Pitchfork

If you'd told me a year ago that Billy Bragg and Wilco would one day take Woody Guthrie's lyrics and pen their own music for the songs, I'd have thought you were joking. As it turns out, this seemingly unlikely collaboration has produced some exceptional music. And it's not all folk, either.

Billy Bragg says that what attracted him to Woody Guthrie's work has always been Guthrie's great ability to combine music with politics-- an art that Bragg himself has perfected. On "Christ for President", Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy croons, "Every war, we waste enough to feed the ones who starve/ We build our civilization up and we shoot it down with wars," all to a somewhat familiar campaign rally melody. On "Eisler's Come and Go", Guthrie ponders what he would do if called to testify before the McCarthy Commission on Un-American Activities, as fellow leftist songman Eisler had been. Throughout the record, Wilco's music fits Guthrie's lyrics wonderfully and affords them a vibrancy which hasn't always been associated with Guthrie's music.

Wilco fans may surprised that Mermaid Avenue's best moments come with the songs featuring Bragg on lead vocals. On "Ingrid Bergman", Guthrie professes his deep and undying love to the actress while, according to Bragg's liner notes, "making liberal use of the mountain-phallus metaphor." And the standout here is the gentle, romantic "California Stars", which captures Guthrie's ability to cast beautiful, panoramic visions of what it is to be in love and to tirelessly pursue impossible dreams.

Mermaid Avenue, named for the section of Coney Island where Guthrie lived, brings Guthrie's work to a generation who may have dismissed him as yet another post-war folkster with a message from another time and another place. It's an impressive collaboration that makes Guthrie's art as relevant and important today as it was in its own time.