Personal, artistic healing Illness made singer Alejandro Escovedo slow down, refocus: Ten minutes to curtain time, Alejandro Escovedo was folded like a pocketknife, throwing up blood in a Tempe, Ariz., dressing room.

He finished the show - a musical based on his father's life - then collapsed. The talk in the emergency room was of shunts and liver transplants. "I was very confused, scared," the genre-defying singer-songwriter recalls of that night nearly two years ago. "I remember hearing the nurse, 'If we don't do something quick, we're going to lose him.'" Then he passed out - "went somewhere else," he puts it. And the condition he had lived with since 1996, diagnosed as hepatitis C, had taken the wheel. Since that episode, the Texas troubadour has been to the edge and back. For months after he was stricken, Escovedo would toss in bed, battling both sickness and the treatment, a battering combination of interferon and ribavirin that turned his muscles into putty. He couldn't sleep. He lost his hair. His skin felt as if it were on fire. He wasn't sure if the drugs had made him dark and depressed, or if he was meeting some new part of himself. Without health insurance, he was beat financially. He wondered if he'd ever want to pick up his guitar again. "I had been doing the same thing for a long time," says Escovedo, 54. "I hadn't sat still. I have had time to sit and look at everything I've done and maybe where I was going to go - if I took care of myself." He credits a new, holistic approach for his current good health. The will to play and write has returned. But some things, such as the way he tours, must change. No more will he spend five straight months on buses, as he did with the True Believers, his three-guitar posse from the 1980s. The illness helped Escovedo appreciate slowing down. "The fact that I've watched my (2-year-old) daughter grow up the first couple of years is a blessing. And I'm much closer to my older children. I've witnessed the support of so many friends. I think I've found a different sense of focus inside me." Those friends staged benefits for him across the country, raising money to pay for medicine that cost him $3,000 a month. Yet friends gave him more than money. He credits them with giving him back his music. Some of the rock heroes from his youth recorded last year's "Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo." Part of the proceeds went to the Alejandro Escovedo Medical & Living Expense Fund. Another portion benefited an assistance program for other musicians with hepatitis C. "Suddenly, I was lifted in a way," he says. "It brought back all that I loved about music. I needed it."