Billy Bragg gave the best concert I ever attended. It was in the early 1990s in a school gymnasium in St. John’s. Mr. Bragg was, so the story goes, on vacation in Newfoundland, and he took some time from his whale-watching adventure to play a charity gig. He appeared onstage with a guitar and a small amplifier, and he ran through a thoroughly-entertaining, stripped-down set of many of his already-stripped-down favorites. This, you see, was the success of Mr. Bragg’s early career. An angry young man with a keen sense of humor and a knack for connecting with his fans, he could draw you in with his take on relationships in “The Saturday Boy” and “Must I Paint You A Picture,” and you would follow him to darker spots in the human heart on “Levi Stubb’s Tears.” His clever songwriting on “The Milkman of Human Kindness” and “A New England” carried the day. An unapologetic Labour Party advocate, he was never shrill in his openly partisan politics, on songs like “Between the Wars,” “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” and even “Help Save The Youth of America.”
But when he was in St. John’s, he was basking in the relative commercial success of Don’t Try This At Home (1991) whose lush musical accompaniments were hard to replicate alone. Perhaps this was a sign of trouble, a sign of things to come. Marriage, fatherhood, and the eventual revelation that Tony Blair’s government advocated things that might have made Margaret Thatcher blush had to be reflected in Bragg’s music. How could he be that clever young man anymore? I was less pleased with efforts that tried to build on the triumphs of the early 1990s: William Bloke (1996) and England, Half English (2002) left me cold, for the most part, where musical proficiency and lyrical variety stood in for early magic. An exception must be made for his two albums of newly-discovered Woody Guthrie songs, prepared in collaboration with Wilco in the late nineties, which freed Bragg to connect with his material.
So what to expect from Mr. Love and Justice, a brand new album from one of my favorite voices, a voice muted for so long that NPR recently listed him in a program naming people we’ve “grown out of”? Well, I took a flier, and I couldn’t be happier. I bought the deluxe version of the album: two discs, one solo and one with the band. I listed to the solo album first, and I listened to it repeatedly. I found tracks, like “I Keep Faith,” “M For Me,” and “Something Happened,” that stand up amongst his best relationship songs. There are even rough gems, musically, like “I Almost Killed You” and, lyrically, like “The Johnny Carcinogenic Show.” The complex politics of contemporary Britain emerge in “The Beach is Free” and “Sing Their Souls Back Home.” There are a dozen songs here with which to fall in love, and in this form they would not have been out of place in a set in 1988 or 1991.
But this need not be an exercise in nostalgia; the fully-arranged versions on the other disc have their own warmth, I must acknowledge, and these may be of greatest appeal to new fans, people for whom “How can you lie there and think of England / When you don’t even know who’s in the team” has no resonance, people who are too young to know about “Red Wedge.” I would even admit that “I Almost Killed You,” “Something Happened,” “O Freedom,” and the title track may be better with the band. That’s what happens when you fall in love with the songs: they transcend the arrangements. And two versions of each track lets old fans and new do just that.
