Wilco’s music and arts festival Solid Sound returns to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, from June 26– 28, 2026. Today, the festival announces Wilco and Billy Bragg will perform Mermaid Avenue Live, the first-ever full-length concert of music from the Mermaid Avenue songbook, to open the festival on Friday, June 26. Mermaid Avenue is the acclaimed collaborative project of Wilco and Bragg, in which they composed and recorded original music set to the unpublished lyrics of Woody Guthrie. Weekend passes are now available here.
Jeff Tweedy said, “The world needs all the Woody Guthrie it can get. We’re thrilled that we get to bring these songs to life with Billy.” Bragg adds, “There’s an abiding love out there for the Mermaid Avenue albums, so I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with Wilco to bring Woody’s words to life once again.”
At the time of his passing in 1967, Guthrie had accumulated over a thousand sets of unpublished lyrics. Those pages remained in a trunk until 1995 when his daughter Nora approached Bragg, a lifelong fan, with the idea of adding music to some of those lyrics and recording them for a new generation. Bragg brought in Wilco and together they created a collection of fifteen new songs called Mermaid Avenue (1998), which The Los Angeles Times called “the perfect channel for Guthrie’s raucous and irrepressible spirit.” Pitchfork described the record as “such a deeply nuanced and humanizing portrait of a larger-than-life character that it significantly shifted how listeners thought of Guthrie.”
While Mermaid Avenue highlights like “California Stars,” “Hoodoo Voodoo,” “Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key,” “Airline To Heaven,” and “Secret Of The Sea” have had steady inclusion in Wilco and Bragg’s respective live sets over the years, the artists were not able to tour together in support of the record or the follow up volumes (in 2000 and 2012), with the exception of a handful of shared appearances. This will change at Wilco’s Solid Sound this year when the band and Billy Bragg will finally join forces on stage.
