I just experienced the most transcendent musical experience of my life.

Before tonight, the pinnacle was being in a sold out crowd at Fenway Park, singing along with Paul McCartney on the chorus to “Hey Jude”, which is far from my favorite Beatles song, but being in a chorus of forty thousand people singing a song the whole world knows, with the person who wrote it, is staggeringly powerful. Or it is for me.

This topped that.

Solid Sound Festival 2026: Wilco, Billy Bragg & friends (Natalie Merchant from 10,000 Maniacs, Hugo Burnham from Gang of Four) joined by Nora Guthrie and family to perform Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”.
Solid Sound Festival 2026: Wilco, Billy Bragg & friends (Natalie Merchant from 10,000 Maniacs, Hugo Burnham from Gang of Four) joined by Nora Guthrie and family to perform Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”.

Almost 30 years ago, Wilco & Billy Bragg got permission from the Woody Guthrie estate to produce music based on notebooks of poems & lyrics he left behind, but never recorded music for. Tonight, for the first time, they played those songs live.

But that wasn’t the transcendent part. The transcendent part was when they closed the set by inviting on other bands — Gang Of Four, the Mekons, Natalie Merchant — along with Woody’s daughter, Nora Guthrie, and what seemed like about fifty of Woody’s grandkids & great-grandkids.

And we all had a singalong to a song even more well known than “Hey Jude”:

“This Land Is Your Land”.

Reader, I cried. Heck, I’m teary just typing this. Every kid learns this song. It might as well be the true national anthem. And a few thousand of us just sang it with several dozen descendants of the man who gave it to the world.

This land was made for you and me.