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Must I Paint You A Picture?: The Essential Billy Bragg

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Billy Bragg

 
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Must I Paint You A Picture?: The Essential Billy Bragg
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Avg: 4.0 (176 ratings)

Billy gets off the soap box and sings his love letters.

  • We Say...

    Review by J. Edward Keyes

    Too often sacrificed in the rush to create Billy Bragg, post-Guthrie socialist folkie is Billy Bragg, hopeless romantic. It's odd and unbelievable that politics somehow became sexier than, well, sex, but so goes the strange and crazy world. So let this collection stand as a testament to the other Billy Bragg, the one who pours out his heart in secret to the woman who will never know his name. The character is perfectly suited to Bragg — he's a funny-looking bloke who can't really sing and has a harsh and intrusive accent, and those imperfections only make his tales of unrequited love sting longer and harder.

    "The Milkman of Human Kindness" offers tokens of his devotion, but then slips out unnoticed. The title track is a repeated plea, a little more heartbreaking each time through. "The Price I Pay" is pure straight sorrow, Bragg sighing "That's the price I pay for loving you the way that I do" over pirouetting piano. Is this the voice of a firebrand activist, or the soft plea of a shrinking violet? Bragg approaches both topics with the same directness, preferring to state outright rather than hint or imply. Case in point, the speedy, spectacular "A New England," where Bragg lays out his m.o.: "I don't want to change the world/ I'm not looking for a new England/ I'm just looking for another girl."

  • They Say...

    Review by Mark Deming, All Music Guide

    In 1983, Billy Bragg was a guy with a cheap electric guitar, a rough but passionate voice, and a knack for writing and singing straight from the heart whether he was discussing leftist political concerns or the mysterious interactions between men and women. The guy has a band and the political issues that have caught his attention are trickier 20 years later, but he's still enchanted and puzzled by love, and hasn't stopped writing worthwhile songs about it. Must I Paint You a Picture? The Essential Billy Bragg is a two-disc, 40-song compilation that does an admirable job of capturing the hills and valleys of Bragg's recording career, opening up with "A New England" from his debut EP, Life's a Riot With Spy vs. Spy, and closing with a cut from 2002's England, Half English. A spin through this set suggests that Bragg's best (or at least most affecting) work arrived in the early stages of his career, as disc one (which follows Bragg through Worker's Playtime) is a decidedly more solid and absorbing listen than disc two (the material from the disappointing William Bloke in particular weighs down the collection's second act), and his love songs have stood the test of time a shade better than his political material (the miners' strike may be over, but broken hearts are timeless). But there are plenty of gems to be found throughout this collection, and Must I Paint You a Picture? serves as a potent reminder that in the grand tradition of Bob Dylan, even Bragg's lesser albums contain a handful of truly memorable songs worth hearing; if this isn't the ideal Billy Bragg collection, it's an excellent introduction, a solid career overview, and a lovely reminder of how much he has to say about the heart and the mind. Initial pressings come with a ten-song bonus disc that adds several hard to find selections, including Bragg's Anglophile rewrite of "Route 66," a telling duet with the late Ted Hawkins, and a bootleg remix that merges Bragg with the Hives.

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