The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #260

#260: "Rosalie" (2001) - Alejandro Escovedo

Here's another artist whose work isn't nearly as well-known as it should be, though it isn't from lack of critical praise. Escovedo's mix of traditional Mexican music, country & western, punk, and traditional rock has long been praised, especially since his lyrical, detailed, beautiful, and ultimately sad debut album Gravity (partially about his first wife's suicide a year after the birth of one of their children) in 1992 (and one of the best albums of that decade), never staying put in one musical place, varying and deepening his sound, improving as a lyricist and singer, slowly gathering fans (popular and critical) along the way.

In 2001, Escovedo had a near hit with the song "Castanets" from his excellent album A Man Under the Influence, and he subsequenty embarked upon creating and staging and co-writing the stage play (w/music) By the Hand of The Father, about the Mexican immigrant experience and its influence on future generations. In 2003, not long after the show began (in L.A.), and just as it was gaining steam and recognition, Escovedo collapsed onstage. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis-C, and he nearly died from the attack. He spent several years recovering (thanks to the help of donations from many of his musical brethren, who contributed to benefit album for him to pay his medical bills...because record companies don't offer their artist health insurance).

The song Escovedo was performing when he collapsed was "Rosalie," as lilting and pretty and romantic a love song as there is on this list. The song's inspired by his (second) wife's parents, who spent seven years apart, writing letters every day of those seven years until they finally married. It's a sweetheart of a story, and Escovedo frames it in his singuar style, mixing plenty of rock guitar echo and reverb and a steady rock drum backbeat with Spanish/Mexican acoustic guitar picking, and adding a stately violin for respectable good measure. It's a record that can lead one to believe not just in the enduring power of love, but in the enrapturing power of music as well.

Escovedo's star is finally started to brighten again. Just this past month, Escovedo released a new album (Real Animal--it's great, probably the best album of this year so far) which garnered the musician his first Billboard-charting album in his thirty-three years as a professional musician, appeared on the Today show and on Conan, and has been fortunate enough to have Bruce Springsteen cover one of his new album's songs on every date of the Boss's curent tour. Shame that Springsteen didn't cover this one; it'd sit great right after "Rosalita."