Alejandro Escovedo, the singer and songwriter, likes to have a proper Mexican breakfast before a long drive. “Let’s go here,” he said. He pulled into the back lot of a restaurant called El Pueblo, across from the Tornado bus terminal on East Jefferson Boulevard, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. El Pueblo, he said, is where travellers arriving by bus from Mexico often go to eat and to get their bearings. He ordered in Spanish, then remarked that his Spanish was poor. The plates came quickly. Chorizo con huevos. “This is badass, man,” he said. An elderly vagrant looked in through the window and then walked in. Escovedo gave him a dollar. “When I was small, I used to be able to see the pain in people,” he said.

This was the Friday before Labor Day. The following week, he was due in Philadelphia, to begin a tour that would take him to Brooklyn, then south, and west, and eventually back to Dallas. Typically, he’d be resting up, but that night he had a benefit gig in Austin, his former home town, and so, prior to leaving Texas, he was sneaking in a three-day road trip, a kind of sentimental journey—south to Austin and beyond, backward through time, down to the border of old Mexico. He had rented a black S.U.V., with room for a guitar and an amp; he joked that its tinted windows and low clearance gave it a slight cartel vibe—good for Laredo.

Escovedo, who is sixty-seven, was about to release a new album, his fourteenth as a solo artist, on top of a few with a run of beloved but luckless punk-ish bands. For this one, he’d teamed up with an Italian musician and former journalist named Antonio Gramentieri, known to all as Don Antonio. The album, “The Crossing,” tells an imagined story of two young immigrants working in an Italian restaurant in Texas: a Mexican named Diego (a kid not unlike Escovedo) and an Italian named Salvo (a version of Gramentieri), who share a love of punk rock, as well as the hardships and wonders of their experience as less than welcome newcomers to America. They recorded it in Italy, with a band comprising Gramentieri’s childhood friends and neighbors in Modigliana, a small comune east of Bologna—a long way from the Rio Grande. The album has the customary Escovedo mixture of romping Stooges guitar and plaintive folk, but also, in places, a cinematic heft that suggests Ennio Morricone—a whiff of the spaghetti Southwestern. Escovedo and Gramentieri didn’t have Trump, or his wall, or ICE square in their sights when they started, but the tragedy of the lives disrupted on both sides of the southern border suffuses the album; the context deepens an idiosyncratic cycle of songs. As Escovedo sings at the end, “We all become history when we make the crossing.”

Four years ago, Escovedo got married for the third time, to a hair stylist and photographer named Nancy Rankin; a year later, they moved to Dallas from Austin, where he’d lived since 1980, and where he’d made a name for himself. Alejandro splitting Austin? It was as if Joey Ramone had moved to Boston. Rankin had a job on a television show in Dallas, and they were looking for a clean break. But, also, Austin had got too gentrified, too popular, too expensive. “It’s overrun with this hipster thing,” he said. “I’m told it gets a thousand new people a week. I blame myself for going around the world telling people how great Austin is.” The bumper-sticker invocation “Keep Austin Weird” had apparently come up short.

Now Escovedo was an evangelist for the weirdness of Dallas. He and Rankin rent an apartment above the reception desk in the Belmont Hotel, a former stucco motor lodge reborn as a kind of bohemian citadel, with a view of downtown. He often performs in the lounge there, and hosts talks with writers and musicians. Their apartment is cluttered with books and records, the spare bedroom a studio of sorts, filled with old guitars. There are makeshift shrines to Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Juan Marichal, Escovedo’s favorite baseball player as a kid, and to his seven children—six girls and a boy, ranging in age from fifteen to forty-eight.

After breakfast, Escovedo drove down Jefferson Boulevard, admiring the pawnshops and the quinceañera storefronts, and the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was cornered after the assassination up the road. Escovedo had on a straw hat, a burgundy T-shirt, stovepipe Levi’s, running shoes, and, around his neck, a caramel-colored bandanna, held with a silver clasp. He has an overbite and big cheeks, which add an affable and perhaps misdirecting ingenuousness to his presence, in person and onstage. His hair is Elvis-ish, black and combed up, with wisps falling in front of his ears, as stand-ins for sideburns. He put on a Muddy Waters song, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and set a course for Austin.

One night in 2003, Escovedo was preparing to go onstage, in an auditorium in Tempe, Arizona, when he succumbed to a wave of what felt like a bad flu. He vomited blood—three bowls of it, he said—and felt better. After the gig, he collapsed backstage and was rushed to the emergency room. In the hospital, a nurse asked him, “What are you in here for?”

“Hepatitis C,” Escovedo said.

She said, “You’re going to die if you don’t get a liver transplant.”

He’d received the diagnosis five years before, when he was forty-seven. How he’d caught hep C he didn’t know, but there had been some intravenous drug use, in the late seventies, when he was a punk rocker living in the Chelsea Hotel and the East Village. Since the diagnosis, he’d had some good months and some bad ones, but now, with advanced cirrhosis and a bleeding esophagus, it seemed as though there might not be any more months at all. In the hospital, he again started throwing up blood. A nurse said to his sister, who was at his bedside, “If we don’t do something soon, we’re going to lose him.” And then he passed out. He soon found himself in a space without walls, in a void of light, where he was visited by his children. They wore brightly colored serapes and headdresses festooned with little balls, and they were laughing and singing and playing tambourines and flutes, and grabbing onto his legs. He thought, There is nothing here but love.

When he came to, hours later, he learned that he’d received a blood transfusion. He had no health insurance, and so in the months ahead an array of friends and collaborators in the music world performed benefit concerts on his behalf. Eventually, many of these friends—among them, Lucinda Williams, Ian Hunter, John Cale—recorded a double album of covers of his songs, called “Por Vida.” Some artists had to be turned away, for lack of space. As musicians age and encounter health problems, they are constantly playing fund-raisers for one another, but Escovedo inspired an almost custodial regard among other musicians, those both more famous than he and less. A cynic might guess that he’d had enough success to touch all of them but not so much as to foster jealousy or resentment. Or maybe there was nothing there but love: here was a sensitive, agile songwriter who could rock out with the blunt force of Johnny Thunders—both a literate soul and a true punk, a humble collaborator and a plucky front man, a pussycat and a tomcat. The attention earned him a new generation of fans, including me; the support—financial and otherwise—got him through. He found a way to manage the hepatitis for the next dozen years, and got back to recording and performing.