in David Pulkingham, a lifelong player whose primary past experience was acoustic, from classical to ethnic. He’d only played electric jazz six-string before Escovedo hired him for his string quartet tour. But in just a few years as a rock player, Pulkingham has become a fierce, sharp and wise lead guitar savant whose work is as much the star of the album as the singer and his songs.

“He’s just a natural guitar player,” Escovedo raves. “The thing about rock’n'roll is that it doesn’t require a lot of the intelligence, or even the technical ability. So I had to dumb him down. But the beauty of it is that he was a willing participant. So with all that ability, all that talent, all that technique, what came out is beyond what I imagined. He’s not only a secret weapon but an essential part of the whole thing for me, as far as even songwriting is concerned too. I value him greatly. We’re great friends too. He’s a rarity amongst guitar players. [That is, no ego trip.] And he’s a wonderful human being.”

Then there’s Munoz, Escovedo’s brother of the road for years whose deep grooves and pugilist punch are as musical as they are rhythmic. “He’s a monster on this record, he’s so good live.” The addition of Daniels on bass brings it all to nuclear fission. “He’s everything I’ve ever wanted to find in a bass player – the missing link,” Escovedo enthuses.

And with the rocking combo of his dreams, it all comes easy. “I kind of like draw the map, and send David out with the troops and away we go.”

***

As the album’s title announces, Street Songs… is about love in its myriad forms at the primal place where the rubber of emotion meets the road of life. “Originally I didn’t want to have any idea of what the album was going to be about,” Escovedo explains. “I wanted no context, no framework at all. All I wanted was to write songs that were anonymous, transparent, but rocking – just an album of songs that were great rock songs.

After all, Real Animal was suffused with his personal history. “I wanted to get away from that. But as in all things in life, you can never escape your catalog or your life. So it became about what I was going through at the time,” he notes.

But broach that subject and Escovedo grows hesitant. “I really don’t want to talk about it,” he insists with a quiet finality. “Not everything has to be divulged to everyone. I learned that the hard way. And I’m not proud of it. When people read things in the media it just cheapens it, and it’s a sensitive situation. The full story is very complicated.”

Suffice to say that his third marriage, this time to poet Kim Christoff, is over. In the little city that talks big time behind backs – one of the sad strains infecting the Austin scene that makes it less than the musical paradise it claims to be – forked tongues have long wagged with an acidic venom over the local hero’s love life. There was the suicide of his first wife Bobbie some 20 years ago to which Escovedo applied wisdom and healing on his second solo album, Thirteen Years. Relations with long-divorced next wife, visual artist and sometimes rocker Dana Smith, remain strained.

Sure, Escovedo would rightly prefer that such matters those of us in Austin can’t help but know remain personal business, as none of us have walked his in shoes or those of the women who have loved him. And as he readily if not too proudly admits, “The lifestyle is very hard on relationships. What I do for a living is not conducive to a long-term relationship of any kind. Even with my musicians it’s hard to keep them going.” Yet it all provides a context that makes the album even more bracing and downright affirmative for any of us who have known romance that’s gone terribly and sadly wrong.

And Street Songs… is anything but a work of heartache. Rather, it’s the big beat of a heart that doesn’t merely gotta have faith but burns with the passion of… well, a true believer. And Escovedo remains a devotee of love. “Absolutely,” he stresses. I’m very clear, focused, infused with a sense of love. I love my life. I love my children. I love what I’ve done in the past and will do in the future.”

“I’m in love with love, and it broke me in two,” he sings, on the album’s strutting opening track, “Anchor.” On the pummeling punkish cut that follows, “Silver Cloud,” he is “the hungry man” who “needs your love” and is “a fool for your love.” Later on, he declares, “All I want is to fall apart with you.” Instead of giving in to love’s struggles and travails, Escovedo remains assertive, heartening and hopeful, framed by the wisdom that comes with a life fully lived and the lessons as a result heeded.

And also aware of the complications and complexities we all bring to our loving relationships, which he captures with chilling results on “This Bed Is Getting Crowded.” He explains how it’s “kind of a lover’s ghost song about the history and the ghosts we bring to bed. If you think that they don’t exist you’re crazy.”

He does admit that Christoff left him while he was on a retreat by himself in Mexico. “I was there for a month last August. I wanted to get away. I worked real hard on Real Animal, over a lot of time, a lot of ground. I needed a break. No better way to cleanse yourself of… just the fuckin’ scars, you know, let the scars heal than jump into the Pacific Ocean. It’s gorgeous down there.”

Prophet visited for a few days to get started on their next series of collaborations. “When Chuck and I get together it’s pretty electric. You’ve got to wear some safety gear,” Escovedo notes.

And to then return to another failed relationship “was difficult, and it was very….” He pauses. “It was easy to write the songs. I gotta tell ya that. For different reasons. There was a sense of liberation in a way. And yet there was a lot of melancholy in a way. It was a real fertile ground for songwriting.”

“These songs on this record are about love and so many shades of love and so many different capacities of love,” he continues. “‘Down on the Bowery’ is about a father and son – it’s for my son Paris. The fact that Ian Hunter sings it with me gives it another even kind of generational thing. It sounds like he’s singing it to me and I’m singing it to my son.”

And Hunter is like a rock’n'roll father to Escovedo. “That’s what I was thinking. When I hear him sing I think of all the times I’ve listened to his songs and all I’ve learned in his songs – the wisdom and clarity. The point is that it was the voice of my past, and now I’m passing what I learned from those songs and what I learned from Ian back on to my son. Just telling him to be a freak if he wants to be a freak, to be whoever he wants to be. Encourage him to be outside the norm of society.”

