Alejandro Escovedo

“A toilet bowl full of blood.” That’s what Alejandro Escovedo says he saw after he vomited in his hotel room in Tempe, Ariz., on April 26, 2003. That’s when he knew the Hepatitis C he’d been running from for seven years had finally caught up with him.

He went ahead and did the show that night anyway. It was By the Hand of the Father, a theater piece about Mexican-American fathers—Escovedo’s and dozens of others—featuring slides, monologues by actors and actresses and Escovedo’s original songs performed with his band. But as soon as the show was done, the singer/guitarist collapsed and was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital.

“When I got to the hospital,” he remembers, “they found I had varices of the esophagus, cirrhosis of the liver and tumors in my abdomen, and they were all bleeding at once. The doctors gave me a blood transfusion and then started talking about a liver transplant or shunts that bypass the liver. This nurse asked me, ‘Why are you here?’ I said, ‘I have hepatitis C, and I’m bleeding internally.’ She whispered conspiratorially, ‘Oh, I have it, too. You know how I deal with it? I drink my urine every morning.’ Then another nurse came in and told me I didn’t have long to live.”

It’s now three years later, and Escovedo is still with us. But he’s not the same; you never come out of a long hospital stay the same person you were when you went in. “I died a little today,” he sings on the song of the same name from The Boxing Mirror, his first studio album in four years. The lovely guitar arpeggio unfurls slowly, as if reluctant to delve into such territory, and there’s a similar hesitation in Escovedo’s wavering tenor as he continues, “I put up a fight and carved a simple hello.” It’s as if we’re back at St. Luke’s Hospital and the news is sinking in. Brian Standefer’s cello enters with the dark undertow of that reality, and the singer adds, “You can hold to the light / So no one will know / We died a little today.”

The song echoes the sound of those early-morning hours, when most of the city is asleep, but you’re still awake, confronting the questions everyone avoids when there are daylight or neon-light distractions. It’s a sound Escovedo had to invent in the early ’90s to fit songs such as “Pissed Off 2 A.M.,” “Broken Bottle” and “As I Fall.” It’s the anguished epiphany of every stop-and-go, yes-and-no, early-morning dilemma. But never had Escovedo had an early morning like April 27, 2003.

“You know how people talk about near-death experiences and how it changes your life so profoundly?” he says of “I Died a Little Today.” “Even Buddhists talk about how everyone should have one. I left a lot of things behind, who I thought I was. I always had this thing about pride, and that’s not necessarily a great thing to possess. I’m still working on it, but I think I have a lot less.”

What makes the new album so impressive is that Escovedo never makes the glib claim that letting go is easy or clean. His doctors finally convinced him he had to stop drinking and smoking if he wanted to live, but he never pretends he doesn’t miss those pleasures. In the song “Arizona,” he sings, “Have another drink on me; I’ve been empty since Arizona.” You can hear alcohol’s allure in John Cale’s bubbling synth figure and in Standefer’s snaking cello line, and you can hear the struggle with temptation in Escovedo’s vocal.

Arizona is not only where he almost died; it’s also where he met his fourth wife, Kim Christoff, while he was still married to his third. “One kiss just led to another,” he sings in the same song, “one kiss just fades into lover.” In other words, some temptations are hard to resist.

For Escovedo, music is a temptation he’s indulging again after a period of abstinence. When he left St. Luke’s, he spent a month in Arizona, walking the desert, wondering if he was going to live, pondering what kind of life might remain ahead of him. When he was strong enough, he, his wife and daughter returned to their home in Wimberley, Texas, in the hills south of Austin. There he was swallowing so much medicine that he barely had the strength to walk around, much less play music.

“Interferon and Ribo?avin f— with your head so much,” he says, “that I was depressed and fatigued and behaving erratically. I wasn’t a very nice person during that year. After a while, the medicine was making me sicker than the disease was. I couldn’t sleep for months because my skin was burning up. I had no red blood cells and no white cells and it was eating away at my bone marrow. I almost needed another blood transfusion.

“Regardless of how sick I got, though, I have to admit that the drugs gave me time; they cleaned out the virus, allowed my liver to regenerate itself and got me to the point where I could switch to a more holistic approach. But it was hell to pay. I didn’t pick up a guitar for almost a year.

“It was like I was suddenly cut loose from the capsule. I wasn’t sure who I was. If I wasn’t a musician, who was I? If I wasn’t traveling in a van, who was I? If I wasn’t staying up all night after the gig, drinking with the guys, who was I? I had to rethink everything, and the only way I could make sense of it was to start writing songs again. The first song I wrote was ‘Arizona.’”