Billy Bragg & Joe Henry
Shine A Light

THE REVIEW

«Shine A Light» is a beautiful record.

I had the first sensation when the video was released online in the summer announcing the project and the song that ideally gives it the title.

Then, few other songs followed, but enough for the sensation to solidify.

Until September 23, when it was released.

And today that sensation is a certainty: this record is beautiful.

It is a themed album, about stations and trains.

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The countless train journeys are, for me, a precious box of memories.

Like when, on the train, I met an old teenage flame after years, a feeling that was not reciprocated by the way.

For this reason alone, «Shine A Light» would still be a beautiful record.

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But it's not just that.

It's that «Shine A Light» features Billy Bragg.

Billy Bragg, by now, is one of the family.

My brother introduced him to me, struck by his first records, and, under the pretext of giving it as a gift to me, brought home «Talking With The Taxman About Poetry».

A few months later, he took me with him to the concert Billy played at Castel Sant'Angelo. If not the very first, it was one of the first concerts I attended, and the emotions I felt were so intense that even today I can still hear the inevitable post-concert ringing in my ears, when the amplifiers are off, even the stage lights, and you decide to head home.

It's a thirty-year-old story, Billy had just released «Talking With The Taxman About Poetry», caught in a magnificent transitional moment, forced to question whether it was better to vote red for himself or green for his son, as someone expertly summarized.

I took a liking to Billy Guitar right away, and I like him even more today, if that’s possible.

Today his hair is all white and he’s grown a white beard too, he's put aside the electric guitar and picked up an acoustic one, his music no longer clings to the punk roughness that formed it, but rather to folklore, understood in its original sense of the study of popular tradition and its manifestations.

In this sense, «Shine A Light» is the ideal continuation of «Mermaid Avenue», the monumental work accomplished with Wilco on Woody Guthrie's texts, now twenty years ago.

The three volumes of «Mermaid Avenue» are beautiful records, in the same way that «Shine A Light» is a beautiful record, here and now.

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After weeks spent traveling together on the same trains, I asked her why she had never consented to my courtship. «I considered you too superficial, not serious» or something like that. We met when I was fifteen and she was fourteen, there you go.

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«Shine A Light» features Joe Henry.

Joe Henry, through my own fault, I’ve known him for far less time than Billy.

Indeed, yes, I've always been quite superficial, and I had never noticed that on so many records I appreciate - from Allen Toussaint to Aaron Neville, from Ani Di Franco to Lisa Hannigan - Joe Henry's name is prominently displayed there as the producer.

No, I got to know Joe in his capacity as a musician, thanks to the beautiful «Invisible Hour» from 2014, an album suspended in rarefied folk atmospheres, between Van Morrison's «Astral Weeks» and Leonard Cohen's «Songs From A Room», without of course reaching those heights, otherwise they would have much more yelled about the miracle, but still a record truly worthy of mention.

His debut dates back to 1986, and now I'm slowly catching up on lost ground, with great satisfaction.

Just as Wilco proved to be the ideal companions for Billy in «Mermaid Avenue», so Joe is the ideal companion in «Shine A Light»: if Billy is action, the passionate proponent of an ideal, Joe is the word, the theorist reconstructing that ideal from many minimal stories.

The common opinion is that action speaks with a clearer voice than words; but what I understood, or misunderstood, is that, without words, the action is little more than nothing.

Similarly, without Joe, this album would not have been as beautiful as it is.

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A little surprised by that answer, at twenty, I began to reflect on my superficiality and lack of seriousness.

She was right, and as often in my life, it's someone else who is right about me.

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«Shine A Light» is thirteen songs from the folk tradition, composed in the first half of the twentieth century.

Rather, they are thirteen minimal stories that, more or less in passing, also talk about stations and trains, but most of all they are the stories of the women and men who live those stations and trains.

They are mostly famous songs because they have been played and replayed thousands of times over the years and have now become part of the popular and cultural heritage, from «Rock Island Line» to «The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore», from «The Midnight Special» to «In The Pines», from «Gentle On My Mind» to «Hobo’s Lullaby».

However, they have rarely sounded as intense, and involved. Just for voices and guitars, those of Billy and Joe.

It could be described as a live album because Billy and Joe play in stations, on trains, and in the background, you can distinguish all the noises you would expect to hear in similar circumstances: trains arriving and then departing, travelers' conversations, workers working, goods unloaded and new ones loaded onto wagons, the applause of some curious passerby who stopped to understand what those two are doing and thus misses his train and will have to wait for the next one to pass.

Disturbing noises? Absolutely not, on the contrary, that's what makes «Shine A Light» a lively record, rather than a live record. And a beautiful record.

My record collection is lost in the most indefinite disorder, some records disordered alphabetically, others chronologically, others emotionally.

Now «Shine A Light» is emotionally disordered, alongside Johnny Cash's «Unearthed», tomorrow who knows.

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What to retort came to mind only much later, as always, and I did so maintaining something along the lines that I had since grown and matured and had even acquired a bit of common sense.

«Only that I am no longer fourteen years old», exact words and those I will never forget.

«Shine A Light» I will gift to her.