“So I kinda let John produce the record. Before I left [to make the album], Joe Nick [Patoski, former True Believers manager, No Depression contributing editor, and Escovedo's Wimberley neighbor] said, ‘Ask him if there’s anything he’s never done that he’s always wanted to do in the studio. And then ask yourself if there’s anything you’ve always wanted to do. Be open to all the possibilities.”
The results push all sorts of envelopes. (Patoski later told me that a musician friend, on first hearing it, said it sounded like Pink Floyd.) Where so many previous Escovedo recordings approximate the arrangements of a live performance, here there are strings that sound like keyboards, percussion that sounds programmed, guitars that erupt out of nowhere.
There’s a jittery remake of “Sacramento & Polk” that takes it to an edgier place than the original on 1999′s Bourbonitis Blues. There are two different mixes of “Take Your Place”: an alternate mix that places it within the familiar Stones/Faces tradition, and a Cale deconstruction that sounds to this listener like Prince (it drew mixed response from the band).
“Both Cale and I liked the Stonesy version OK,” Escovedo says, “but I said, ‘You know, I’ve done this [kind of] song several times before, and the Stones don’t really need my advertising anymore. They’re doing OK without my waving their flag. So he spent a whole day working on it — it’s just groove and vocals, and that’s all there is. It repulses some of the band members — one of them said it sounds like Haircut 100 — but I just love that it’s different.”
Whether because of Cale or the circumstances preceding the sessions, Escovedo has never sung with more warmth and open-hearted vulnerability. Particularly on “I Died A Little Today”, “The Ladder” (a cantina-flavored love song for Christoff), and “Evita’s Lullaby” (written for his mother), he achieves a tenderness on the ballads that extends the interpretive range of his vocals.
“I wrote that for my mom after my father passed away,” says Escovedo, who’d felt as if he was punched in the gut by death all over again when his dad passed two years ago, in the midst of his son’s convalescence. “He knew he was going to die, and he was very much at peace with it. But we were all just crushed. Here I read Buddhist philosophy, scripture, and I think I have this sense that everything moves on, there’s a cycle, and we have many lives that we pass through, and everything’s connected and all that.
“But when it happened, all that went out the window. I was lost, man. I really was. I went to the memorial in San Diego thinking that I was going to say something about my dad. I couldn’t open my mouth. I look at pictures of me there, and I look like I’m older than my mother.
“So I wanted to write this song that would be me talking to my father about my mom, how much I remember them dancing, and how much I know she loved him. And how I hope they’re together soon in a peaceful way.”
For all of the pain reflected in the material Escovedo wrote for The Boxing Mirror, there’s a profound peacefulness there as well. The closer he came to death, the richer and deeper his appreciation for life became. Whether or not it’s his best album, as he believes, it’s certainly his bravest, in the chances it takes both musically and lyrically. And it’s plainly the one that means the most to him.
“This album to me sounds very confident. It sounds strong. One of Cale’s main objectives is that it should sound like someone who isn’t sick anymore,” Escovedo says.
“You know, I shouldn’t say this, but I was scared of dying. I’m not frightened of death anymore, because I confronted it. I faced it, and I know what death feels like. And it’s not a bad thing. Not a negative thing. It’s just part of life.”
When ND senior editor Don McLeese lived in Austin, he and Alejandro Escovedo would meet for Mexican breakfasts and spend more time talking about baseball, books and daughters than music.
