Recommended: Alejandro Escovedo, a singer of truth
Published 1:23 pm Friday, October 3, 2025
For the last 35 years, I’ve been writing songs and hauling them around the world.
It’s been wild, unpredictable, occasionally ridiculous, but also profoundly rich. Music, to me, is humanity’s first magic trick — alchemy for the soul, a shot of truth straight to the veins. It can shake you, strip you down, and remake you in ways nothing else can.
I fell in love with music as a kid in the Austin counterculture of the 1970s, where families crammed into clubs night after night. The music back then wasn’t safe or polished. It was raw, fearless, unbothered by trends. Beauty and art sat dead center in the bullseye, with commerce and careerism pushed to the margins. That spirit seared itself into me, shaping me not only as a musician, but as a fan who believes music isn’t worth a damn unless it aims for something deeper, something that rattles the bones.
This year, I had the honor of booking a few shows for Vashon Center for the Arts’ 2025–26 season. To me, it wasn’t just another gig — it was a mission. I wanted to bring our Vashon community music that wasn’t just entertaining, but necessary. Urgent. The kind of music that makes you feel alive in a way you didn’t know you were missing.
Which brings me to Alejandro Escovedo, and this invitation for you to experience the power of his work on Oct. 10, at VCA.
I first met Alejandro when I was 14 at Austin’s legendary Continental Club. The band was Rank and File, and they were a revelation — high-energy, twangy, both retro and forward-looking. They called it cowpunk—a shotgun wedding between classic American roots and the raw snarl of punk. It felt urgent. It felt dangerous. It felt like the future.
After the set, I stuck around to meet the band. The Kinman brothers were swarmed, so I found the other guitarist off to the side. He introduced himself as “Alejandro” and within minutes we were talking about music like we were old friends. I probably faked knowing half of what he mentioned, but the next day I biked to Inner Sanctum Records and blew every cent I had chasing down those records.
Not long after, Alejandro formed the True Believers. Ask anyone who was there, and they’ll tell you the same: they weren’t just one of the best bands in Austin in the ’80s, they were one of the best bands in America, period. Loud, chaotic, gloriously ragged, but with songs that cut to the bone. They were too uncompromising to chase the charts, and that refusal—stubborn, noble, beautiful—became a defining feature of Alejandro’s career.
Great artists don’t fit into boxes. They don’t play genres. They chase ghosts — beauty, truth, meaning — and grab whatever tools they need along the way. Alejandro has been doing that from the jump. After the Believers blew apart, he came roaring back with Buick McKane, a garagey, feral band that reveled in noise and abandon. Then in 1992, he dropped “Gravity.” Where the music before had been all fire and bluster, “Gravity” was quiet, stripped bare, devastatingly personal. It became a touchstone of authenticity, showing a generation of songwriters that rage and tenderness, pain and beauty, could live side by side in the same song.
From there, Alejandro’s catalog unfolded like a fever dream, each record another chapter in a restless saga. “Thirteen Years” and “With These Hands” carried the same intimate ache as “Gravity,” while “A Man Under the Influence” and “Real Animal” pushed into grander, more cinematic terrain. Working with producers like Tony Visconti and Chuck Prophet, he kept reinventing himself, pulling new sounds out of the ether.
What ties it all together is not style or genre but a relentless honesty that never flinches. That’s why his music matters. That’s why it lasts.
At heart, I think of Alejandro as a folk singer — but let me qualify that. A real folk singer is not a gentle creature, but a wild, untamable, yet deeply human one, carrying stories that cut through the static and land like gospel. Over the decades, he’s released nearly 20 albums and toured the world like a man possessed, always showing up with the same urgency and honesty he carried from the very start.
Alejandro Escovedo isn’t just a songwriter. He’s the godfather of movements, a bridge between worlds, and above all, a singer of truth.
Get tickets for Alejandro Escoveda’s concert, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, at vashoncenterforthearts.org.
Ian Moore, a longtime islander, is a guitarist, singer and songwriter with a storied career as a touring musician. He is also the co-founder of SMASH (Seattle Musicians Access to Sustainable Healthcare), an organization that works to provide vital resources and support to musicians in need.
