Alejandro Escovedo has been in the middle of several significant musical moments in the past 25 years. His membership in the Nuns during the mid '70s qualifies him as one of the Bay Area's original punk musicians, and Rank and File, which he anchored along with ex-Dils Chip and Tony Kinman, and soon after True Believers, formed with brother Javier in the '80s, placed him ahead of the alt country movement. For most of the past two decades, Escovedo has been a leading figure in the lively, much-mythologized world of Austin, Texas.

After True Believers split up, Escovedo explored other musical territory and recorded a pair of solo albums, 1992's Gravity and 1993's Thirteen Years – both just reissued, each with an extra disc of live recordings or studio outtakes.

They were shaped by the breakup of a long personal relationship and the subsequent suicide of his partner. Sorting through such debris – suicide included – is the flesh and blood of pop music. But what's most interesting, particularly in the case of Thirteen Years, is not the subject matter but the instrumentation Escovedo uses. More than half of the album's songs feature, along with a standard rock lineup, a string quartet consisting of three violins and a cello.

Escovedo's music over the years has been sometimes good but never great. As with many Austin musicians, live performance has been particularly important – the annual South by Southwest festival, and the sometimes lopsided critical attention that went with that territory, helped boost a reputation that was enhanced by its distance from the familiar arteries of the pop world. The songs on both of the reissued albums range from the quiet and meditative to upbeat Stones-style rockers, boasting solid playing, generally interesting but familiar musical ideas, and well-worn, although not necessarily bad lyrics.

The lyrics on both albums are earnest and – to be charitable – simple. A song like "Try Try Try," from Thirteen Years, sounds for all the world like ex-Austinite Lucinda Williams's "Hot Blood." In this case, Escovedo writes, "A friend said to me / You try too hard / You just spin around in circles / You never get it right." Unlike Williams's best work, which can rocket unexpectedly into pop paradise during a chorus, "Try Try Try" doesn't have much lift. But what makes it effective is moments like the simple four-measure conversation between the cello and violins that falls into what would otherwise have been aptly described as space to fill but instead is as eloquent as any on the record. Other spaces are charged with slightly off-center sections of surging acoustic guitars and, again, the strings. Simple melodic phrases are doubled in different octaves by violin and cello, and somehow, though the arrangements are marked by the same upright, earnest flavor of Escovedo's lyrics, the effect is to add an insistent ache to work that might otherwise have been prosaic.