Austin, Texas’ Alejandro Escovedo and Jon Dee Graham were once bandmates in the True Believers, for many, the great American rock band that got away. One unrepresentative album in 1986 and another that was dropped by the label after completion ended the band and, for a while, frayed the relationship between the two. Since then, both developed substantial careers as songwriters and performers, though Escovedo’s career and life were almost cut short by a bout with Hepatitis C. When he returned to live performing with his “orchestra” — four strings, keyboards and two or three guitars in addition to bass and drums — Graham was with him.

 

Producer John Cale doesn’t capture the power and scope of Escovedo’s big band on The Boxing Mirror. The strings aren’t as physical and ripping as they are in concert, but the album is still beautiful, ambitious and dramatic. It recalls Tom Waits, not in any obvious way, but like Waits, Escovedo synthesizes so many influences — popular and obscure — in mature, personalized music. Only “Break This Time” and tense, agitated “Sacramento & Polk” owe any obvious debts, and those are both to Cale and the Velvet Underground.

 

As hard and distorted as those songs are, they’re completely at home on an album that contains the delicately beautiful “Evita’s Lullaby” and the evocative “Arizona.” The latter was named for a transitional moment in his illness, when he finally had to face the fact that he was sick before a show in Phoenix. None of that is written into the song, which sonically evokes the desert’s space. The burbling synthesizer suggests the truth of the line, “You said I’ve lost my way / but it’s all a dream / since Arizona.”

 

Escovedo’s songs tell a story by merging the narrative with the emotional reality of the characters involved, creating an honest if surreal-seeming song. On Full, Jon Dee Graham’s gift is to depict a resonant moment with a handful of words. When he sings, “Sat on the back porch / smoked a cigarette / Sat on the back porch / I smoked seven cigarettes / Sat on the back porch / I was looking at my hands,” you don’t need the verse’s conclusion — “I was swept away” — to envision someone lost in deep thought.

 

His songs are also the songs of someone who’s lived some life. He sounds like an adult — people have noticed more than a passing resemblance to Tom Waits’ voice — and he’s someone who has taken enough hits to realize how little is gained from a tough guy image. When he sings, “Something wonderful’s gonna happen,” he sounds hopeful, vulnerable and credible.

 

His songs are more direct than Escovedo’s, saying what he wants to say with bass, drums and his own guitar, which is capable of being lyrical on a solo, then full of danger and menace moments later. Like Escovedo, Graham’s part of a generation that grew up on rock ’n’ roll then discovered how to make it address not just the lives of teens, twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, but also the lives of people older than that. Along the way, their sonic palates broadened and incorporated quieter moments and a greater sense of craft, but The Boxing Mirror and Full suggest that children and receding hairlines don’t mean you lose your ear for a rock ’n’ roll noise.