Wilco

Mermaid Avenue is the album that completed Alt Country, answering the age old question "will the circle be unbroken" with a resounding "Yes!" The concept was brilliant -- to take bare bones Woody Guthrie lyrics and write catchy melodies for them. Wilco and Billy Bragg did just this, recording with some old-timey backline and warm, modern production.

Named for a Coney Island street where Woody Guthrie lived in the late Forties and early
Fifties, Mermaid Avenue is a collection of recently discovered Guthrie lyrics now set to
music for the first time. It's also nothing that the previous work of those involved could
have led anyone to expect. Born in 1912, shaped by the 1930s, recording mostly in the
1940s, the shadow self of a young Bob Dylan in the early 1960s and dead in 1967,... More >

Here's this Brit folksinger, a punk by heritage and a pop star by ambition whose most salient talent is how guiltlessly he mixes up the three. And here's this middle-American alt band, folkies by sensibility and pop pros by ambition whose most salient talent is a musicality they don't know what to do with. With the wisdom of half a century's ripoffs behind them, both are more resourceful melodically than the icon whose thousands of unpublished lyrics they were chosen to make something of. So be glad he kept the tunes in his head. Because while the words are wonderful and unexpected--author of several published books and reams of journalism, Woody Guthrie might have made his mark in any literary calling--it's the music, especially Wilco's music, that transfigures the enterprise. Projecting the present back on the past in an attempt to make the past signify as future, they create an old-time rock and roll that never could have existed. Finally--folk-rock! (Grade - A)