Over thirty years on from 1992's Gravity, the solo debut that let the world know Alejandro Escovedo was one of America's great songwriters, the man has little if anything to prove, and doesn't have to rest on his laurels if he's not so inclined. However, Escovedo has taken a truly idiosyncratic look at his own songbook on 2024's Echo Dancing, in which he's cut new, radically different versions of fourteen songs from his back catalog. Reportedly, Escovedo had traveled to Italy to cut a set of fresh tunes with Don Antonio and Nicola Peruch, who collaborated with Escovedo on his 2018 album The Crossing, but at the last minute he came up with the idea of re-interpreting some of his older compositions instead, though fans can be excused for not recognizing all of Escovedo's oldies. A few of these songs are genuinely obscure, but even the best known tracks get a truly thorough reworking, with scratchy guitars, lo-fi keyboards, and vintage drum machines often dominating the arrangements, making much of this seem like Escovedo's long-lost new wave or synth-punk LP. Tracks like "Sacramento & Polk" and "Wave" sound as if Escovedo, Antonio, and Peruch were aiming to be eccentric for their own sake (especially the former, which could pass as a B-side for the Normal's "Warm Leatherette"), though the more spare and atmospheric tone of "Outside Your Door" and "Last To Know" (dominated by droning keyboards and minimal electronic drones, confirming Escovedo's statement that Suicide was a major influence on him) fit the songs well while also casting them in a bold new light. The notion of Escovedo making a lo-fi junkshop electronic album sounds even more unlikely than him covering his own songs for a full album, and while Echo Dancing is uneven, the hits outnumber the misses by a margin that qualifies this as a successful experiment. That said, given how well he and his collaborators take to this approach, perhaps this would have been an even better LP if he'd come up with a set of original songs purpose built to these sounds. Escovedo is a great interpreter, but he's an even better songwriter.© Mark Deming /TiVo

Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who crafted the Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated piano-and-strings-centered score for the 2014 biopic The Theory of Everything, created a very different type of score for the action/crime film Sicario, released in 2015. A mix of quietly emotive, violin-led symphonic song and distorted, dissonant, percussive orchestral noise, Sicario [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] delivers tension and off-kilter anxiety in both hushed and hyper musical moments. Jóhannsson and film director Denis Villeneuve previously collaborated on 2013's Prisoners. © Marcy Donelson /TiVo

Born in 1951, Alejandro Escovedo is at an age where most rock musicians are happily coasting on their past accomplishments, if they're still making new music at all. Thankfully, Escovedo is and always has been a maverick, and he's eagerly overhauled his sound and approach with his twelfth studio album, 2016's Burn Something Beautiful. After making three fine albums with producer Tony Visconti and a band anchored by guitarist Chuck Prophet, Escovedo has taken a creative left turn and crafted Burn Something Beautiful with a new set of collaborators. The album was produced by former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Young Fresh Fellows and Minus 5 founder Scott McCaughey, and the two also co-wrote the songs with Escovedo. The studio band includes Buck, McCaughey, Kurt Bloch (of the Fastbacks), and John Moen (of the Decemberists), with guest appearances from Corin Tucker (ex-Sleater-Kinney). Kelly Hogan (longtime vocal cohort with Neko Case), and Steve Berlin (of Los Lobos). The finished product sounds unmistakably like an Alejandro Escovedo album, but the textures of his musical personality readily mesh with the tuneful but noisy, anything-goes freedom of Buck's freewheeling post-R.E.M. solo albums. The thick layers of buzzy guitar that dominate tunes like "Horizontal" and "Luna de Miel" take Escovedo's punk and glam influences and twist them into new shapes, while pop-oriented tracks such as "Heartbeat Smile" and "Farewell to the Good Times" have potent hooks but also a tough, insistent rock & roll backbone. And when Escovedo bares his soul on tunes like "Suit of Lights" and "I Don't Want to Play Guitar Anymore," his collaborators know how to match the mood without letting the music go limp. Escovedo is working with some stellar musicians who also lock in with him like a band, and this is an album where the players create a whole that's more than the sum of its parts. Burn Something Beautiful comes after a period of transition for Escovedo, with the artist leaving his longtime home of Austin, Texas for Houston after a health scare and a brush with death when he and his new wife found their honeymoon interrupted by a category four hurricane. But despite time and tough circumstances, the man is still writing outstanding, revealing songs full of heart, soul, and intelligence, and these performances show he's hardly run short of new ways to make his work communicate. An album full of potent atmosphere, dirty guitars, and emotional honesty, Burn Something Beautiful ranks with Escovedo's best and most adventurous work, and both fans and curious neophytes owe it to themselves to give it a listen. © Mark Deming /TiVo

