Mermaid Avenue is a curious and delightful musical collaboration featuring Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and others playing the music of Woody Guthrie — well, actually, playing the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, to which they had to write the music. It started out as a single album, then became a documentary film, then added two more albums — you can get a nice overview of the whole project here. I mention it because it has held up extremely well over the years and still bears repeated listening. Wilco used Guthrie’s lyrics basically to write Wilco songs, and some damned fine Wilco songs, for instance “California Stars”:

Bragg made more of an effort to channel Guthrie — his belief that they all ought to be doing that was a point of tension during the sessions — but sometimes he writes Billy Bragg songs, as in the luminous “Birds and Ships,” sung hauntingly by Natalie Merchant:

One of the songs that knocked me out when the record first came out was “Aginst th' Law,” sung by the young bluesman Corey Harris: