Folk & World
Craft Recordings releases an expanded edition of “Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions” on 11 December, the collection of everything Billy Bragg and Wilco recorded from unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics. Sixteen of the recordings have never come out before.
The box gathers the three original volumes and the material that had been released around them: alternate versions, live takes and demos. It comes in two physical formats, a seven-LP box with a seven-inch single and a four-CD box, and digitally. Each volume also returns separately as a limited double LP.
The title is not new: “The Complete Sessions” first appeared on 21 April 2012, the same day as the third volume. What changes now is the unreleased material.
The first track out is “Against Th’ Law”, in an alternate version of a song that had appeared on the second volume.
The project started when Nora Guthrie found a trove of her father’s unpublished lyrics and asked Bragg to look at them; he brought in Wilco and the first record, fifteen songs, came out in 1998. “It’s been over thirty years since Nora first asked me to look at some unpublished lyrics of her father’s,” Bragg says. “I had no idea then that the project that she, I, and Wilco undertook would lead to a complete reassessment of the legacy of Woody Guthrie.”
Text by Alba Puiggròs