Billy Bragg Is Off The Rails And Ready To Write About Trump

When UK singer-songwriter Billy Bragg invests his mind into a project there are no half measures, and no telling where his thought processes will take him.

He recently embarked on a quest to write a book about a transformative period in English music and ended up taking a detour which led to Shine A Light, the project with US artist Joe Henry that found them riding the rails through the American heartland while recording a collection of classic railway-themed blues, folk, and country songs.

"For the last couple of years I've been working on a book about the period in our cultural history when British pop music went from being jazz-based to guitar-led, and that all hinged on Lonnie Donegan having a hit with Rock Island Line in January 1956," Bragg explains. "Donegan was the first British artist to get into the charts playing a guitar, which in turn then kicked off the whole skiffle explosion which then leads to The Beatles and the rest of British music in the 1960s. Everything basically has its roots in skiffle, right up to bands like Mott The Hoople and Dr Feelgood. So while writing that book and attempting to put skiffle into its proper cultural context, it dawned on me that the majority of the material of that time was made up of railroad songs."

"It had to be conducted like we did so we could try and discover what the railway means to America in a modern construct."

Having enticed long-time friend Henry into the project, the pair decided that simply recording a record of train-themed songs wouldn't suffice, instead approaching the project like a field recording. The two troubadours boarded an LA-bound train in Chicago and for the next four days recorded a variety of old standards while the train paused for passengers at various stops, sometimes working track-side and sometimes in train station waiting rooms, always with an eye on the soon-to-depart train, lest they be left behind.

"If we'd recorded it in a studio we might as well have called it Bill And Joe Like Trains," Bragg laughs. "It had to be conducted like we did so we could try and discover what the railway means to America in a modern construct, and it allowed us to meet a lot of people and hear their stories. They actually try and make it so that you sit with different people each night in the dining cart, so you hear a lot of stories about why people have ended up on the train: it's a great way of meeting people and getting some different perspectives.

"It's strange though because in America only a certain type of person catches the train long-distance: either they're not wealthy enough to fly or they have some sort of condition or they don't want to show their ID to catch a plane. Or, they're two musician blokes trying to unravel some mystery from another time," Bragg chuckles. "But it was great fun despite the unique logistical hurdles it threw up at us, such as how not only are you trying to get a good take, you're trying to get it before the train leaves. There is a certain amount of adrenaline involved in that, which keeps you on your toes."

Fortunately for those Bragg fans pining for the fiery leftist polemic he brought to his early work when landing on the scene in the '80s, this current period of political upheaval - which manifested in the UK firstly with the Brexit debacle, exacerbated by both Trump's victory in the US Presidential race and the general rise of the alt-right - has got him itching to return to the fray.

"It's too much, it's all encompassing, you can't get away from it anywhere in the media at the moment," he bemoans. "The alt-right is trying to block anything exhibiting empathy from being aired in public, it's better for them to divide and keep fair-minded people apart. I've finally realised recently that it's time for me to stop posting rants about the disaster we're facing on social media and to start writing songs about it."