Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions [Box Set]
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More than thirty years ago, Nora Guthrie asked Billy Bragg to look at some unpublished lyrics of her father's. Woody Guthrie had left behind pages of songs with no melodies attached, and Bragg, joined by Wilco, wrote new music for words nobody had ever heard sung. The three Mermaid Avenue albums that followed between 1998 and 2012 reshaped Guthrie's legacy and became a touchstone of modern Americana.
Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions gathers all of it. The first volume delivers "California Stars," "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key," and "Walt Whitman's Niece." Vol. II adds "Airline to Heaven" and "Remember the Mountain Bed," and Vol. III brings "When the Roses Bloom Again" and "The Jolly Banker." Together they reveal a Guthrie who was funny, romantic, political, and strange, often inside a single verse.
This edition goes further than any before it. A full LP of alternates and demos adds 16 previously unreleased recordings, including alternate versions of "Aginst Th' Law" and "All You Fascists," solo takes of "Hesitating Beauty" and "Airline to Heaven," and working demos of songs heard here in their earliest form. The year the set arrives, Bragg, Wilco, and Nora Guthrie reunited on stage at Wilco's Solid Sound Festival to play this music again.
The box holds seven LPs on 180-gram vinyl plus a bonus single-sided 7-inch carrying a Woody Guthrie home demo of "Hesitating Beauty." It comes in a deluxe slipcase with a booklet of new liner notes by Bob Mehr, with all lacquers cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. This is the definitive edition of a landmark project.