Wilco, Billy Bragg, and Natalie Merchant Play Mermaid Avenue in Full for the First Time at Solid Sound

The Mermaid Avenue project always existed slightly outside of time — a posthumous collaboration that bridged folk lineage and late-nineties indie. Until this weekend, it had never been staged as a complete live set. That changed at Wilco’s Solid Sound festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, where Jeff Tweedy’s band, Billy Bragg, and guest vocalist Natalie Merchant ran through the album’s songs, pulling from all three volumes without strict sequence.

Originally released in 1998, Mermaid Avenue took shape after Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora handed a stack of his unrecorded lyrics to Bragg, who then invited Wilco to co-write and perform. The collaboration yielded two albums in short order, with a third assembled for a 2012 box set, but no proper tour followed. Bragg and Wilco had shared a stage for individual tracks before; a full run-through had never materialized.

At MASS MoCA, that gap closed. Merchant, who appeared on the original recordings, added the same presence she brought to tracks like “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key.” The performance was not a note-for-note memorial. Drawing from different volumes out of order made the set feel like a living archive, not a period piece. And doing it at Solid Sound — a festival built around Wilco’s own curatorial instincts — gave the moment a self-determined logic it might not have carried elsewhere.