Alejandro Escovedo was having second thoughts. He’d started a new song, but “here comes this line, ‘I’m in love with love / and it’s broke me in two,'” he recalls by phone from Austin. “To be honest, I didn’t want to sing that. I thought it was a terrible song, but I think that was not so much about what I really thought about the song as a song, but what I was saying in the song, which was really bare and naked.” Escovedo’s guitarist David Pulkingham encouraged him to stay with it and soon, people were trying to sing along to early versions – often before they knew the words they were trying to sing.

The song is “Anchor,” the lead track from Escovedo’s new album, Street Songs of Love. Escovedo plays the Parish at the House of Blues Monday night, and he’ll feature the new album, which started with little concept more than to write some “cool rock ‘n’ roll songs.” Then his long-time relationship broke up, and that led to an unplanned meditation of love. “The record dictated itself; it led me to where it ended,” Escovedo says. “It’s more naked emotionally than Real Animal was.”

Such subject matter has led many musicians to make sulky records, but Street Songs of Love is anything but. “Someone referred to me as ‘the Lord of the Dark Aura,'” he says, laughing. “Nobody wants to talk to that guy at the party.” Instead, it’s a rock ‘n’ roll album first, driven by guitars and drawing from a love of punk and glam rock. It’s a side of him that he says never left, even when he was playing with string quartets and orchestras. There are no strings on Street Songs of Love, though. They’re there on 2008’s Real Animal, the autobiographical look back at his life in music from New York punk days around Max’s Kansas City to punk bands in California to the first indie wave in 1980s as a member of True Believers. “By the end of Real Animal, I’d had enough of the strings. I needed to hear the two guitars, bass and drums. I needed to simplify things.”

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A number of people helped facilitate Escovedo’s recent drift back in a punkier direction. Part of it comes from being managed now by Jon Landau, who also manages Bruce Springsteen. “It changed my life,” Escovedo says. “The Today Show, the Democratic National Convention – those don’t happen to some songwriter from Texas.” But the higher profile forced him to rethink about how to present himself and his music. “What about the things from the past can fit into this thing now?”

He also added bassist Bobby Daniels to his band, which includes long-time bandmates Hector Munoz and David Pulkingham. “When I said, ‘Remember that first Damned single?’ or ‘Remember that Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin song, “Crawfish”?’ – he knows that stuff as well as I do, so he gives me a nice musical partner.”

Once again, Escovedo turned to fellow traveler Chuck Prophet to help with the songwriting. Ironically, as Escovedo’s music has become progressively autobiographical, he’s looked for outside help to write it.

“I was a very natural writer,” Escovedo says. “I just wrote. It was very simple for me, but after 10 albums and tackling this autobiographical album, Real Animal, I felt I needed someone to guide me. I was too close. Chuck helps me focus in on it and tighten it up in a way I don’t do if I’m on my own.

Escovedo also returned to Tony Visconti, who’d produced Real Animal. Visconti has made an indelible mark of his own on rock ‘n’ roll, having produced the career-defining albums for T. Rex and David Bowie. Visconti recorded the album in a situation far from glam London – a converted horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky. They worked hard on the album, but Escovedo appreciated Visconti’s calm. “He’s a beautiful human being,” Escovedo says. “The important part of Tony Visconti is not only his vast musical knowledge and the records he made and the way he produced them, but what he brings out in me and in the musicians that play with me, something you didn’t know existed in you until he showed it to you.”

Part of Escovedo’s charm is that the rock ‘n’ roll fan in him is often in view, and that’s also the case when he talks about Visconti. ” It’s beautiful to be in the studio and he says, ‘Here’s what I did with Marc (Bolan).'”

Alejandro Escovedo and the Sensitive Boys play House of Blues’ Parish Monday at 8 p.m. Tickets are on sale now.