For Alejandro Escovedo, a diagnosis of hepatitis C marked a turning point. The new album will surprise a lot of people, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea

The once lounge-bar lifestyle of Alejandro Escovedo - former punk rocker and, for the past 10 years and more, something of a visionary in the Americana genre - has been pulled up short and sharp.

Speaking to him at the recent roots festival in Kilkenny, an event he was due to perform at three years ago, he tells me that a few days prior to his departure in 2003 he began to bleed internally. He was rushed to an emergency room, and diagnosed with hepatitis C. Thus began more than two years of different treatments, some of which were devastating in themselves.

At one point he found himself even sicker than before he started. It was when Escovedo discontinued using one medicine that he started to climb out of what he terms the "abyss" of sickness.

"It changed my life profoundly," says Escovedo (Al to his friends) who the previous night had played an astonishing, life-affirming concert at the Watergate Theatre. "You begin to understand what it is that's really important in life. That's a cliche, but such understanding seems to eliminate some of the excess out of your life. You also begin to understand things about yourself as to where your actions have brought you to, or will lead to, if you persist on following certain paths that are unhealthy for you - not just physically, but spiritually and socially."

The most dramatic change in the singer's life is that he no longer allows alcohol into his system. Escovedo is the first to admit that this is both a good and bad thing. Alcohol was very definitely part of his former lifestyle, he says; as a social drinker, it formed part of the "make-up" of his band as they travelled from gig to gig, country to country.

A number of people, he imparts, will say that he's not as much fun as he used to be. Does he really believe that? "Oh, it may or may not be the case," he shrugs, and smiles the smile of someone who knows something better. "But sobriety has a multitude of meanings. Last night, after the gig, people were celebrating the fact that their football team won the hurling match; there were a large number of very drunk people, and that made me uneasy."

How? "Well, I'm no longer on the same wavelength as people who get drunk. It's funny when you stop doing what was so much a part of your life, in which what you imbibe alters your personality. You find that the things you thought were funny aren't as funny any more. Also, knowing the results of what excessive drinking can do to you - and I'm not saying that everyone ends up in the same place, but the possibilities are definitely there - makes me a little bit . . . I don't know, I feel for people.

"Back in the States, I'm approached by people who also have hepatitis C, and usually they come to me after the shows; they want to know what it was like for me, what I've done to maintain the disease, to keep it in check. And these are people who, for the most part, are very drunk.

"But they don't really want to hear that they have to stop drinking, or that they are killing themselves.

It's quite simple - if you know you have hepatitis C and you continue

drinking alcohol, you are destroying your body."

And just think of the money you've saved. "There is that! The other thing is that I look at my friends in the band and family members who drink, and sometimes after a long night of drinking they don't feel so great the next day. I'm certainly glad I'm not part of that any more."

Escovedo has used his new-found sobriety wisely; his new album, The Boxing Mirror, is a string-drenched affair produced by former Velvet Underground member John Cale. Those expecting a sunny mix'n'match of Mex/Tex/Americana will be startled to discover instead a moody blend of Velvet Underground disturbance and sombre ruminations on serious topics - not too surprising, considering Escovedo's experiences of the past three years.

The use of a string quintet, says Escovedo, lends his music a more recognisably cinematic sense. "Erik Satie and Bernard Herrmann have always been influences. If you couple very primitive rock'n'roll riffs and add the beautiful cinematic grandeur of strings, then you come up with something unusual. It was for those reasons I chose John Cale as producer. When I was a teenager, there were always the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones arguments. For me, it was always Velvet Underground, and so the use of dissonance - the way Cale played the viola, his classical music background, his album Paris 1919, and then all the ground-breaking records he was involved in - was important to me."

The Boxing Mirror, says Escovedo, is the epitome of the music he wanted to create in a cinematic context. Sweetness and light have been dispensed with, Cale's approach having finally nailed down what Escovedo himself has been trying to do musically for some time - "to take a chance, to make the strings sound more than just organic strings, and to make sure the arrangements have a little more dissonance than before".

"I think it'll surprise a lot of people, because so many think I'm more alt.country than anything else. In America, I'm not easily defined, and that's wonderful because it gives me a lot of freedom. It has all the elements of things that we've done in the past, but it's brought them into a totally different light. The thing that I love most about the record is that it sounds fresh. It's a new beginning for me, in so many ways. It's symbolic of what I've been through. You come close to death, you face it, and you find yourself almost washed of a lot of things in your past. It's a new skin, almost, and this record symbolises that for me. It has opened my eyes to a lot of things. I'm able to relate to my musicians differently as a result of all I've been through. More compassion, more love - making music now is a totally different experience from what it was four years ago."

And what about the perception of him as some kind of figurehead for the by-now sprawling alt.country movement?

"I've been around a long time," replies Escovedo, "and I've survived mutations of what may be perceived as alternative country. But people might not know that I started out playing punk rock, so my true love is rock'n'roll. If I represent anything, then it's a freedom of staying outside the mainstream and making music that's true to my heart."

The Boxing Mirror is on EMI. Escovedo plays in Whelan's, Dublin, tonight