Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Avenue Vol. II

The first Mermaid Avenue only scratched the surface. When Billy Bragg and Wilco set new music to Woody Guthrie's unrecorded lyrics, they cut far more songs than one album could hold, and the pages Nora Guthrie had pulled from her father's archive kept giving. Two years after the original, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II arrived in 2000 to finish the thought.

It is the looser, wilder half of the story. "Airline to Heaven" opens the record at a gallop, "Remember the Mountain Bed" stretches into one of the most tender performances Wilco ever put to tape, and "Someday Some Morning Sometime" closes it in a haze. In between, Guthrie turns up as a science fiction daydreamer on "My Flying Saucer," a baseball fan on "Joe DiMaggio Done It Again," and a fighter on "All You Fascists."

Spanning folk, country, blues, and rock across 15 tracks, Vol. II widened the musical world of the series and deepened the portrait of a songwriter who was far more than the protest singer of legend.

This new Craft Recordings edition spreads the album across four sides of 180-gram vinyl, and it sits naturally alongside the first volume on the shelf.