Alejandro Escovedo’s The Crossing Is an Expression of Our Unsettled Time

When the Scene speaks with Alejandro Escovedo, who’s calling from his home at Dallas’ Belmont Hotel, it’s mid-December, and a GoFundMe campaign has just been launched to crowdfund Donald Trump’s promised border wall between the United States and Mexico. At press time, the GoFundMe has raised nearly $20 million. And as a result of the congressional budget dispute that initially inspired the campaign, the federal government has been partially shut down since Dec. 22.

“It’s become even more blatant that there’s a lot of dangerous thought being tossed around and accepted by a third of the population in this country,” Escovedo says, discussing the day’s headlines. “You have to watch out sometimes.”

As the son of Mexican immigrants, Texas-born Escovedo has spent much of his life considering the psychic effects of immigration. His latest album, 2018’s The Crossing, distills much of what he’s learned into 17 songs that trace the experiences of two young immigrants — Salvo, from Italy, and Diego, from Mexico — as they follow their dreams of being punk musicians. A concept album, The Crossing plays out like a novel and offers a kaleidoscopic view of the young men’s trials and tribulations as they try to make ends meet in Galveston, Texas.

Escovedo first conceived of The Crossing while touring Europe in 2017 with the Italian band Don Antonio, which backed him on the album and will tour the new music with him this year. “The reason it blossomed there I think was because Southern Italy is very similar to Mexico in a way. The food is spicier, the dialect is different, the desert meets the ocean. They also have a lot of immigration coming through that part of the country.”

The early sketches of the story of Salvo and Diego began to take shape during a subsequent run with Don Antonio, with Escovedo and Don Antonio bandleader Antonio Gramentieri fleshing out the idea when Gramentieri spent several weeks in Dallas in 2017. 

“The thing I loved about them when I first heard them was their love of soundtrack music and atmospheric music,” Escovedo says of Don Antonio. “And I loved that they weren’t trying to be American. A lot of times when you got to Europe you’ll find a lot of musicians who are trying to sound like Americana, which is very big there. They were not following that path. They were finding their own self through Italian music and being Italian. In turn, that brought out even more Latino in me than had ever come out in my music.”

Sonically, the album coalesces Escovedo’s myriad influences (spanning DIY punk, Tex-Mex country and Americana rock) in such a way that the musician, now 67, has never sounded more like himself. Guests on The Crossing include The Stooges’ James Williamson, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, songwriter-author Willy Vlautin and Escovedo’s fellow Texan Joe Ely — an eclectic roster fitting of such a sprawling effort. 

Lyrically, The Crossing also finds Escovedo digging deeply into his personal history, with nods to his brother’s band The Zeros; story-songs like “Texas Is My Mother,” inspired by real conversations with DACA recipients; and a powerful spoken-word track called “Rio Navidad” (performed by Vlautin) that has roots in Escovedo’s own lived experiences. 

Standout track “Teenage Luggage,” which features Williamson, is a perfect three-and-a-half-minute distillation of Escovedo’s achievement with The Crossing. It blends eerie pedal steel with a driving punk beat and culminates in a knockout lyric: “You think you know me? / You’ll never know me / You’re a bigot with a bad guitar.”

Moments like “Teenage Luggage” offered Escovedo an outlet for his frustration at the political landscape, while tracks like “Texas Is My Mother” give voice to his more tender feelings. Releasing and performing the new music for a receptive, understanding audience has offered him much-needed catharsis and allowed him the space to process how feelings brought forth by the current administration have deep roots. 

“For me, it really hit because the first thing that Trump delivered in his announcement to run for president was that Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers and murderers, this whole thing about Mexicans,” Escovedo says. “But in reality, it’s about all people who are not white. The Mexican thing really hit. I grew up feeling these things anyway throughout my life.”

Escovedo is working on a memoir about his upbringing and his life in music. He cites writing The Crossing as one piece of what has opened him to the possibility of sharing his story, and he hopes that doing so will connect more people to the challenges faced by immigrants and marginalized communities.

“I think you know as a writer that when you can capture a place in time, it’s a very unique and special and rare gift,” he says. “This record seems to have captured something that people can relate to in that sense. That’s been a wonderful thing.”