Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal

Now, his latest album, Real Animal, finds Escovedo looking back to those years when his musical personality was still being shaped by punk, glam, garage rock, Mott the Hoople, the Faces and the Velvet Underground. Produced by Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex, Thin Lizzy), Real Animal is a collective journey through Escovedo's various musical incarnations from punk rock to string quintets and is as introspective as it is retrospective. Escovedo wrote the album in collaboration with Chuck Prophet, formerly of the California band Green On Red, who toured the same circuit as Escovedo's groups in the '80s. The pair set out to tell Escovedo's story as a kid who grew up in a musical family, yet was something of an outcast because he didn't gravitate toward more traditional Latin music. "I wanted to tell what it felt like to be a young Chicano in the early '60s, late '50s in California, but feeling even more alienated because I loved English rock 'n' roll as much as I loved garage rock," he says. "If you're going to write the story of that period of time," Escovedo says, "you better have the right kind of music to back it up."