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June 4 - June 10, 2009
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• Musical animal
Excovedo discusses opening for the Sex Pistols and h
by Alan Sculley
• Underground fantasies
Indie darlings Metric take a new track on their latest album
by Erica Grossman
 Musical animal
Escovedo discusses opening for the Sex Pistols and his recent solo success
by Alan Sculley
Alejandro Escovedo has a simple assessment of his current CD, Real Animal.
“I feel that this album is the strongest album I’ve ever made,” he said in a recent phone interview.
Those who have heard Escovedo’s recent solo albums (such as 2006’s The Boxing Mirror or 2001’s A Man Under The Influence) will know that’s a pretty heady statement.
Escovedo, so far, has not achieved anything close to mainstream popularity. But he has been creating some of rock’s most distinctive music and has been one of the most consistently exciting live performers for better than a decade.
One of 2008’s best CDs, Real Animal highlights the hard rocking side of Escovedo’s music. It includes three searing but hooky tracks in particular that can make the walls sweat — “Smoke,” “Chelsea Hotel ’78” and “Real As An Animal.” The album, though, also has three of the prettiest ballads one could hope to hear in “Sensitive Boys,” “Hollywood Hills” and “Swallows of San Juan” as well as the mid-tempo gems “Always A Friend” and “Sister Lost Soul.”
But even if the CD fails to take his career to a new level, the Real Animal project has yielded two new artistic partnerships that Escovedo hopes will extend into the future.
One was in the production of the record. Originally Glyn Johns, the legendary producer of the Who, was going to produce Real Animal. But when things didn’t work out with Johns, Escovedo landed a producer with similar credentials in Tony Visconti (who’s famous for producing David Bowie and T.Rex).
“Oh, it was amazing,” Escovedo said of working with Visconti. “He brought so much to the table, man. Everything that we had wanted as far as creating a rock and roll album with strings and the arrangements and the sounds that we wanted, all those things were just at his fingertips. So he was essential to the making of this record.”
The other key partnership was with Chuck Prophet, guitarist of the much-admired 1980s roots rock band Green On Red. Escovedo wrote the entire Real Animal album with Prophet and found the collaboration fruitful.
“I’d never really collaborated with anybody [on songwriting],” Escovedo said. “I’ve got to tell you it was a great experience for both of us. I think we both got a lot out of it.”
Together Escovedo and Prophet wrote songs that touch on the early part of Escovedo’s career, beginning with his first group, the Nuns.
Based in San Francisco, the group became popular in the city despite the fact, Escovedo noted, that the band members were hardly virtuosos on their instruments.
Perhaps the band’s lasting claim to fame was for being one of the opening acts in San Francisco at the last show by the Sex Pistols.
“It was a crazy night,” Escovedo said. “It was at Winterland, completely packed with 5,000 people. We went on, and people were already starting to gob on us, right? And like idiots, we tried to gob back. Once you started to gob back, here comes this barrage of anything that they had. A size D battery whizzed by my head, ricocheting off of the ride cymbal. So it was just a circus. And I remember this about it. I remember suddenly realizing that it wasn’t about the music at that point. It got to be about some sort of weird spectacle. It was a carnival ride. And that’s when for us it ended in a sense, punk rock.”
From there, Escovedo joined Rank & File, a group lauded for its collision of country and punk that to Escovedo’s regret flew apart after just one album. The song “Chip ‘N Tony” refers to the Kinman brothers, who fronted the band.
“Sensitive Boys,” meanwhile, is partly devoted to Escovedo’s next band, the True Believers, which also included his brother, Javier.
“If there was one great disappointment in the bands I’ve been in — obviously I was disappointed with the Rank because I thought that Chip and Tony and I would always play together, hang out and have fun — and then with the Believers we had the same kind of aspirations, but I felt like we were a better band in a way,” Escovedo said. “And playing with my brother was special… When that didn’t work, that was a great disappointment for me because I feel that my brother and I lost a lot in our relationship as a result of being in that band.”
Escovedo has since, of course, reached new heights in a solo career that has produced seven albums.
He figures to mix in new material with several time-tested fan favorites from his back catalog on tour this summer.
