Line-up Announced for Wilco’s Solid Sound 2026
The North Adams festival returns June 26-28 with a stacked lineup—and a historic reunion with Billy Bragg to perform “Mermaid Avenue.”
When Wilco returns to North Adams June 26-28 of next year for Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCA, the weekend will carry the familiar pleasures: a lovingly idiosyncratic lineup, musicians roaming the campus like art students who forgot to go home, and Wilco themselves anchoring it all with the easy confidence of a band that long ago outgrew the need to prove anything. And this year’s line-up is chockfull: The Breeders, Gang of Four, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, L’Rain, S. G. Goodman, and Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet, Respira, and the Autumn Defense, among many others.
But this year’s announcement contains an especially exciting reunion.
For the first time, Wilco will reunite with Billy Bragg to perform songs from Mermaid Avenue, the collaborative project that set unused lyrics by Woody Guthrie to new music. (Bragg will also perform separately with his band.) Released in 1998, Mermaid Avenue arrived quietly, without the self-conscious reverence that often attends archival projects. Instead, it slipped into the musical bloodstream.
Take “California Stars,” with its loping, almost offhand melody. Guthrie’s lyrics feel loose and provisional, yet quietly aching. Or consider “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key,” (with a guest vocal by Natalie Merchant) which wraps political exile and emotional dislocation in a tune so inviting you barely notice how heavy it is. These songs endure because they never announce their importance.
That durability is the album’s great trick. Guthrie’s words—about labor, love, dislocation, and stubborn hope—were never embalmed. Wilco and Bragg treated them as raw material, not relics. And they feel even sharper now, their empathy and politics more human-scaled in retrospect.
Solid Sound has always excelled at this kind of contextual resonance. The festival, produced by Wilco and staged across MASS MoCA’s sprawling industrial galleries, thrives on conversation between genres and generations. There’s also the expected Solid Sound sprawl beyond music—comedy (John Hodgman is curating a cabaret!), film, family programming, and those strange, serendipitous moments that happen when you wander into the wrong building and discover the right thing.
