Old Fogey of the Year, part 1 - Alejandro Escovedo

I've never actually defined what qualifies an artist as an Old Fogey - I'm gravitating towards  "a living artist old enough to collect a government pension." Which eliminates Radiohead and the Tragically Hip, for example, whose careers on record go back as far or farther than Alejandro Escovedo's. But Escovedo, who will be 66 next month, was already in his 40s before beginning his solo career. The many bands he was in before that - the Nuns, Rank and File, the True Believers - were and remain extremely obscure to anyone outside the bar circuits they worked. And the few recordings they made all sank without a trace and to this day are quite difficult to track down.

Alejandro shook things up recently. He got married, for the fourth time. He and his new wife were almost killed by a hurricane while on honeymoon, and both came down with PTSD as a result. After being based out of Austin Texas for more than 30 years, he moved to Dallas. And after making a series of fine records in collaboration with Chuck Prophet and Tony Visconti, going back to 2008's Real Animal, he found himself some new recording partners. He teamed up with Scott McCaughey and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck to write this one, which he recorded in Portland with McCaughey, Buck, and some of the local luminaries, most notably Kurt Bloch and Jerry Moen.

It's turned out to be a helluva good idea - Escovedo's written one of the best batches of songs in his long career, and he has never, never rocked this hard. It's all loud noisy guitars, and it reminds us that Escovedo was one of the original California punk rockers some forty years ago, before Rank and File and True Believers. It's all good, but I especially love "Johnny Volume"

I'm going down to Max's
Fender Twin on ten
Back to Jackson Heights
start all over again

and then Kurt Bloch just rips it up. Everyone should make a point of seeing the whole show on Austin City Limits in a few weeks.