Billy Bragg releases his first new studio album in five years “Tooth & Nail” on March 18 2013. Available formats are CD, LP and a limited special edition CD+DVD Bookpack. The limited special edition Bookpack includes the CD, a 36 page booklet containing exclusive photos and a collection of columns written by Billy originally published in Q magazine between 2008 and 2011, plus a DVD of 10 promotional videos that Billy made for his singles between 1986 – 2002. “Tooth & Nail” was recorded over a whirlwind five-day session with Grammy Award winning producer Joe Henry (whose impeccable production credits include Solomon Burke, Aimee Mann, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint) in his South Pasadena studio. Working with a small band of musicians whose talents had recently appeared on records by the likes of Bon Iver, Lana del Rey and Regina Spektor, the performances have a wonderfully spontaneous feel. The results are, according to Billy, a return to the rootsy sound of 1998’s Mermaid Avenue sessions he recorded with Wilco – drawing on soul, country and folk music influences to explore the ups and downs of relationships that have stood the test of time. ‘In 2011, I took a long, hard look at who I am and what I do. This album is the result.’ Billy Bragg January 2013.
Billy Bragg’s first studio album since 2008’s Mr Love & Justice – and his 13th in total – presents a very laidback, mellow side of the activist and singer.
Recorded in South Pasadena, California by producer Joe Henry, these 12 songs, much like his collaborations with Wilco in 1998 and 2000, are infused heavy with Americana and country influences.
While those Mermaid Avenue records consisted of Bragg setting previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics to music, here there’s only one cover – a lilting, gentle take on I Ain’t Got No Home, which was originally popularised by Guthrie himself.
A sadly prescient tale of a wandering worker struggling to survive in a rich man’s world, Bragg’s take on the song is appropriately dejected and desolate, and it’s easy to imagine him lost in the vast and dusty deserts of the American southwest.
But the setting of these songs is much closer to home – a not-so-new England poisoned by corporate greed and political corruption. “This,” Bragg declares on opener January Song, “is how the end begins.”
What follows is a simultaneous snapshot and critique of modern life: the mellow rage that pervades the countrified defiance of Handyman Blues; the hopeful optimism – replete with whistling solo – of Tomorrow’s Going to Be a Better Day; and, most tellingly, There Will Be a Reckoning’s powerful rallying cry against “the politicians who led us to this fate”.
But Bragg also assumes the role of the broken, both in the despondency of Swallow My Pride and the mournful farewell of Goodbye, Goodbye. To say that this is Bragg’s Nebraska is not entirely true, but these songs share with that album its numb desperation, its downtrodden narratives and its musical heritage.
That heritage might mean that he sounds less English than usual, but this is still a quintessential Billy Bragg album. Through its songs he conveys truths about this country in a way that few other English songwriters, if any, are able to do.
–Mischa Pearlman
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