How can we connect to this national mythology in the first part of the 21st century, where the once mighty rails appear to be an anachronistic, yet still-potent vehicle for moving freight from place to place? In the pursuit of a great idea, two fine musicians boarded a passenger train in Chicago in 2016 and rode those mythic American rails all the way to L. A. The result is the wonderful disc recorded by Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, entitled Shine a Light: Field Recordings From the Great American Railroad. Bragg, who is British, seems to understand the American psyche far better than most Americans. The evidence is in both his work here and with Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue series, where many unknown Woody Guthrie lyrics were put to music, a project which yielded three fine albums. Read more