Alejandro Escovedo
Some consider Real Animal a creative pinnacle for Alejandro Escovedo, “a career album,” though by my count it’s at least his fourth career album. The first was 1992’s Gravity, produced by Stephen Bruton, which belatedly launched Escovedo’s career as a fully-formed solo artist. There was 2001’s A Man Under The Influence, produced by Chris Stamey, which revived his career. There was 2006’s The Boxing Mirror, produced by John Cale, after it appeared that Escovedo might never again have a career.
And now we have Real Animal, which sounds both like a natural culmination and like nothing he has previously recorded. As he sings in the fever dream of “Chelsea”, “It makes no sense, and it makes perfect sense.” It is both the hardest-rocking and the most produced, or at least arranged, album of Escovedo’s career helmed by Tony Visconti, best-known for his work with David Bowie, though I’d suspect Escovedo was at least as much as attracted by the producer’s T. Rex legacy. You can sense Visconti’s touch in the “uh-oh” vocal riffing on the opening “Always A Friend”, the Spectoresque grandeur of “Sister Lost Soul”, the Bowie-channeled guitar figure of “Golden Bear”, the soothing background vocals throughout.
While such flourishes are at odds with the stripped-down Tex-Mex strains that have previously provided the heart of Escovedo’s music, there has long been a tension of polarities giving his artistry its magnetic pull. Punk thrash and chamber-string refinement. Troubadour tradition and glam-rock artifice. A vibrant life force and a fatalistic, self-destructive streak.
This album’s songs, written in collaboration with Chuck Prophet, offer memories of formative years in New York (“Chelsea”) and California (“Hollywood Hills,” “Swallows Of San Juan”), as well as homage to the seminal influence of Iggy Pop (most specifically on “Real As An Animal”, though even “Chip N’ Tony” sounds more like the Stooges than Rank And File.) Yet ultimately this song-cycle is less a celebration of the past than a meditation on time itself, the tension between the passage of time and the persistence of memory, between holding on and letting go.
“Slow Down” captures the ambivalence exquisitely: “The past is gone, but it still lives inside of me,” sings Escovedo, who ultimately resolves “to let go of the past,” bringing the album to a cathartic close. Equally revelatory is “People”, which combines the bluesy swagger of a younger man with a wisdom few possess at that age: “We’re only gonna live so long/We’ve still got time, but never quite as much as we think.” Or, “as we need,” he later sings.
It’s the dual perspective that enriches Real Animal. Even when he sneers “It’s 1978” in “Nuns Song”, the album never lets us forget that 30 years have passed since then. Escovedo couldn’t have made this album without living as recklessly as he did in his 20s. And he wouldn’t have made it without the reflective maturity of a survivor in his late 50s, still creating music as vital as anyone’s.