Wilco Plays First Full Mermaid Avenue Set at Solid
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- Wilco held Solid Sound Festival 2026 at Mass MoCA in western Massachusetts on June 26-28, with Jeff Tweedy telling the crowd from the stage it was the best edition in the festival's history.
- Night one featured the band's first full performance of the Mermaid Avenue songbook, with Billy Bragg joining as a co-frontman and Natalie Merchant and Nora Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's daughter) appearing as guests.
- Tweedy paused to honor late multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, who died in 2009, with a solo vocal on the Mermaid Avenue song "Another Man's Done Gone" before the night closed with a mass singalong of "California Stars" and "This Land Is Your Land."
- Night two included a keyboard duet with jazz pianist Bob James on the Taxi theme, a transcendent "Impossible Germany" solo from Nels Cline, and the live debuts of two new Wilco songs, "Flawed Men" and "Losing Traction."
- The festival's campus featured opening sets from Gang of Four (with Ted Leo), the Breeders, Sharp Pins, and Hannah Cohen, alongside Wilco side projects the Autumn Defense and Nels Cline's Consentrik Quartet performing across the museum grounds.
- The closing set paired Tweedy with his sons Spencer and Sammy and longtime Chicago friends, tearing through covers ranging from Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" to Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" in a finale Tweedy described as "making some shit with your friends."
Why it matters: Wilco chose the festival's biggest-ever thematic swing — a full Mermaid Avenue concert 28 years after the album's release — to surface Woody Guthrie's explicitly political material at a moment when new song "Losing Traction" laments that "the truth is losing traction," making this less a victory lap than a deliberate public statement wrapped in celebration.
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