Wilco fans, mark your calendars: The band’s biannual Solid Sound Festival is returning to North Adams, Massachusetts, on June 26-28, 2026 — and they’ve just announced a very special show to kick off the weekend. On the festival’s opening night, Wilco will be joined by U.K. folk singer Billy Bragg for the first-ever full concert of songs from their Mermaid Avenue collaboration.
The Mermaid Avenue project brought the two acts together starting in the mid-Nineties to work with a trove of lost lyrics penned by the late icon Woody Guthrie. They composed fully original melodies and arrangements for Guthrie’s words and recorded the resulting songs together, with Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy sharing lead vocal duty. The collaboration — which yielded three albums’ worth of material, released between 1998 and 2012 — is the source of one of Wilco’s most beloved live songs, “California Stars,” along with less-frequently performed gems like “Hesitating Beauty” and “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key.” These sessions captured Wilco at a pivotal time of transition between the loose, rootsy rock of Being There and the further-out explorations of Summerteeth and beyond; helped bring Bragg back to prominence with U.S. audiences after his triumphs of the 1980s; and affirmed their shared foundation in the folk tradition embodied by Guthrie. But they’ve never performed a full show together until now.
“The world needs all the Woody Guthrie it can get,” Tweedy said in a press release. “We’re thrilled that we get to bring these songs to life with Billy.”
Bragg added: “There’s an abiding love out there for the Mermaid Avenue albums, so I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with Wilco to bring Woody’s words to life once again.”
Solid Sound, which first took place in 2010, traditionally opens with a special show on night one (past years have featured all-covers, karaoke, and all-deep-cuts sets). The second night is typically devoted to a more traditional Wilco set, while the third day features Tweedy and friends performing solo material. The festival, held on the modern-art-filled grounds of MASS MoCA, also features tons of other performances by an eclectic mix of acts from many genres; the rest of this year’s lineup will be revealed in the coming weeks and months. It’s a uniquely welcoming festival experience, geared toward people who genuinely love live music, and any fan of Wilco or indie rock more generally should try to make it there at least once.
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Tweedy is currently on the road performing songs from his triple album Twilight Override — a 30-song set that we dubbed “a whopper of an album that rewards the time you spend with it” in our four-star review — with a backing band that includes his two sons, Spencer and Sammy, as well as several other longtime collaborators. Tweedy and his band appeared earlier this week on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where they performed the uplifting rocker “Enough” and the raucous “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter.”
Tweedy has U.S. tour dates continuing through late November, along with a week-long run in Europe in February. Last night at New York’s Brooklyn Steel, he concluded his encore with a scorching cover of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” featuring a surprise guest appearance from Wilco’s Nels Cline. It ruled. You can see a fan-shot video of that performance below, if epic guitar solos by two of the greatest electric warriors in modern music are your thing.
