South Congress shapes the sound of Escovedo's latest

On a sun-dappled late May afternoon, Alejandro Escovedo strolls down South Congress Avenue, a soft breeze tugging at his distinctive coif as the first vestiges of the searing summer heat to come lurk in the air.

His stride is lean and purposeful, but his mind is easily distracted. In front of the bustle of Jo's Coffee he bumps into Hotel San Jose proprietor Liz Lambert, with whom he exchanges warm greetings and promises to meet while both are in London in late June. He pauses in the parking lot to gab with a taxi cab driver. He peeks his head into Blackmail and By George, greeting shop girls and admiring two-tone threads. He shoots a wave to the woman behind the desk at the Austin Motel.

And he proves utterly incapable of resisting the siren song of SoCo specialty stores — peering at a striking print of John Cale at the Yard Dog Gallery, examining a used turntable at Off the Wall and wearing a mesmerized look as he trolls the stalls at antiques emporium Uncommon Objects.

"It takes a week to get down the street when you're walking with Alejandro. He's all about the hang," Lambert says by phone the following month, en route to Austin from that trip to London, England, where she watched Escovedo play for a crowd of thousands at the Hard Rock Calling festival in Hyde Park, London. Like a generation of Austinites reared on Escovedo from ample plays on KUT and KGSR, she came to Escovedo as a fan and listener, but she grew to know him better after opening the Hotel San Jose in 2000.

"Alejandro is always interested in whatever is going on around him and what other people are doing on the street, which is why South Austin is a good fit for him. You wouldn't want him wandering around 360," Lambert says with a laugh. "You can't plan on getting to some place at a particular time. It's less a walk with him and more a sort of walkabout."

To watch Escovedo saunter across South Congress evokes a sensation eerily similar to watching him dominate the stage — at Antone's, at the Continental Club, in the intimate confines of the Cactus Café or the iconic studio of "Austin City Limits." He is a man in his element. In the blocks between Academy Drive, where the South Austin faithful imbibe at Doc's Motorworks, and Johanna Street, where the lunch crowd grabs sandwiches at Magnolia Cafe, he knows seemingly every regular. Backward and forward, top to bottom, the avenue is his.

Little wonder that South Congress lends its pulse to the acclaimed Austin troubadour's latest studio album, "Street Songs of Love," released last Tuesday on Fantasy Records. Its hums, its rhythms, its personal connections and ever-present energy form the spine of the record. Perhaps that's why "Street Songs of Love" charges out of the headphones with an assurance and comfort that usurps even Escovedo's Springsteen-praised 2008 album "Real Animal." The street where Escovedo feels most at ease helped birth the album that sees Escovedo at his most \u2026 well, Escovedo.

"This street is the whole heart and soul of the record," Escovedo says. "I live out in the country these days, in Wimberley. I have no neighbors or anything like that. But I've spent 30 years in Austin. My kids grew up here. If I had a neighborhood, this would be it. I've seen a lot come and go. Sure, the buildings have changed, but I feel like it still has the soul of South Congress in it. I'm so comfortable here. For me, it's home."

I first find Escovedo seated in the appealingly Spartan lobby of the Hotel San Jose. Clad toe to tête in stylish vintage threads, he's his usual picture of classy cool. Barely tinted glasses frame his face, an elegant hat sits on his head, an anchor pendant droops from his neck and he wears skinnier jeans than any 59-year-old should be able to. Somewhere on Sixth Street east of Interstate 35, there is at this moment a hipster wishing he could pull off skinny jeans that effortlessly.

Like "Street Songs of Love," our journey begins directly across the street at the Continental Club. The album's songs were skeletal — or nonexistent — when Escovedo began a two-month weekly residency at the Continental Club in late 2009. Week by week, as crowds grew and word got out, he and band the Sensitive Boys constructed 13 songs in front of a live audience, guiding them from acoustic frameworks to hard-rocking, Clash-lean nuggets of classic rock and soul-baring ballads.

Much of "Street Songs of Love" alternates between two poles. There are the barn-burners heavy on ax-grinding, like "This Bed Is Getting Crowded" and the voraciously sexual chest-thumping of "Silver Cloud" ("Hey pretty thing, won't you come inside?/I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a hungry man"). Call that rock Escovedo. Then there are the meditations, like the tender rumination on beauty of "After the Meteor Showers" or the romantic pleading of "Fall Apart With You." Call that sensitive Escovedo.