No one has really ever been able to define themselves and their music like singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo does. His life in music of all kinds sometimes feels like a swirl through the sky, where his songs point out all the majesty and mystery of how he sees the world. The sounds he makes take him places that he might not even predict, but once there, greatness always follows.

The son of a Mexican immigrant and a Texas native, the sounds that Escovedo first discovered and then performed morphed into all kinds of exciting styles of his life.

A member of the first-wave punk rock group The Nuns in San Francisco, he moved to New York and joined the Judy Nylon band and experienced the total electricity of the late 1970s there.

Moving then to Austin was a radical shift of geography and musical style when Escovedo helped form one of the country’s first so-called Cowpunk adventurers. It often seems like the man has been on a pirate-like adventure through the kinds of music he is drawn to. Those sounds are usually new and often have a strong edge of the avant-garde in them.

Deeply embedded in the burgeoning Austin scene in the 1980s, Escovedo was a prime architect in the new band True Believers, which included his brother Javier and Jon Dee Graham. In many ways the band helped build the gateway to the whole burgeoning Americana music scene which prospers to this day, but it was also the turning point for Alejandro Escovedo to take his life in his control and record solo albums.

In the thirty-plus years since that decision has come a wild roller-coaster ride of groups, spinoffs, tribute albums and even original dramatic projects and experiments. In 1998, No Depression Magazine named him Artist of the Decade. For this musician, though, that was just the start of a life that twists and turns wherever Escovedo’s clearly uninhibited imagination takes him.

The 21st century has been a time of widely successful excursions that only a few American musicians are able to create. Between adventurous solo albums, continuing collaborations with other musicians, and an ever-growing sense of boundary-breaking, Alejandro Escovedo has created his own definition of what a modern rock artist can accomplish.