‘Echo Dancing’ excavates songwriter’s own work
By Dave Gil de Rubio
As a recording artist, if a person hangs around long enough, they get to look back at their body of work. And if they’re really lucky they not only get to revisit their canon, they even get a shot at reinterpreting and reimagining these earlier fruits of their labor. That’s what Alejandro Escovedo has done with his latest album, Echo Dancing. It finds him using the past to shape the future.
The idea was spawned in part when the 74-year-old Americana icon took a listen to Por Vida: A Tribute to Alejandro Escovedo, a 32-cut compilation that found a wide array of artists covering the songs of the album’s namesake as a means of helping him cover his medical bills while he recovered from Hepatitis C.
Among the friends and famous fans who participated were Lucinda Williams, Rosie Flores, Son Volt, the Cowboy Junkies, the Jayhawks and Ian Hunter. One cover in particular caught Escovedo’s ear.
“I came across a song done by Calexico, called ‘Wave,’” Escovedo said. “I just loved it. I started listening to that record a little more and I thought it would be cool to join the excavation of songs, see what’s down there and see what we could salvage and put a new paint job on. Maybe just fix it up and see what happens.
“I had a lot of fun doing it,” he continued. “It was really interesting how it came about. It just happened by chance, but once it started to roll it was really, really easy and a lot of fun to do.”
The next step found the Austin resident decamping to the Italian countryside, where he joined forces with musicians Don Antonio and Nicola Peruch. Escovedo had worked with Antonio on 2018’s The Crossing, a concept album about two young refugees (one Italian, one Mexican) who bond over their mutual love of punk rock while they struggle with racism and discrimination as they try to immigrate to America.
Escovedo gladly leaned into this musical partnership as he spent November 2022 in Europe working on Echo Dancing at the duo’s recording studio. It was located at a 15th-century stone mill located in the countryside, overlooking olive orchards and vineyards.
“Don Antonio and Nicola Peruch were the perfect partners in this endeavor because they were just very open to whatever I was going to do, no matter what,” Escovedo said. “The idea was that we were going to create an album that was totally improvisational—just start playing, start singing and see what happens. Then we changed gears and got into this mode and it worked out OK. They were perfect for the job.”
In hopping on his music time machine, Escovedo not only went through his solo music canon, but included selections from other groups/projects he was involved with, specifically Buick Mackane (“John Conquest”) and the True Believers (“Outside Your Door”). But rather than do a by-the-numbers rendition, Escovedo and his cohorts reimagined the original material using sonics and electronics in a manner that was a tip of the cap to influences like Suicide.
Echo Dancing also represents a point in time where Escovedo is taking stock of his life and mortality. Part of it involves a recent move back to Austin after spending four years living in the Belmont Hotel in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.
“I spent most of my life in hotels and wanted to get back to the country,” he said.
Alejandro Escovedo will appear locally with his band at HopMonk Sebastopol on Wednesday, Oct. 15. Tickets $45 plus fees at hopmonk.com/sebastopol.
