Alejandro Escovedo and Joe Ely

Escovedo's rise has been a gradual, steady incline rather than a quick ascendance. But it has deepened and burnished his music making it closer to the bone, where it begins to break, while deepening his insight and his ability to find that insight in performance.

His tireless touring and dogged determination to place one album after another has taken him through many musical scenes. Remaining the same persona within each, he is an artist who doesn’t settle for the easy way out.

It is a journey that has taken him from Texas to California to New York and back again to Texas, encompassing a breadth of music as varied as the many bands he was part of before embarking on a solo career. In the 1970s, he surfaced on San Francisco’s no-holds-barred punk scene centered around the Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach as a guitarist in The Nuns. As a member of the band Rank and File he helped unite the disparate worlds of punk and country in the 1980s. After he moved back to Austin, the True Believers combined all manner of Americana music in a harbinger of what was to come in Alejandro’s solo career which begun in 1992 with the album Gravity.

Joe Ely is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist whose music touches on honky-tonk, Texas Country, Tex-Mex, and rock and roll. Ely has had a genre-crossing career, performing with Bruce Springsteen, Uncle Tupelo, Los Super Seven, The Chieftains, and James McMurtry in addition to his early work with The Clash and more recent acoustic tours with Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, and Guy Clark.

Presented by Franklin Theatre Live