Badly Drawn Boy – Born in the U.K. (2006)

Born in the U.K., in my opinion, is the best album the British singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy has ever released. This is partly due to the fact that this was the first album I ever heard by him and those albums tend to have the most emotional significance. Partly it's just because the songs on this album have amazing catchy melodies and even the kind of thematic nature of the album is kind of intriguing to me. The title of the album is a reference to Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA and like Springsteen's album, this too, is quite a critical portrayal of what it means to be proud of your home country. Basically, Badly Drawn Boy is saying that it doesn't matter where you come from, but also, where you come from is a big part of who you are and you should be able to be proud of your origins without exclusive nationalism. This album is a realistic exploration of what it means to be English instead of the polished and utopian nationalist view.


I first heard this album in a car when me and one of my best friends were driving a 12 hour drive to Kuusamo from Helsinki in Finland. We drove there for just three days to snowboard after which we drove back. Music was an essential part of that road trip and this is one of the new albums I discovered on that drive. I bought it myself only a few days later.

The album starts with an intro, where Badly Drawn Boy is having a discussion with himself about the theme of the album. This conversation builds up to a intimate piano ballad that eventually grows into Land of Hope and Glory that starts the title track Born in the UK. This is one of the greatest songs on the album and it depicts the theme of the album perfectly when he sings "Then you see the Union Jack and it means nothing, but somehow you know that you will find your own way, it's a small reminder every day, that I was born in the UK." This song follows into another amazing song, Degrees of Separation, which has a great catchy melody and mixture of fast and slow parts that are quite common in Badly Drawn Boy's music. The thing I really like about this album is that each song quite naturally follows the previous one in one linear line. There's a true sense of theme album. My other favourite songs from the album include Journey from A to B, Nothing's Gonna Change You Now, The Long Way Round and One Last Dance.

Badly Drawn Boy has lent his songs to many films. The most well known is the soundtrack for About a Boy that is based on Nick Hornby's book. There are some film sequences from the film Definitely, Maybe in the music video for  The Time of Times. It shows Badly Drawn Boy as we have learnt to know him, with a hat deep in his head of long hair where we can only see a tiny part of his face behind his bushy beard.

Pretty much all of the songs on this album are fantastic songwriting. All of these songs would sound great even just played with an acoustic guitar, but I think they sound even better because of the great orchestrations that have been played for this album. There are strings and horns in most of the songs. Sometimes these kinds of elements may make the music a bit pompous, but on this album those elements have been added tastefully and the result is very impressive.

Listen to the album on Spotify.