Nora Guthrie established an archive in 1995. Hundreds of incomplete lyrics had been left behind by her father Woody; these were essentially poems scrawled on whatever that came into his possession throughout the years, never set to music, and never meant for a specific audience. She had the option of giving them to a library. They could have been released as a book by her. Rather, she searched for someone who would be willing to live with them. She located Billy Bragg, who was both flattered and astute enough to realize he couldn’t succeed on his own.
Everything changed when Wilco was brought in. The Chicago band was on the rise, but not quite at the top. The truly bizarre work was still a few years away, but it had been released in 1996 and made them more than just a country rock band. Bragg saw them as a bridge, an American ensemble capable of giving Guthrie’s Dust Bowl-era words the appropriate regional feel. He might not have fully expected the late Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy to arrive with their own interpretations of what those phrases might sound like.
In hindsight, the studio conflict is clearly significant and well-documented. Bragg want a more conventional folk approach that was cautious, polite, and rooted in the language Guthrie had used. Wilco intended to take the lyrics to an unfamiliar place. In Guthrie’s incomplete lines, Tweedy and Bennett perceived possibilities unrelated to acoustic reverence. They heard Americana in its looser, more experimental form, which is music that straddles the line between country and noise and doesn’t really care.
The conflict between experimentation and caution is audible throughout the record in ways that make it more fascinating than either concept would have been on its own. The folk-punk energy that Bragg had spent his career cultivating is evident in his songs, which are straightforward, political, and passionate. In ways that feel truly novel, Wilco’s contributions meander, experiment, and sometimes surprise. It doesn’t sound like a compromise. It sounds like a cooperative effort amongst individuals who disagree in constructive ways.
When Mermaid Avenue was released in 1998, it received more praise from critics and a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album than either artist could have received on their own at that time. More significantly, it introduced Guthrie’s words to audiences who had never heard of the original Guthrie library but had grown up with Tweedy’s Chicago and Bragg’s English working-class politics.
Additionally, Wilco benefited internally from the endeavor. It appears to have loosened the band’s conception of what Americana may contain because it came right before Summerteeth. The creative attitude that would lead to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a few years later is precisely the boldness to take a folk icon’s lyrics and make them unusual rather than accurate. Mermaid Avenue is more fascinating in hindsight than it may have sounded at the time because you can hear it as a practice run for what followed.
The Solid Sound performances, in which Bragg and Wilco performed the entire album with guests in Western Massachusetts, confirmed what the record had always implied: this was something that only worked because the individuals involved were exactly who they were, showing up at precisely the right time with precisely the right box of incomplete words.