Mermaid Avenue (1998)

This interesting collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco—and two more that followed in 2000 and 2012, plus similar projects by other artists, none of which I know—started with Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora, the first director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation. It seems Woody left behind over 1,000 completed lyrics which he never set to music. In 1995, Nora contacted Bragg after seeing him perform at a Woody tribute concert. She wanted to know if he would be interested in setting some of them to music. He was indeed, and he invited Wilco to join, and the first results are on this album. For the most part the songs are divided about equally between them—Bragg writes his and Wilco writes theirs. Everybody performs on all—the credits are complicated, plus extras like Natalie Merchant sit in on some tracks. Some of the Wilco stuff is composed by Jeff Tweedy, some by Tweedy with Jay Bennett. Two—“Hoodoo Voodoo” and “She Came Along to Me”—are collaborations between Bragg and Wilco. The whole Wilco band gets credit on the first. “She Came Along to Me,” one of the best on the album, is credited to Bragg, Tweedy, and Bennett. In general, and somewhat surprisingly for me, as a fan of Wilco who has spent most of my life generally indifferent to Bragg, the best songs here are by Bragg. For one thing, he channels the spirit of Woody Guthrie better. The wry, resigned aside in “She Came Along to Me” and the pause that expresses everything—“Maybe we’ll have all of the fascists out of the way by then.... Maybe so”—might by the most Woody Guthrie moment on the album (and that might be Bennett or Tweedy on the rejoinder). But I think the most Woody Guthrie moment on the album actually goes to another Bragg workup, “I Guess I Planted,” which stoutly shouts for the union battle and is perfectly rousing about it. “Walt Whitman’s Niece” is a nice call-and-response wake-up number to start the album (by way of the sequencing given) and “The Unwelcome Guest” finishes it well. Both by Bragg. That reminds me. I get a kick out of Woody’s various celebrity fixations found in these lyrics: Walt Whitman, Ingrid Bergman (in her Stromboli phase, which to me is still a dish ordered in Italian restaurants), and Hanns Eisler, a composer associated with Bertolt Brecht. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the Wilco gang didn’t contribute anything worth our time here. “California Stars” and the shorty “Christ for President” are two of the best songs here. But I do think, and maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, that Bragg is the most obviously plugged in to Woody Guthrie.