Thirteen Years

In the early \'90s, the Austin-based singer, songwriter, and guitarist Alejandro Escovedo stepped out as a solo artist after an already lengthy career in such roots-rock and punk bands as Rank & File, the True Believers, and the Nuns. His second solo album, *Thirteen Years* is a mostly melancholy suite of songs backed by a large, lush string section and tied together with recurrent piano, harp, and violin variations on a vocal-less theme. The album\'s slick production and all those strings can be a bit much, but just as the presence of a couple Stonesy rockers doesn\'t dispel the album\'s downcast halo of sorrow, nothing obscures the elegance, intensity, and emotional heft of \"Baby\'s Got New Plans\" and the title track. Both are definitive Escovedo compositions. A 2002 reissue added a bonus album stocked with instrumental mixes of four songs and three stripped-down live covers recorded in the same era, plus a demolition-derby version of the older \"Gravity\" by Escovedo\'s concurrent garage-rock outfit Buick MacKane.