Wilco, Billy Bragg & Natalie Merchant Play ‘Mermaid Avenue’ Live For 1st Time At Solid Sound

A decades-in-the-making set came together Friday at Wilco’s 2026 Solid Sound festival held at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The band was joined by Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant for songs from the Mermaid Avenue project, which features music built around Woody Guthrie’s unpublished lyrics.

Wilco and Bragg released the first Mermaid Avenue album in 1998. The project began years earlier when Guthrie’s daughter Nora Guthrie, who appeared onstage during the Solid Sound set, recruited Bragg to help sort through a trove of unpublished lyrics Woody left behind following his death in 1967 at age 55.

Despite subsequent volumes released in 2000 and 2012 (and animosity arising between the band and Bragg), outside of occasional onstage collaborations, Wilco and Bragg never toured together behind any of the Mermaid Avenue records.

Each of the three volumes of those collaborative albums came to life during the collaborative set, with the first edition making up the bulk of the setlist through songs including “One by One,” “Hesitating Beauty,” “Christ for President,” “Ingrid Bergman,” “Walt Whitman’s Niece” and “She Came Along to Me,” among others.

Former 10,000 Maniacs member Natalie Merchant emerged near the end of the set to supply her Mermaid Avenue vocal parts to “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” and “Birds and Ships.”

“Hoodoo Voodoo,” a song from the first album that was later discovered to have been recorded by Woody Guthrie, followed Merchant’s first appearance. The second volume’s “All You Fascists” closed out the main set with The Mekons members joining in.

The encore’s celebratory offering of “California Stars” saw Merchant back onstage to perform the song frequently played by Wilco, and recently by Bragg as well.

Singer-songwriter Sarah Lee Guthrie, who is the daughter of singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie and granddaughter of Woody Guthrie, was among the contingency of related people brought out to join a performance of her grandfather’s anthem “This Land Is Your Land.” Both Sarah Lee Guthrie and Nora Guthrie sang parts of “This Land Is Your Land.”

View videos from the long-awaited Mermaid Avenue set below: