Billy Bragg has veered off-and-on, for more than 25 years, between a full-band approach and the pointed clamor of his solo electric guitar. He's toggled between topical protest songs and gritty, non-romanticized ruminations on relationships.
But in the end it's all about politics—both the politics of the bedroom and the politics of parliaments. And underlying it is a fierce, red-flag-waving hankering for social justice, from a decidedly leftist perspective.
The peerless British songwriter/agitator comes to the Calvin Theatre on Friday for a solo show, one of only three Stateside appearances on his current visit.
When it's suggested he has an "unflagging" dedication to The Movement, he quickly interrupts to disagree.
"Oh, trust me, man, I have days when I flag—believe me. I have flagging days. But generally, my positive average is high, let's say it like that," Bragg says with a chuckle, during a wide-ranging telephone interview from his home in Dorset, England.
Bragg sounds, as usual, like an unrepentant idealist. He dots his conversation with wide-eyed phrases like "making the world a better place." It's an irony-free zone.
This perspective has been long out of fashion; perhaps not coincidentally, so too has popular political engagement, in many quarters of this country, at least. Bragg is someone who came of political age playing gigs to support striking coal workers in early-'80s England, with Thatcherism on its heady rise. And he hasn't stopped agitating since. He's a one-man reminder of a time before the word "earnest" became a cultural epithet.
"For me the real problem is cynicism," he says. "Holding onto your own optimism, damping down that cynicism that we all feel when we watch the TV news every night—overcoming that and hanging on to your belief in a better world, that's the real challenge when someone like Obama comes in and everyone's expectations are so huge."
Bragg's combination of songwriting achievement and political activism, sustained over such a long period of time, makes him a very particular sort of icon.
"What's the point of getting bitter? I learned a lot of that off of Woody [Guthrie], I think. He never wrote a cynical song in his life. All his songs were positive, powerful, empowering…You're trying to communicate to other people, both to express your own ideas but also to empower them to do whatever it is they need to do," he says.
Bragg's political work may not be cynical, but a song like "Wish You Were Her" from 1991's Don't Try This At Home ("A brief distraction from your memory is all that I had hoped that she might be") is by no means an isolated example in his catalog of a sour love song that sounds pretty, well, cynical.
"Save the romance and the bitterness for the love songs," he explains. "It's kind of sweet and savory, really, isn't it? You don't want to get the two mixed up. They're both very important, but they don't really go that well together."
The reference to Woody Guthrie is not an idle one. Bragg's most celebrated work might very well be his late-'90s collaboration with Wilco, setting unpublished Guthrie lyrics to original music. And Guthrie may be the chief model for Bragg's career, as he travels widely and gigs on behalf of traditional leftist causes, occasionally adapting old folks' songs and union hymns while also writing new music based on personal experience. (A few years ago he even wrote an adaptation of Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues" called "Bush War Blues.") And while he's collaborated with a host of accompanists over the years, from Johnny Marr to Mike Mills and Peter Buck—and his last two albums were recorded with his band The Blokes—he's more likely than not to strap on his electric guitar and hit the road solo. Indeed, Bragg may be the last troubadour.
So what happens to the social critic/songwriter when something as ostensibly positive happens as the first election of a president with an African American father?
"It would affect me as a songwriter if it hadn't been accompanied by the collapse of free-market capitalism," he remarks matter-of-factly.
Bragg's public persona is so tied up in his political activism, it may be easy for the casual observer to overlook his remarkably deft way of describing the realities of romantic relationships.
Indeed, even without the whole activist icon piece, the arc of his "relationship songs" alone forms a remarkably mature and insightful body of work, peppered with everyday poetry and informed by an eagle's-eye-view of the contours of the heart.
There's the young man celebrating single life in "A New England" (Life's A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, 1983), the bachelor balking at marriage while gamely trying to sound self-righteous about his cold feet in "Greetings to the New Brunette" (Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, 1986), the crushed romantic trying to salvage a flagging relationship in "Must I Paint You A Picture" (Workers' Playtime, 1988), the blissful husband trying to remember the moment he first saw his wife-to-be in "The Fourteenth of February" (William Bloke, 1996), the family man insisting his wife's problems are "our problems now" in "M For Me" (Mr. Love and Justice, 2006).
Taken as a whole, it's like a graceful case study, penned over two and a half decades, of male emotional evolution. It's difficult to think of another body of work comparable in this way.
Bragg's most recent record, Mr. Love and Justice (2006), stands among his best work. It is split just slightly toward personal songs, which can't help but reflect a happy marriage and home life. The political focus is as sharp and fiery as always ("O Freedom" is the tale of someone arrested and subjected to the Bush-era, torture-facilitating practice of "extraordinary rendition"), but the sound is more relaxed than ever. Indeed, that electric guitar, prone to making such a glorious racket in Bragg's hands, is hardly to be found.
It was his first album in six years. In the intervening time he wrote The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging, a book examining the nature of British identity and seeking a sort of nationalism that is neither xenophobic nor jingoistic.
"After two and a half years of polemical focus, when I delivered the book I suddenly started writing songs again. And they were love songs," Bragg remembers. He brought The Blokes into the studio and declared they should spend the first week without playing any electric instruments.
"It was a gentler, more ballady set of songs, so it seemed to me it might be nice to start in a more organic way, start acoustically," he explains. "So that's how we started. And that kind of defined the sound of the record, which I'm quite pleased about."
Though topical songs have been done before, as have beautifully rendered relationship studies, one of the hardest songwriting chores might be to map the space where these overlap. An anthem is great for political marches, but more valuable may be the song that forces the listener to examine his or her personal life in the context of great affairs.
Bragg trod this ground wonderfully in two songs on the William Bloke album. In the sublime "The Space Race Is Over," he recounts childhood memories of watching the Apollo 11 moon landing, and rues sadly (and somehow, believably) the way the end of the Cold War means he'll never travel to the moon himself. It's a thoughtful lament from a first-time father about finally, definitively, growing up—and it's heartbreaking.
In "From Red To Blue," he examined that most personal and basic mode of political expression: voting for a chosen political party. His only child, Jack, was at that time a toddler, and in this song he addressed an unnamed peer who is "a father now" and has (in the British political color coding of the time) abandoned progressive causes and "drifted from red to blue."
"I'm not really interested in nostalgia for the 1980s. What I'm interested in is how people hold onto their ideals and how they articulate them. That's what 'Red to Blue' is all about," he says. "It's easy to give up. It's easy to become cynical. That's the soft option. What's much harder is to hold onto your ideas and try and move forward with them and actually try to put them into action. That's really, really difficult."
Back when Bragg went on the BBC's Top of the Pops at the height of the English miners' strike and played "Between the Wars," it was one of the great moments of radical subversion of mainstream television. But 25 years later, as such a definable entity, does Bragg still have the ability to surprise an audience, to tell them something they weren't prepared to hear?
Bragg disputes the "preaching to the choir" concept. As an example, he raises the themes of The Progressive Patriot: "You may agree with me that we need to fight against racism. But you may not agree with me that we need to come up with an idea of English identity, a strong idea of our national identity that is inclusive. We shy away from talking about the politics of identity because we believe in internationalism. That leaves a vacuum that the racists and fascist parties can easily fill." Much of his audience may share a similar view in a large sense, he says, but when it comes down to details there are plenty of issues that offer room for persuasion.
"You've got to seek those issues out, confront those issues," he insists, "because your ultimate goal is to offer the audience a different perspective. Rather than to merely confirm them in their worldview, you've got to try and move them along a bit."
