Alejandro Escovedo Returns to Rock on 'Street Songs of Love'

Alejandro Escovedo's 2008 release, 'Real Animal,' turned out so well that the Texas singer-songwriter brought back many of the same elements for his latest, 'Street Songs of Love.' He wrote songs with his friend Chuck Prophet, recorded them with his band the Sensitive Boys and re-enlisted Tony Visconti to produce the album, which is due June 29 on Fantasy Records.

"I knew going into it that it was going to be a guitar record. I wanted to make a rock record again," Escovedo tells Spinner, noting that the album took root when he was on vacation last year. "I went to Baja, Calif., and I spent a month there on my own. Chuck Prophet came out for a few days when I first got there and we wrote what was the beginning of the album."

It's an album about love, born in part from difficulties Escovedo was having in that area at the time. Despite the weighty topic, writing with Prophet is rarely a solemn occasion.

"We laugh a lot. We tell stories a lot," Escovedo says. "When we get together, he put it once, it's like two electrical currents in the room and sparks fly. We start trying to show off for each other, we try to one up each other and songs just come out."

After shaping the songs with a series of shows in Austin, Escovedo and the Sensitive Boys holed up in a Louisville, Ky., studio for 12 days with Visconti, who has produced albums by David Bowie, T. Rex, U2 and Thin Lizzy, among many others.

"Tony had a really beautiful kind of vision as to what the sound was on a larger scale," says Escovedo, who adds that working with Visconti on 'Real Animal' gave him insight into how big a role the producer played on the seminal records among his credits -- and helped with the sound of 'Street Songs of Love.'

"I had a much clearer understanding of what his role was in those records and how important he was to those records," Escovedo says. "That realization allowed me to have a lot more trust in him, hand everything over to him and allow him to do those things that are so beautiful on the records we love to go back to and listen to."