“IT’S MY OWN FAULT, REALLY… BUT I THINK PEOPLE HAVE FORGOTTEN I CAN WRITE LOVE SONGS… SO I THINK I NEED TO WRITE SOME GROWN-UP LOVE SONGS WHICH REFLECT WHERE RELATIONSHIPS GO IN THE MIDDLE OF LIFE,” A VAGUELY DISQUIETED BILLY BRAGG TOLD THE MOUTH MAGAZINE IN THE CLOSING MOMENTS OF A PODCAST INTERVIEW LAST SUMMER.
The impression was that despite our general chat having advertised the shelves were as full as ever in his Put The World To Rights corner-shop, Bragg had drawn back the curtain for a moment and revealed that there was some sort of personal taking of stock going on through the back.
As ever, he appeared to be fully engaged with the responsibiliy of being his own figurehead – Billy Bragg: Political Campaigner – but also, for a few seconds, a private man who had reached that age when he has to ask himself hard questions regarding the way he’s gone about his business and think on the ramifications of any of the bargains he’s had to make.
Frankly, when he said “I think people have forgotten I can write love songs,” the subtle implication was that by “people” Bragg meant person, singular, and by “write love songs” he actually meant love itself: “It’s my own fault, really”…  Six months on, his thirteenth studio album is about to be delivered (TOOTH AND NAIL is released next week) and, throughout it, those nuances are born out. It’s an occasionally frail and always thoughtful record – clearly Bragg has been shouldering some weight and, indeed, undertaking something of a mid-life audit: “I took a long, hard look at who I am and what I do… and this album is the result.”
“How can a man be strong when he can’t even pick up a telephone?” Bragg questions on the heartbroken SWALLOW MY PRIDE, immediately raising the song to amongst his most soulful. It recalls the aches in THE ONLY ONE and MUST I PAINT YOU A PICTURE (both from 1988’s WORKERS PLAYTIME) but, where they were angsty and intense, sorrows here are set to the shimmering guitar, warm brass and waltz-time of classic Otis Redding, and the estranged man’s simple plea for home is weary, humbled and admitting of human failings. HANDYMAN BLUES stands up for creative types who are useless about the home, frustrated by their own shortcomings and causing disappointment to others when confronted with the simple domestic measures of manhood. Bragg concedes defeat but the fuses that need changing, the curtain rails waiting to be hung and the shed as yet unassembled are eventually balanced against the love songs written and the poetry that has put food on the table. It’s a sweet but cutting reminder that the pen can be mightier than the saw: “I’m a writer not a decorator”…
On NO-ONE KNOWS NOTHING ANYMORE Bragg faces unanswerable existential questions arising from following the progress of the Hadron Collider experiments. Later, he posits the argument that though it may very well be able to break us down into our smallest component parts and offer the solutions to quandaries on where it is that we come from and what it is that we are made of, science is too dry to explain away the soul or tell us who we are and how we should be. For all its hokum, he suggests, it is faith in salutary parts of the Bible (specifically the book of Luke) that do that, reminding us of respect and decency as we DO UNTO OTHERS…
JANUARY SONG was written in tribute to Bragg’s mother, who died two years ago, and details his feeling uptight in the days around her funeral. It’s a fitting companion to TANK PARK SALUTE (the elegy for his father on 1991’s DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME), and has him confronting mortality as he enters the age where life starts subtracting ever more rapidly. GOODBYE, GOODBYE seems almost to be Bragg bidding his own fond-hearted farewell just in case…
The beat-up Americana of TOOTH AND NAIL was crafted during a five-day session in South Pasadena, with oak-smoked producer Joe Henry (Solomon Burke, Elvis Costello, Lisa Hannigan) pushing Bragg right out of his chalk-circle vocal comfort zone by allowing only one take per track. Henry’s rootsy settings make a virtue of the dust in Bragg’s voice, and so there’s an honesty throughout which illuminates these poignant low-light porch songs.
As he sifts through the mid-life pain of his campaign, TOOTH AND NAIL can be reflective and sometimes resigned – but, as ever with the best Billy Bragg, it’s wry and it’s raw.
There’s no numbing down, here.