Alejandro Escovedo has plenty to look back on but even more to get done

Days after Alejandro Escovedo ended a whirlwind South by Southwest festival — his 35th or so — the Texas rocker headed north by northwest.

Today, he’s in Calgary, Alberta, where the theater company One Yellow Rabbit is helping him workshop a one-man play about his extraordinary life, based on an upcoming memoir.

It’s a slow-process that requires a lot of looking back. But as always, Escovedo tries to stay laser-focused on the future.

“It’s funny because at this age — I’m 73, right? — I’m an old man in any book, and I still want to do everything. I still wanna surf. I still wanna run a 50K trail run,” he says over the phone from Calgary.

“I just want it all, you know?”

On March 29, the singer-songwriter will release Echo Dancing, an album that recasts songs from throughout his career in bold new ways. He recorded it with Italian guitarist Don Antonio (Antonio Gramentieri) and keyboardist Nicola Peruch.

My conversation with Escovedo has been edited for clarity.

One thing that jumped out at me is the sound of Echo Dancing. It can be dark and psychedelic, but at other times, it’s very minimalist. What were you aiming for?

I knew I wanted to make an album with Antonio and Nicola in Italy, without a rhythm section, and my initial thought was to do an album that’s completely improvised. In order to get inspired, I listened to some of my older material, and I found a truly beautiful version of [his 2001 classic] “Wave,” done by Calexico for the tribute record [2003′s Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo].

And so that sparked an idea. “Wow! This is really cool to deconstruct the old songs.” I have a lot of gratitude [for] what Antonio and Nicola did — it’s a true collaboration.

I saw you perform with Antonio and others at the Belmont Hotel lobby in Oak Cliff. (In 2015, Escovedo moved from his longtime home near Austin to an apartment at the Belmont when his wife, Nancy Rankin, was hired as a hair stylist for the Dallas-filmed TV show Queen of the South.) Why’d you decide to move back to Austin in 2019? And how do the two cities compare, from a musician’s point of view?

I really enjoyed Dallas. I loved the people and the restaurants, and I felt like I was part of a cool, tight little community at the Belmont and at Spinster Records. It’s a much larger area compared to Austin, where the Austin Rehearsal Complex and the Continental Club were kind of the headquarters for the whole scene, right? But I found that Dallas was a much more diverse musical community, where gospel and R&B and jazz were prominent and you have all the great bands from Denton.

We lived right above the [Belmont] lobby. And you know, you come home from a long tour and somebody’s at that piano in the lobby, totally drunk, trying to play Elton John songs off key. Whenever the DJs were raving, our apartment got the brunt of it. After a while I said, “You know, Nancy, I’ve been touring now for 40-something years: My life has been a hotel room. I think I need to get a place again.” I used to have a little 5-acre place out in Wimberley, and I’d gotten very comfortable with living out in the country. Now we live out in Driftwood, on a friend’s ranch, and we have a lot of property and privacy. And all of my kids still live in Austin. We got very fortunate. It was the right move.

One of the most powerful tunes on the new album is your trippy funk version of “Bury Me,” originally on your ‘92 album Gravity. It’s sung in the voice of a man pondering mortality. What inspired it?

The years 1990 to 1994 were very rough for me. [Escovedo’s wife] Bobbie committed suicide and I had a 9-year-old daughter and a 6-month-old baby when she died. It was a very deep, dark, grief-ridden place I was living in, trying to raise my kids, trying to still be a musician. And “Bury Me” represented this confessional thought: “I wish it had been me, instead of her.”

In hindsight, what would you tell your younger self about how to get through that rough period?

I would tell myself to cease blaming myself and beating myself up and to just deal with raising my children, you know? I would’ve stopped torturing myself. I think it snowballs, if you let it. I had a therapist at the time — but it was really difficult. I gotta tell you, the hardest thing in the world is to tell your children that kind of news, you know? It was probably the hardest period of my life, and I’ve been through a lot since then.

“Last to Know” is another great song from 1992 that you’ve re-interpreted. The lyrics hint at the absurd side of life as a musician.

It’s a funny story. I was in Buick MacKane, and we fancied ourselves as the greatest rock ‘n roll band alive. But we couldn’t get a gig in Austin. We found ourselves in this purgatory, so we’d just take off and try to find a gig. One time we were playing Oxford, Miss., and we got paid in a case of vodka and a case of cranberry juice, because Cape Cods were our favorite drink. And we were three Cape Cods outside of Oxford when the driveshaft fell off our borrowed van.

Our drummer got out of the van, climbed underneath and said, “Throw me the duct tape!” And he duct-taped the driveshaft back onto the car. But it broke down a mile later, and as we were sitting there, waiting and laughing and drinking, I wrote “Last to Know” as kind of this anthem to Buick MacKane and this attitude that we had. We never had any career plan or ambition. We just really wanted to play loud. It was more of a party than a band, and the kind of party where there’s that one last guy who just won’t leave.

You revisit “MC Overlord,” a song from The Crossing, your 2018 concept album about two immigrants who meet in Texas. As the son of a family who emigrated from Mexico in the early 1900s, what do you wish more Americans knew about immigration?

I would just hope that people have some sort of compassion and love and decency and brotherhood for people. Remember, we’re all immigrants. In Texas, we always hear “Oh yeah? My family’s been here for a hundred years.” Well, my family’s been here for thousands and thousands of centuries, you know? Yet I still feel displaced. It’s a weird thing. It’s a stranger-in-your-own land kind of vibe. I would just hope that people have a little more understanding of why these people are crossing the border, what they’re looking for, and what America represents or is supposed to, anyway.

I love “Castañuelas,” the slowed-down version of your 2001 song “Castanets.” I heard you refused to play “Castanets” for a few years because of then-President George W. Bush.

My friend called me and says, “Uh, have you read The New York Times today? George Bush put you on his top 10 iPod list!” And I was crushed. I go “Oh, no man. No! Please, no!” So we started saying that we would not play the song until he was out of office.

In redoing it, I was very into Ya No Estoy Aqui (I Am No Longer Here), a movie about kids in northern Mexico who love cumbia music, but they’ve slowed it down, in the same way that reggae slowed down to become dub music. So I showed that to Nicola and Antonio, and “Castañuelas” turned out to be this really sweet kind of a [mix] between dub and cumbia. I love it a lot, man, but I must say it’s the hardest one we’ve had to tackle for the live show. At South By Southwest, we did it as a mashup with the old version.

When we spoke in 2018 at the Belmont, you’d been named spokesman for the Prevent Cancer Foundation’s “Think About the Link” campaign, focusing on viruses linked to cancer, including hepatitis C. You almost died from hep C in 2003, but were cured of it in 2015 when you were prescribed new medications. Today, how do you look back at that chapter in your life?

Looking back, to say I wasn’t just completely in terror most of the time would be a lie. Because it’s so powerful, there were times you’re just laying there going, “I don’t know if I can fight this another day.”

How’d you overcome that? What advice can you offer people going through similar things?

I’d say completely rethink everything about your life and focus on becoming a healed person. I mean, whether that be your diet, your exercise, your humor. Get a lot of sunshine and go out and do all the things that you know you’ve always wanted to do in your life. Don’t let anything deny you the focus to heal.

In Dallas, when I began a new treatment, within three days I was feeling great again and I began the road to recovery. While I was in Dallas, I got rid of Hep C, wrote three albums and did a lot of touring. So it was a good time. Looking back, I just feel very fortunate and very blessed that it didn’t overtake me.