To listen to The Boxing Mirror (Back Porch), you'd think Alejandro Escovedo had spent the last four years battling himself rather than a life-threatening illness. From the title on down, Escovedo's seventh solo album repeatedly suggests Escovedo's brush with death encouraged him to confront a few other demons as well. "I turned my back on me, and I faced the face of who I thought I was," he sings on "Arizona," whose title refers not only to the location of Escovedo's onstage collapse, but also his recovery and spiritual detox (and, not incidentally, the place where he met his wife).

"A lot of the healing process has been getting my mind in order," Escovedo says from a tour stop. "Getting rid of things that were dragging me down and causing the illness in a way." Escovedo doesn't precisely say what those things might be, but he cites several decades of road stress, "the very deep lows and high highs of being a musician," as well as the alcohol and other substances he used to keep himself going. Essentially, he wore himself down. "For a guy that's been performing on stage for 30 years, it's really hard to break a lot of those habits," he says. "But when your doctor tells you you can stop drinking or you can die, you know that the only choice was to live."

Ironically, the treatment for Escovedo's hepatitis nearly killed him all over again, and left him too physically and spiritually drained to pick up a guitar for more than a year. But a combination of herbal remedies, acupuncture and Buddhist meditation brought Escovedo back from the brink, and to the surprisingly sanguine sound of Boxing Mirror. "I've always written about serious events in my life, and family, and the messiness of adulthood," he says. "But I think that through it all, you can find that there's hope, and there's survival. I think there's a real joy on this record that maybe I couldn't articulate before."

Fri., June 23, 7:30 p.m., $21-$29, with Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400, www.worldcafelive.com.