Be sure to look for a new album in stores starting June 12th. This is the next leg of the journey following Billy and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue. The project was always intended to have multiple volumes, and with Volume II, the voice of Woody Guthrie lives on and is carried to an entirely new generation of fans.

Woody Guthrie was the first alternative musician. While Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley were busy peddling escapism to the masses, Woody was out there writing songs from a different point of view with a lyrical poetry that captured the awesome majesty of America's scenery and the dry as dust humour of its working folks. He travelled the country with a news man's eye for a story and a collector's ear for a song. And he brought it all back home to Coney Island, where, in the house on Mermaid Avenue, he sat writing songs about hot rod hotels where he'd worked as a boy, about the secrets of the sea that he'd fathomed during long, tense voyages on Atlantic convoys as a merchant seaman in World War II. Although at times he reached back to the Bible stories for inspiration, these songs also place Woody firmly in our modern world - we can imagine him watching Joe DiMaggio on TV in Brooklyn, while flying saucers whizz by his open window.

These lyrics are but a fragment of a great creative outpouring that occurred in the years after World War II. Woody was slowly being incapacitated by the Huntington's Disease that would eventually kill him. He knew that time was running out and yet he still had so much to say. When he died, the music he had written for these songs died with him. The Woody Guthrie Archive contains over two thousand more complete lyrics of songs he wrote during this period. Until that work has been appreciated, Woody Guthrie still has so much to say to us.

Billy Bragg, London 2000

Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.