If you'd told me a year ago that Billy Bragg and Wilco would one day take Woody Guthrie's lyrics and pen their own music for the songs, I'd have thought you were joking. But as it turns out, this seemingly unlikely collaboration has produced some exceptional music. And it's not all folk, either.

Billy Bragg says that what attracted him to Woody Guthrie's work has always been Guthrie's great ability to combine music with politics-- an art that Bragg himself has perfected. On the track "Christ for President" Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy croons "Every war we waste enough/ To feed the ones who starve/ We build our civilization up/ And we shoot it down with wars," all to a somewhat familiar campaign rally melody. On "Eisler's Come and Go", Guthrie ponders what he would do if called to testify before the McCarthy Commission on Un-American Activities, as fellow leftist songman Eisler had been. Throughout the record, Wilco's music fits Guthrie's lyrics wonderfully and affords them a vibrancy which hasn't always been associated with Guthrie's music.

Remarkably, Mermaid Avenue's best moments with the songs, especially the ones featuring Bragg on lead vocals. On "Ingrid Bergman," Guthrie professes his deep and undying love to the actress while, according to Bragg, "making liberal use of the mountain- phallus metaphor." The most perfect track on the record is a gentle, romantic piece, "California Stars" which captures the lyricist's ability to cast wide and beautiful images of what it is to be in love and to tirelessly pursue impossible dreams.

This record, named for the section of Coney Island where Guthrie lived, brings Guthrie's work to a generation who may have dismissed him as yet another one of those post- war folksters with a message from another time and another place. Mermaid Avenue is an impressive collaboration that makes Guthrie's art relevant and important today.

-Aparna Mohan