Billy Bragg And Wilco Mermaid Avenue The Complete Sessions Rar
100 1998's Mermaid Avenue rewrote Woody Guthrie's history through his unrecorded lyrics, revealing the joker, lover, boozer and horndog behind the icon. It let the artists rewrite themselves, too: Billy Bragg, the British folkie agitator, turned goofier ('My Flying Saucer'), while Wilco turned rootsier ('California Stars').
Billy Bragg And Wilco Mermaid Avenue The Complete Sessions Rarely
The selling point of this four-disc set is a third CD of new songs – weaker than the first two despite some gems like Bragg’'s deeply English ballad 'Go Down to the Water' – and a DVD documentary that shows the rocky road to lasting art. 90 One of the criticisms levelled at the new Sean Penn movie This Must Be The Place is that whilst it captures the quirkiness of small-town America almost perfectly, it fails to comment on it. A fair enough point, and one that reminded me of the wonderful writing of Woody Guthrie, whose lyrics and music take the listener on a road trip through the heart of a fascinating country: Mark Twain set to an acoustic guitar, or a musical Kerouac (just about) on the wagon. In the documentary Man in the Sand Guthrie’s daughter Nora describes him as “Huckleberry Finn, floating past the settled folk on the shore, and very glad to be floating by”, combining the vernacular and the deeply personal with the political commentary that coloured the likes of ‘This Land is Your Land’. 90 In the documentary Man in the Sand, which chronicles the collaboration of Billy Bragg and Wilco to turn long-forgotten Woody Guthrie lyrics into actual songs, Bragg walks around Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, trying to get an idea of the people and surroundings that inspired the populist bard of American folk. Bragg wanders around deserted streets, talks to the locals, and even discovers the remains of Guthrie’s birthplace, the planks of wood tucked away in the corner of a local shop.