Hunter’s presence is the other guest signifier on the disc. He and Springsteen both represent Escovedo’s artistic aims as well as the notion that a rocker can mature yet not abandon the crunch’n'punch of rock’n'roll that was the siren’s call when young and full of piss and vinegar.

Springsteen’s manager Landau declared in his prior days as a music critic the oft-quoted line: “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Street Songs… is the album that makes this longtime music journalist, just a few years younger than Escovedo, believe that genuine rock’n'roll still has a future at a time when the style is at its lowest ebb since it first went large in the year of my birth, 1954.

Hunter represents the template for Street Songs of Love. Both in music and content, Mott the Hoople – a band whose inspiration has echoed throughout Escovedo’s career – suffuses the disc in spirit and attitude.

It’s an inspiration that harkens to Escovedo’s True Believers days. “What we loved the most about Mott was the ability to rock, and then those ballads were so beautiful: ‘I Wish I Was Your Mother’ or “The Ballad of Mott’ or ‘Saturday Gigs,’ great songs like that. His lyrics were so good, and the stories he told you were in such a personal focused way. I love that combination of the literary and rock. Real rock, not like….” Escovedo pauses. “I think a lot of songwriters try to rock and they aren’t rockers.”

And Street Songs is the album that declares in no uncertain terms: Escovedo may be one of the finest songwriters with a guitar and pen over the last two decades (and named in the 1990s “Artist of the Decade” by No Depression a few years before the era was even over). And damn, he can rock.

**

The question we opened with still remains as Street Songs of Love evokes another pile of praise from reviewers. “In another, less fragmented pop era, this would be the album of thoughtful but radio-ready love songs to finally get Mr. Escovedo the big national audience he deserves,” notes New York Times critic Jon Pareles. “Could it happen now?”

“I think if any album will give us a larger audience, this one could,” says Escovedo. Even though his solo career epitomizes the title of a song he wrote about The True Believers, “More Miles Than Money,” stardom and success are moot points as far as he’s concerned. Even if some lucre would indeed be appreciated. “I wouldn’t mind. I have a lot of kids to support,” says the father of seven.

On the other hand, “Does it matter at this point?” he asks with full rhetorical oomph. “I’m making really great records I think. I love my band. I think what we’re doing is still viable, still fresh. We’ve still got more records in us. The ideas aren’t drying up. The possibilities are endless as long as I stay healthy, which I am. I see myself doing this for quite awhile. I’ve been doing it for quite awhile.”

And the well still boasts considerable reserves. “David and I could make a record together. I could make an instrumental record with the band. We could make the dance-y rock’n'roll record that I want to make,” he posits.

“It’s funny now how my life has taken such a change,” Escovedo ruminates on how, since Real Animal, he went from having a wife and young daughter and living in a Texas countryside refuge to, for now, hanging his hat in a hotel. “But a lot of it’s coming together. Things are passing my way that are bringing me closer. I feel like it is. It feels like everything’s falling into place.

“That’s always been such a difficult thing for me in life. I’ve always felt like a lot of us are really displaced sometimes, like everything is a misstep. Almost but not quite there. And wanting it to be so badly,” he confesses.

Throughout it all, one love has never let him down: rock’n'roll. “It’s everything,” he concludes. “If the music is going well I can get through anything.”

By Rob Patterson – blurt-online.com

http://blurt-online.com/features/view/663/

Mr. Escovedo, a longtime local hero in Austin, Tex., and his songwriting partner, Chuck Prophet, stick to the structural basics that have been the through-line of Mr. Escovedo’s music since he was a punk-rocker in the 1970s, even as he has dipped into hard-rock, alt-country, Tex-Mex, folk-rock and string quartets. “Street Songs of Love” has a little of them all, strings excepted, as it juxtaposes hard-riffing rockers — “Tender Heart” socks the tom-toms, cranks up the fuzztone and pounds a piano — and ballads like “Fall Apart With You,” which vows “All I want is to fall apart with you” over a girl-group bolero beat and women singing la-las.

The producer Tony Visconti, who honed David Bowie’s most durable albums, relies on the sinew of Mr. Escovedo and his band — two guitars, bass and drums — augmented with handclaps here, soul-style backup vocals there. Yet in this staunchly straightforward music, each song takes some memorable leap.

Lyrics that start out routine turn incisive and surreal. “Poured the poison, drank a toast to health,” Mr. Escovedo sings in “Undesired,” an anthem about love found and betrayed. In “This Bed Is Getting Crowded,” over minor chords hinting at Tom Petty, he wonders, “Am I here with you, are you here with me?/Or are we both here with him?”

“Street Songs” envisions a girl “Dancing on a beachland night/Movin’ for money on some bad advice” as a slinky bass line implies every shimmy. Mr. Escovedo is kindly in “Down in the Bowery,” a song to his teenage musician son that has Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople as a guest. And he’s elemental in the galloping garage-rock of “Silver Cloud,” shouting, “I’m a fool for your love — come on, fool me!” and then wrenching guitar chords off the beat to joust with his lead guitarist, David Pulkingham. In song after song Mr. Pulkingham’s subtle variations provide a lift; he makes “Tula,” which could have been a standard one-chord Texas boogie, a phantasmagoria of funk, blues and Celtic modality, abetted by Hector Muñoz’s percussion and someone hooting jungle birdcalls.

In another, less fragmented pop era, this would be the album of thoughtful but radio-ready love songs to finally get Mr. Escovedo the big national audience he deserves. Could it happen now?

By Jon Pareles – The New York Times.  Published July 4, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/arts/music/05choice.html?_r=1