Over more than 35 years of touring and recording, Alejandro Escovedo has played punk, rock, folk, country, and Latin music. But no matter the style, Escovedo’s songs tend to default to a dreamy drone. Sometimes Escovedo plays loud, with wildly reverberating guitar and rattling drums; sometimes he’s more muted, sticking to the soft hum of a violin or cello over acoustic guitar. But Escovedo is a cool customer regardless, singing in his pleasantly raspy voice about a life spent on the road, watching people and places slip past him. There’s an effortlessness about Escovedo’s songs, such that listeners could easily miss that he’s singing about desperate folks in desperate situations—and that sometimes the desperate person is Escovedo himself.
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