Anger still an energy

Billy Bragg – The Million Things That Never Happened

Billy Bragg is still looking back in anger on his 10 th studio album, which he calls the first pandemic blues album of our times, but also a heart felt paean to human resilience.

He continues his journey into country music, using pedal steel and lap steel guitar, banjo, fiddle and five-string violin on tracks such as opener ‘I Should

Have Seen It Coming’ and bluegrass hoedown ‘Freedom Doesn’t Come For Free’ about a libertarian utopia that goes horribly wrong.

Donald Trump inspires the gospel-tinged ‘The Buck Doesn’t Stop Here No More’, while Bragg’s political side is also seen on ‘Mid-Century Modern’, where the Hammond organ evokes Blonde On Blonde-era Bob Dylan.

Here the 1980s firebrand admits “positions I took long ago feel comfy as an old armchair” but says “the kids that pull the statues down, they challenge me to see the gap between the man I am and the man I want to be”.

Covid is addressed in ‘Good Days & Bad Days’ (“boring old normal – how attractive it seems”) and the downbeat title track, on the weddings, celebrations and the “kiss for the dying” lost to the pandemic.

Bragg has always split his songs between the personal and the political, with the single ‘I Will Be Your Shield’, about love in the time of Covid, and ‘I Believe In You’ among the former.

The final track, ‘Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained’, about time wasted falling down social media rabbit holes, is co-written by his son, Jack Valero.

Here “the angry old men say it was better back then when we kept the aspidistra flying” are rejected as Bragg shows that, now 63 and more than four decades into his recording career, he’s rejecting the false certain ties of nostalgia and moving forwards.