Mermaid Avenue opens the vault once more

Eighteen unheard tracks land on a seven-LP Craft edition this December, weeks after Bragg and Wilco finally played the Guthrie project through live at Solid Sound.

Craft Recordings will release an expanded edition of Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions on 11 December 2026. The seven-LP set, issued with a 7-inch single, adds eighteen previously unreleased tracks to Billy Bragg and Wilco's recordings built from Woody Guthrie's unused words.

The announcement came on 8 October 2026. Of the new material, seventeen pieces are alternate takes and demos. The eighteenth is a Woody Guthrie home tape of 'Hesitating Beauty'. The package goes beyond the 2012 Complete Sessions, which had already joined the original 1998 and 2000 albums with a third volume of unreleased work under one title.

From unfinished words to finished records

Mermaid Avenue was never a covers project in the ordinary sense. Guthrie left words without finished tunes; Bragg, as lead artist on the original sessions, worked with Wilco to set music to that material and carry it into the studio. The first album appeared in 1998. A second followed in 2000. Together they fixed the collaboration in both catalogues and gave listeners a body of songs that sat between folk inheritance and late-nineties songcraft.

In 2012 the Complete Sessions gathered those two records with Vol. III, a further run of unreleased pieces from the same working period. That box defined the project’s documented shape for more than a decade. The December 2026 edition does not replace that history; it extends it, pushing alternate versions and demos into the same frame and adding Guthrie’s own home recording of a song the later sessions had already touched.

The physical format underlines the scale of the addition. Seven LPs plus a 7-inch is a substantial object, aimed at listeners who already live with the albums and want the working takes beside the finished ones. Craft Recordings is issuing the set. The title stays Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions; the contents simply run deeper than they did in 2012.

A full live reading, then the box

Until this year the project had never been performed live in full by Bragg and Wilco. That arrived at Solid Sound festival in June 2026. The expanded box follows that appearance by only a few months. The sequence is plain enough: the songs were played through on stage as a complete statement, and the vault material is now being prepared for release while interest in the collaboration is active again.

That revival is the context the new set enters; it is not a claim invented around it. Mermaid Avenue has always occupied an odd, durable place — neither pure archive nor pure original songwriting, but a meeting of Guthrie’s unfinished pages and the musical decisions Bragg and Wilco made at the end of the 1990s. Alternate takes and demos show those decisions in motion. The home tape puts Guthrie’s voice back beside the interpretations built on his words.

Release day is 11 December 2026. No further live dates tied to the box have been announced. The Solid Sound performance remains the recent live marker for the partnership. What the seven-LP edition changes is the catalogue: more of the sessions, more of the drafts, and one direct line back to Guthrie on tape, issued for listeners who have kept these records close since 1998 and for anyone coming to them now through the renewed attention the project has drawn this year.