Since he has always demanded truth from politicians and sincerity in music, Billy Bragg presumably wasn't just pandering to his audience when the city of Minneapolis came up in conversation.
"That's somewhere past Madison, isn't it?" the British folk/punk hero joked, but then (as he's wont to do in concert) he turned serious on a dime.
"From the very first time I came into this country and played outside the coasts, Minneapolis was the first and remains the foremost. The people there understand where I'm coming from. I've always been appreciated there, and it's the only place I go back to all the time. It's better than Chicago. It's better than Detroit. I feel at home in Minneapolis. I just wish it was warmer."
True to his word, he returns Friday (but is skipping Detroit) on a tour for his first new album in six years, evocatively titled "Mr. Love & Justice."
Bragg took a break from music following his last album, "England-Half English," a record seething over England's post-9/11 rise in anti-immigrant fear-mongering. He felt so strongly, he decided to write a book about the issue and his working-class brand of liberalism, publishing "The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging" in 2006.
Surprisingly, there's little of that venom and vigor on "Mr. Love & Justice." The record mostly eschews Bragg's political brand of songwriting for more personal, everyday themes, including marriage and faith.
How ironic that -- when the world seems awash in sociopolitical furor -- Billy Bragg went out and made a record that sounds hopeful, romantic and even content.
"I think there are more love songs on the album because writing that book was such a polemical expression -- I got it all out," said Bragg, who now lives a family-centered life in an oceanside town in southern England. "When I cleared the deck and looked to see what songs would come through, I was happy that a lot of them were about relationships and those kind of issues. There's a balance that's to be struck between love and justice."
