Alejandro Escovedo, who has made stops at the Royal Theatre in Danville the past two years, has a new album, Street Songs of Love, coming out next Tuesday (June 29) and you can hear it all now, streaming at NPR.
Escovedo, who gained some new fans with a one-off live performance of his song “Always a Friend” on stage with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band during their Magic tour stop in Texas, has Bruce sing on the new record.
Most interesting, thought, is the process Escovedo employed to create the album. He took his band, The Sensitive Boys, into the Continental Club in Austin for a show every Tuesday night for two months, and built the record – on stage, in front of an audience.
Escovedo recounts the story on his website:
“We would bring in three new songs every Tuesday night,” he says of his modus operandi, “and we would play them acoustically first for the audience, and then I’d bring in the rhythm section, and slowly but surely we would add each piece, like the singers. I had wanted to bring in horns, but it never made it to that point. But still, the audience could watch the songs develop.
“It was interesting to see it grow and blossom. It started with the room half full, but it built until the last one sold out. Every week it became more intense with the album taking shape in front of us organically, a work in progress. It’s as if it knew where it wanted to go, so that by the end of those two months we had watched songs begin with a verse and a chorus and become what we felt were complete compositions. And then we took that on the road for two and a half weeks, leading us from Austin to playing our first gig in Little Rock, and then working our way to Louisville, Kentucky, and then the following day we went to Lexington and started making the record.
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Click here to watch two live videos recorded at Rolling Stone
Alejandro’s website