Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Avenue
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Free Music Notes for Mermaid Avenue
Free Music Review: A Wonderful Work
Hit: 5 Stars
Is this a concept album or a tribue album? Is this an album of cover tunes, or original songs? Working with the Woody Guthrie archives, Billy Bragg and Wilco craft music to lyrics written by Woody Guthrie for which he never had an opportunity to write music. As you listen to these songs, sometimes beautiful, sometimes raucus, you can't help but to wonder if these artists have channeled Woody Guthrie's spirit correctly. Should "Walt Whitman's Niece" be the rock song that it is? Should "Ingrid Bergman" be this beautiful plea to the seemingly unattainable starlet, or should it be a sing-a-long? As the album progresses, you realize that correctness doesn't matter, and that whether they got it right or wrong, this album works. The songs are a wonderful representation of the variety of different types of songs heard from Woody Guthrie throughout his career, and the collaboration between the long gone Woody, the Billy Bragg and Wilco is inspired, energetic, creative and fun.
Thanks are due to Woody's daughter Nora and the Woody Guthrie archives for dreaming this project up, and for working with these musicians. Would this project have worked with a duo of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan? Of course, but that may have been a little too safe, and a little too expected. Thanks are due to Billy Bragg and Wilco for realizing that working together would result in a much better, and more diverse album than if they insisted on working alone. Thanks are due to Woody Guthrie, for even if his body would not allow him the strength to write music, his mind could still create these wonderful lyrics.
Free Music Review: this one is addictive
Hit: 5 Stars
The first time I listened to Mermaid Avenue, I didn't quite know what to think. The second time, I kind of liked it. By the third listen, I absolutely loved it and proceeded to listen to it nonstop for quite awhile. The CD ambles along with a compilation of very different songs alternating between Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy as vocalists, with Natalie Merchant making a guest appearance. Mermaid Avenue is wonderful, is bound to become a classic, and makes a great addition to anyone's music collection.Free Music Review: Its about time
Hit: 4 Stars
Its about time these great songs have been covered. Billy and Wilco do a fantastic job and I look forward to hearing volumeIIFree Music Review: Great CD!
Hit: 5 Stars
Thank goodness you can't actually wear out a CD from overuse. I bought Mermaid Avenue a month ago and I can't remember the last time I listened to one recording so often. I've always considered Woody Guthrie a great poet/musician, and I think Billy Bragg and Wilco have done his lyrics justice. Every cut on this record is good and it's obvious that this was a labor of love on the part of all the artists that participated. What else can I say...buy it.
Free Music Review: The Present Marries the Past, Hope for the Future!
Hit: 5 Stars
For those of us who were young and passionate about social issues in the 50's, 60's or 70's, this fantastic album lets us know that the concerns of activists of the 20th century are alive and well in the 21st century.My own 20-something son turned me on to the music of Wilco, playing it during our Sunday dinners. "Is that...who are you listening to?" He smiled smugly as I tried to figure out who this was.
Dylan-like lyrics sung with by a Dylan-who-could-sing? Springsteen? Arlo Guthrie? Or someone entirely different? He grinned as he shared with me his favorite group (Wilco) and their best ever album.
I've listened to other Wilco albums - this one is absolutely the best to me - perhaps I'm more of a Bragg fan than I'd ever have known, or maybe its just the bleeding heart liberal still kicking within me. The messages are clear, the music consistently good. On his other albums, some songs take a bit of getting used to - the present mixes with the past in ways that are sometimes refreshing, uplifting, promising - sometimes grating (even my son says so, but he doesn't care!)
But this album rocks, in a folk music with message kind of way. This is because, of course, the lyrics are Woody Guthrie's, scribblings written on scraps of paper, about times that evidently haven't changed. Guthrie's daughter Nora gave permission for the words to be turned into song - British songwriter/musician Billie Bragg explains this in the amazon interview shown in the sidebar to your left.
"Every year we waste enough to feed the ones who starve," Tweedy shouts in Guthrie's "Christ for President," maybe the greatest campaign song ever written. In the remarkable "Unwelcome Guest," via Guthrie's words, Bragg adopts the persona of a rider on his way to rob a rich man who has earned his wealth by "stealing and lying and gambling," and he ends with this steely-eyed prediction:
"They'll take the money and spread it out equal / Just like the Bible and prophets suggest / But the men who go riding to help these poor workers / The rich will cut down like an unwelcome guest.'
"Has there ever been a vision of social justice so moral, or so clear about its price?" (read the whole article, its good!)
I liked this album because the music is wonderful to hear, the lyrics have thought and meaning still - a wedding of what was then, with what is still now, the album takes something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue - and turns it into a timely, cross-generational piece of art.