Must I Paint You a Picture? The Essential Billy Bragg

1 more product image	By Billy Bragg Elektra / Wea, 2003, Audio CD Customer Rating: 9 reviews   Recommend List Price: $26.98 Our Price: $19.99 (Price details) You Save: $6.99 (26%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Free Shipping on orders over $25.

Must I Paint You a Picture is a generous, two-disc, 40-track survey of Bragg's career to date. The tracklisting was apparently assembled with the help of Bragg's fans, who were asked to vote for their favourites on Bragg's website, but this democratic initiative has only been taken so far: while "Little Time Bomb", for example, was a more popular choice than, say, "The Boy Done Good", the latter is included and the former isn't. It would, of course, be uncharitable to suggest that this is reflective of the authoritarian instincts that lurk inside most socialists.

At any rate, though Bragg has always been chiefly characterised as a political songwriter, his best work has always been that which deals with the politics of the personal: there are few more acute summations of the eternal failure of the male and female to make sense to each other than his "How can you lie there and think of England when you don't even know who's in the team?" Bragg's superb love songs and love-gone-wrong songs are well represented here, from the angry, naive scratchings of "The Milkman of Human Kindness" to such older, if no wiser, musings as "Moving the Goalposts" and "Sulk". Curiously, his older, politically motivated songs now feel like they've reacquired an urgency they lacked during a 1990s largely devoid of stark ideological boundaries, when they sounded rather like quaint period pieces. The so-called war on terror and the increasing discomfort about global trade both have ready made soundtracks in "Between the Wars" and "There is Power in a Union". — Andrew Mueller

Disc 1

1. A New England
2. The Man in the Iron Mask
3. The Milkman of Human Kindness
4. To Have and to Have Not
5. A Lover Sings
6. St. Swithin's Day
7. The Saturday Boy
8. Between the Wars
9. The World Turned Upside Down - Billy Bragg, Rosselson, Leon
10. Levi Stubbs' Tears
11. Walk Away Renee - Billy Bragg, Brown, Michael [Key
12. Greetings to the New Brunette
13. There Is Power in a Union
14. Help Save the Youth of America
15. The Warmest Room
16. Must I Paint You a Picture?
17. She's Got a New Spell
18. The Price I Pay
19. Valentine's Day Is Over
20. Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Disc 2

1. Sexuality
2. Cindy of a Thousand Lives
3. Moving the Goalposts
4. Tank Park Salute
5. You Woke Up My Neighbourhood
6. Accident Waiting to Happen (Red Stars Version)
7. Sulk
8. Upfield
9. The Fourteenth of February
10. Brickbat
11. The Space Race Is Over
12. The Boy Done Good
13. Ingrid Bergman - Billy Bragg, Guthrie, Woody
14. Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key - Billy Bragg, Guthrie, Woody
15. My Flying Saucer - Billy Bragg, Guthrie, Woody
16. All You Fascists Bound to Lose (Blokes Version) - Billy Bragg, Guthrie, Woody
17. NPWA - Billy Bragg, Bragg, Billy and th
18. St. Monday
19. Some Days I See the Point
20. Take Down the Union Jack (Band Version)

Title: Must I Paint You a Picture? The Essential Billy Bragg
Sales Rank: 23517 in Music
Artist: Billy Bragg
Label: Elektra / Wea, 2003-10-28, Audio CD, 2 Discs
Package Dimensions: 5.55 x 4.97 x 0.54 inches, 0.18 pounds

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