Singer and activist Billy Bragg coming to the Basie in Red Bank

Billy Bragg is back.

Bragg, the Grammy-nominated English singer/songwriter, author and activist, visits our shores this fall for the first time since 2019. But the America that Bragg is returning to is quite different than the one he last visited just a few years ago.

Long a voice for workers’ rights, Bragg used the proceeds from his 1984 “Between the Wars” EP to support striking British coal miners. Two years later he unleashed an instant classic anthem with the rallying cry “There is Power in a Union” on his 1986 LP “Talking with the Taxman About Poetry.”

On Tuesday, Sept. 27, Bragg will be at the Buckhead in Atlanta to launch a 14-date North American tour. He’ll be traveling a country where the likes of coffee shop baristas, grocery store workers, journalists and countless others are taking collective action.

“Certainly in the time that I’ve been coming to the U.S., nearly 40 years, it’s more unionized action than I’ve ever seen before,” said Bragg. “And it’s very similar in the U.K. ... We already have the unions in place but they’ve become more active. They’ve become more willing to take action on their own. … It’s absolutely crucial that ordinary people get involved.”

Bragg’s latest album, the 2021 LP “The Million Things That Never Happened,” is by and large a world-weary and heartfelt meditation on life in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown — and Bragg said that world events may be attributable for shifting worker attitudes across the globe.

“People have suddenly realized they have to take action, and I wonder if it comes out of the collective action of the pandemic?” he said. “The idea of people working together for the greater good by wearing masks, taking precautions, getting immunized, (I wonder) whether somehow that’s reminded people that if you do work together for the greater good rather than just staying in your own silo that you can achieve positive things.”

Bragg’s tour brings him to the Keswick Theatre in the Philadelphia suburb of Glenside, Pa., on Saturday, Oct. 1, followed by engagements at the Town Hall in Manhattan on Sunday, Oct. 2, and the Vogel at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

Accountability has long been a principal concern of Bragg’s. “NPWA,” meaning “no power without accountability,” from the 2002 album “England, Half English,” made that clear. But new songs such as “Mid-Century Modern” or “Freedom Doesn’t Come Free,” while spiritual successors of a sort to “NPWA,” turn the call for accountability inward.

“ ... If you’re asking for other people to be accountable, then you yourself have to take on the responsibility yourself to make yourself accountable, to allow yourself to be questioned,” he said.

Bragg, 64, comes from a generation who fought through the era of punk, Rock Against Racism, anti-Reagan, anti-Thatcher activism. But he’s not content to rest on his radical laurels.

“We’ve kind of earned our stripes, but that doesn’t give us the right to sit on the sidelines, telling young people how to do things,” he said.

That sentiment rings loud and clear on “Mid-Century Modern”: “I'm used to people listening to what I have to say, and I find it hard to think that it might help if I just stepped away, and adjusted my perceptions to reflect reality and the gap between the man I am and the man I want to be.”

“I’m trying to both talk to myself and also talk to other people, particularly men, of my generation who are maybe stuck in their ways,” Bragg said of the song and its subjects.

Bragg has carried on his message beyond song and stage — his thoughts can be found in greater depth in his latest book, 2019’s “The Three Dimensions of Freedom.”

“It’s not as if politics has gone bad, it’s just done differently now,” Bragg said. “The main campaigns of the 21st century – Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, extinction rebellion – they’re all about accountability. They’re not ideological, but they are held together by a demand for those in power to be held to account. And I think we have to slightly adjust our perception and recognize that although it’s not the ideological landscape that we grew up in … it is possible to have other parameters, and liberty, equality, accountability is a good place to start.”

Go: Billy Bragg with Alice Phoebe Lou, doors at 7 and show at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, Keswick Theatre, 291 N. Glenside Ave., Glenside, Pa., $35 to $65 in advance, $40 to $70 at the door; 215-572-7650, keswicktheatre.com.

Also: Doors at 6:30 p.m., show at 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2, Town Hall, 123 West 43rd St., New York City, starting at $39.50; 212-997-6661, thetownhall.org.

And: Doors at 6:30 p.m., show at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4, Vogel, Count Basie Center for the Arts, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank, $25 to $99; 732-842-9000, thebasie.org.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Billy Bragg playing Basie Center in Red Bank NJ during tour