While Alejandro Escovedo had shown plenty of versatility over the first 15 years of his career in music -- playing with early punk ravers the Nuns, prescient alt-country upstarts Rank and File, and roots rock firebrands the True Believers, among many others -- it wasn't until the Believers took shape that he began to display his formidable gifts as a songwriter, and with his first solo album, Gravity, Escovedo belatedly made it clear that he possessed one of the strongest and most distinctive lyrical voices of his generation. Opening with "Paradise," a haunting first-person narrative of a man about to be hanged, Gravity is a strikingly accomplished set of songs that deal with love ("Broken Bottle," "Five Hearts Breaking"), death ("She Doesn't Live Here Anymore"), and loss ("The Last to Know," the title song) in deeply personal terms, and Escovedo tells his stories with a talent for finely woven detail that would be the envy of a first-rate novelist. And the diversity of Escovedo's years of musical experience shows in the album's arrangements, which range from quiet, contemplative pieces structured around cello and piano ("Broken Bottle," "She Doesn't Live Here Anymore") to full-on, amped-up barrelhouse rock & roll ("Oxford," "One More Time"); Turner Stephen Bruton's clean, unobtrusive production gets all the details on tape with admirable clarity. Not every songwriter has the luxury of spending a decade and a half on the sidelines honing his craft before making a solo bow, but even with that advantage, there are few people who have the talent and vision to create an album as strong and moving as Gravity; to call it an "auspicious debut" is to risk understatement.© Mark Deming /TiVo

It may be simplistic to describe Alejandro Escovedo's 2006 album The Boxing Mirror as a record inspired by the artist's brush with death, but given the record's back story -- it was recorded as Escovedo was recovering from a near-fatal bout with Hepatitis C -- it's hard not to imagine its brave and often dazzling creative ambition was fueled by Escovedo's knowledge that these could be his last words as a musician. Two years later, a healthier and stronger Escovedo returned to the studio to record his ninth studio album, Real Animal, and by comparison this is a leaner, more tightly focused session; in fact, this is the strongest rock album Escovedo has made since his 1997 album with Buick MacKane, The Pawn Shop Years. It's easy to tag Real Animal as a less ambitious and artful collection than The Boxing Mirror, but viewed on its own merits this ranks with the best and most powerful music of Escovedo's career. Like The Boxing Mirror, which was produced by John Cale, Real Animal was recorded with a producer who worked with some of Escovedo's primal influences, Tony Visconti, and his recordings with David Bowie and T. Rex doubtless helped him connect with Escovedo the smart but swaggering rocker in a way Cale did not; this set of songs is every bit as intelligent and emotionally resonant as Escovedo's best work, but it moves with a taut energy and insistent force that informs even the quieter, acoustic oriented numbers, such as the bluesy "People (We're Only Gonna Live So Long)," and the plaintive "Hollywood Hills." While Escovedo wrote the tunes on Real Animal with Chuck Prophet, the songs bear his stylistic hallmarks and melodic sensibilities throughout, and these stories are dotted with places and events from Escovedo's past -- discovering music as a kid ("Golden Bear"), his days as a San Francisco punk rocker ("Nun's Song"), flirting with the New York bohemian scene ("Chelsea Hotel '78"), and barnstorming with a rock & roll band ("Chip 'N' Tony"). Even when the cues to Escovedo's past aren't obvious, there's too much heart, soul, and blood in this music to not to have come directly from his heart, and he's seemingly incapable of singing from any other place, giving this music an emotional power that reaches down to the soul. If The Boxing Mirror was a work influenced by the shadow of mortality, Real Animal is an album about life -- both as survival and as the faces and moments that fill our days on this Earth. How many artists could make two masterpieces in a row that are so different? And how much do you want to bet that Escovedo still has one or two more records this good in him?© Mark Deming /TiVo

In 2011, Alejandro Sanz left Warner after 20 immensely successful years. Predictably, the label soon released Colección Definitiva, a four-CD/DVD box set surveying the eight studio albums Sanz made for the label, from 1991's Viviendo Deprisa to 2009's Paraíso Express, as well as a myriad of live and compilation releases (including the three-CD/DVD package Grandes Éxitos 91_04, which overlaps considerably with this collection). The first two CDs of Colección Definitiva focus on Sanz's many greatest hits, such as "Corazón Partío" and "Cuando Nadie Me Ve." The third disc is devoted to Sanz's appearances on other artists' (Shakira, El Canto del Loco, Miguel Bosé, etc.) albums, while the fourth gathers together 13 of Sanz's duets, including those with Ketama, Ivan Lins, Joaquín Sabina, and Enrique Morente, among others. The DVD features all of Sanz's video clips. A downsized edition containing only the first two greatest-hits disc is also available.© Mariano Prunes /TiVo

For decades, singer Alejandro Fernandez has argued the continued relevance of Mexican Regional music. So strident is his thinking that he often mixes classic regional and traditional songs with trendy Latin pop on his albums. That said, Fernandez returns completely to his roots on Hecho en Mexico, with 11 new songs exclusively in the mariachi and ranchera vernaculars. Produced by Aureo Baqueiro, it was recorded in Barcelona, ​​Los Angeles, and New York, and features songs by Christian Nodal (who also duets with Fernandez on "Mas No Puedo"), Luis Carlos Monroy, Jorge Massias, and Chico Elizalde. On the track "Menti," Fernandez enlisted the still-beautiful voice of his octogenarian father, the great Vicente Fernandez.© TiVo