“We’re going to cover this new album mostly, pushing the album, and then play some older tunes,” he said, before mentioning some older tunes likely to be in the set. “We always play ‘Everybody Loves Me But I Don’t Know Why.’ We plan on doing ‘Put You Down,’ ‘Baby’s Got New Plans,’ [and] ‘Rosalie’ always seems to work, ‘Castanets’ probably… So we’ll probably stick to a lot of those.”
On the Bill
Alejandro Escovedo performs with Rickie Lee Jones at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9, at the Chautauqua Community House, 900 Baseline Rd., Boulder,
303-440-7666.
 Underground fantasies
Indie darlings Metric take a new track on their latest album
by Erica Grossman
Ask Metric frontwoman Emily Haines about the mood of her band’s latest album, Fantasies, and she chuckles.
“We often feel like we use our records to psychoanalyze journalists,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Half of those music journalists keep telling her that Fantasies feels dark and somber, while the others (including this one) are picking up unprecedented optimism from the album compared to their prior records.
But regardless of which camp you’re in, you can count on one thing: Fantasies is a departure from both the band’s debut album, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, as well as 2005’s Live It Out. Fantasies emits a bigger, more complete studio sound, while still carrying the band’s signature guitar work and Haines’ poetic lyrics. Tracks like “Sick Muse” and “Gimme Sympathy” emit pop sensibilities layered with synthesizers and upbeat choruses, mixed in with heavier, distortion-laden tracks like “Front Row” and “Stadium Love.”
And for the band, this kind of breakaway is OK.
“People see very different things in art, which is amazing,” said Haines. “That’s the point of music and culture in general, right? It makes me feel like we’ve done our job in creating something that has depth. It’s three-dimensional, and I would hate to tell anybody that what they see isn’t there.”
Likewise, Haines said, she would hate to be replicating the previous albums that have made the band such a favored indie darling.
“It’s a natural progression of life,” she said. “I would hate to be the same person I was in 2005 four years later. Ideally, we all grow and evolve as people.”
That isn’t to say Fantasies is without any sort of perspective. While Haines claimed the band was not drawing from a specific emotional well, she did admit to a certain sense of hope in humanity. However, unlike so many artists coming out of the politically charged climate of the past few years, she’s not talking about America’s new president. Instead, it’s about the bigger picture.
“We’ve had trouble in the world, the things that we feel like have been neglected on a large scale… but there seems to be a bit more momentum behind a way of thinking where people are taking a little bit of responsibility and being a little more conscious,” said Haines. “So I think we felt as though things are moving in the right direction, and even though it’s a difficult time, things have had to fall apart in order to be rebuilt. And I’m not talking about Barack Obama; I’m talking about the whole world. There’s just a sense of people coming out of this state of denial of being honest and direct, and it’s so hard to gauge these things, but that’s part of writing to me, to pick up on things like this.”
Which makes sense considering Metric’s propensity toward being involved in an expansive music scene. The members of the band are a bit more nomadic than most, living in different cities, in different countries. And their musical participations reflect that, as well.
In addition to the three albums and tours as Metric, Haines and guitarist Jimmy Shaw have both contributed heavily to the efforts of
the pioneer music collective Broken Social Scene, a band whose lineup is ever-shifting and currently lays claim to 19 members, including such celebrated musicians as Feist and the members of Stars. In addition, Haines released a solo album in 2006 (Knives Don’t Have Your Back) and an EP in 2007 (What Is Free To A Good Home?) under the name Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton. And in between, Shaw has opened up his own recording studio in Toronto, a place the band was able to call home while recording.
“I know it is unusual to live in different cities,” Haines said. “But for us, we spend so much time together anyway it’s kind of like going home is like going on holiday.”
For Fantasies, the band drew from a few different sources. Much of Haines’ writing came out of her time spent in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For the band as a whole, a lot of the writing coalesced during their time spent at a farmhouse outside of Seattle. But wherever the band and its members may go, it can only lead to new bodies of work that avoid any sort of stagnation felt by a more grounded band.
“I try not to ruin music by being too cognitive about it,” says Haines. “It’s kind of like so much of life is supposedly rational thought, and then music is this amazing, mysterious, powerful thing. I just didn’t want to repeat myself with this [record]. And the record we make after Fantasies, there’s no way it will sound the same — I promise.”
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On the Bill
Metric performs with Sebastian Grainger at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 11, at the Ogden Theatre, 935 E. Colfax Ave., Denver,
303-830-2525.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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