Billy Bragg's third full-length album, 1986's Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, is an uncompromised refinement of his brash, anti-Thatcher, busking-bloke persona. Bragg's palette stretches beyond the jagged-rhythmic-guitar-plus-curious-voice approach of the first two albums: "Ideology" and "Marriage" see the addition of horns and piano, "Train Train" adds violin, and singer Kirsty MacColl and guitarist Johnny Marr make guest appearances. The slashing, lovely "Levi Stubbs' Tears," a sad slice-of-life number told from a woman's perspective, showcases the singer-songwriter's ability to write well beyond protest songs. And only Bragg could pen a love song such as "Greetings to the New Brunette" and pull it off. In an off-key yet warm warble, he almost croons, "Shirley, your sexual politics have left me all of a muddle / Shirley, we are joined in the ideological cuddle," one of pop's most delightfully awkward rhymes. And then of course there are the protest songs, such as bracing, simple, Woody Guthrie-ish "There Is Power in a Union." The record's title is taken from a 1926 poem by the poet of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky. --Mike McGonigal
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