Yep Roc Records
2006
The Internationale
About This Album
Billy Bragg usually strove to strike a balance between populist politics and the affairs of the heart on his best albums (such as Brewing Up with Billy Bragg and Talking with the Taxman About Poetry), but with his 1990 EP, The Internationale, Bragg set aside the notion of balance for the day and recorded seven explicitly political numbers. The material ranges from the openly patriotic (a lovely version of William Blake's "Jerusalem," which Bragg has championed as a candidate for the English national anthem) to the pained and bitter (Eric Bogle's heart-wrenching "My Youngest Son Came Home Today") and the satirically humorous (the anti-capitalist "The Marching Song of the Covert Battalions"), though the latter is the only new-from-the-ground-up song on the EP ("The Internationale" does feature new lyrics from Bragg and "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night" rewrites Earl Robinson's famous tune about Joe Hill). Bragg is clearly putting his heart and soul into all these songs, but there's a certain stiffness to "The Internationale" and "The Red Flag" that he isn't able to shake off, and "Nicaragua Nicaraguita" is in serious need of a translation, since Bragg's passionate bellow all but swallows up whatever meaning it may have in Spanish.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,11,12,13,14 and 15)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

Disc 2

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.