Lauded Texas Songwriter and Musician Escovedo plays Main Stage Saturday (Sept. 6) at 8 p.m.
By TOM GERROW
BG Independent News
The first time I heard Alejandro Escovedo was in Austin, Texas, in the early ‘80s while I was a student at the university. He was playing with a band called The True Believers at the time, which he formed with his brother, Javier, and that included local guitar hero Jon Dee Graham, who had previously played in the seminal Austin punk band, The Skunks.
When I saw them, their music was like nothing I had heard before, combining hard rock riffs, punk rock energy and attitude, and adding a bit of country twang.
Mixing punk with country? I didn’t know you could do that. Did they just invent alt-country?
Fast forward nearly 40 years, and Escovedo – who has released nearly a score of records over the years – is still making innovative music with his latest album, Echo Dancing, which came out in 2024. He returns to the Black Swamp Arts Festival and takes the main stage at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 6, for what promises to be a career-spanning performance featuring songs from the album, but also other long-time favorites.
“A lot of the set is taken from the Echo Dancing album, and then we add some older songs like San Antonio Rain,” Escovedo said. “We do Castanets, of course, and Always a Friend, sometimes Chelsea Hotel, Velvet Guitar, Dear Head on the Wall. So we kind of just scatter it throughout all the different albums that I’ve had and try to come up with a good set.”
“I’ve been touring with Scott Danbom from Centro-Matic on keyboards and vocals, and he also plays fiddle,” Escovedo said. “And then Mark Henne, who played with Black Joe Lewis for years, is on drums.”
“But we augment that at times when we can with James Mastro on guitar,” he said of his long-time friend, who will be playing with them at the festival. “I’ve known James for many years through the early New York City days when I lived there, and I was playing with Judy Nylon and at the time he was in The Bongos. You know, we played all those places – CBGB and Max’s and Maxwell’s and Hurrah, all those great clubs. So I’ve known him for a while, and I love his guitar playing, and I love his songwriting. He’s got a great solo album out. That will be the band.”
Echo Dancing revisits Escovedo’s musical catalog, reimagining songs from throughout his long solo career and even going back to the early days of The True Believers. Reinterpreting his old songs for the record wasn’t too much of a stretch. Escovedo says that all his songs have a way of evolving.
“The thing about making records is you write a song, and I love to write really close to recording time,” Escovedo said. “I take it right to where sometimes we’re in the studio, still working out arrangements and lyrics and things like that. So by the time the album is actually released, you’ve been playing these songs for sometimes six months. You have them in a shape that can really translate to the live performance, as opposed to the studio performance. So they’re quite different by that time.”
“One thing that Towns Van Zandt told me a long time ago is that sometimes it takes up to a year to learn how to sing your own songs,” Escovedo said. “I find that to be true sometimes because you’re always playing around with the phrasing, the tempos, the arrangements.”
Now 74 years old, touring is a bit different than in his younger days, but he says some things don’t change. “It’s a little different, but basically it’s the same thing, you know – make sure your guitar is in tune, get up and kick a**,” he said. “I love playing live, so that will never change.”
