Wilco
A Ghost Is Born 20th Anniversary Edition
★★★★
NONESUCH
WILCO WERE two months from the release and US Top 20 debut of their ambitious, embattled fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, when at the end of a February 2002 interview, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy played a CD of new music for MOJO: four songs and four improvisations recorded by Wilco the previous week at home in Chicago. “The band feels so fucking great right now,” he raved, “writing together, learning to play with one mind.”
The tunes in particular were seductive and auspicious, haunted-vocal reveries with hammer dulcimer and distant splashes of keyboard. One track was a pneumatic jolt of dusky jangle with a chunky guitar figure like the Document-era R.E.M. riding the autobahn with Neu!. “I wish I could send this to Reprise,” Tweedy said with a grin, referring to his ex-label which famously rejected Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
They would have heard the raw nerves, ethereal spell and rowdy avant-rock of A Ghost Is Born already coming down the track. An early pass at the forlorn shuffle of The High Heat, ultimately an outtake, and that riveting, initial jump at the album’s 10-minute Krautrock party Spiders (Kidsmoke), previewed that day, are among the rough drafts, roads not taken and weirdsville in this sprawling atomisation – especially in the 9-CD version – of Wilco’s second straight masterpiece, issued in June 2004. Tweedy also shared a test shot of Hummingbird – an intriguing contradiction of gnarly guitars and moonlit electronics – that is one of two rough sketches of that song in the box set. Both, it turns out, were far from its country-McCartney glow on Ghost, Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt harmonising like a farm-boy Wings.
Yet just as Hummingbird first surfaced under another title for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (a demo is in that album’s 2022 box), there are advance notices here of 2007’s Sky Blue Sky in sketches of that album’s Leave Me (Like You Found Me) – an acid-blues wreathed in Hammond organ – and the separation anxiety of Impossible Germany, on its way to ravishing but with some lyrics and a title (Improbable Germany) left in transit. And Tweedy, doing his best ’63 Dylan, detours twice back to Losing Interest, a demo orphan of 1996’s Being There, as if to be sure he isn’t missing out on hidden treasure – then drops it again, losing interest indeed.
A Ghost Is Born was in fact a brand-new start, a long time coming. After the bitter end of his alternative-country band Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy ricocheted through a decade of learning to lead on the job: overreaching at every chance (Being There, Wilco’s second LP and a double; the hermetic pop of 1999’s Summerteeth) and paying the price in stressed-out health and messy departures. At once earthier and way stranger than the chaos and surrealism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost Is Born – named for a line in Theologians, a kicking against the pricks with exultant-raga guitar – was Tweedy’s turning point, his first album with a firm grip on the wheel and a truly collective Wilco (responsive to impulse, challenging in return) built with survivors from previous line-ups like Stirratt, an Uncle Tupelo emigré, and YHF drummer Glenn Kotche. Add a couple of imminent additions for the road, and it is the band Tweedy still leads today. As he tells MOJO’s Bob Mehr in the linernotes, “I’d finally found what I was looking for.”
We hear it right away. At Least That’s What You Said opens the original album like a lingering strand of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the brooding entrance to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Tweedy’s muttered vocal hinting at faint hope over the crooked walk of Stirratt’s bass and Kotche’s drumming. Then the loud kicks in and the frenzy mounts, Tweedy barking at the moon on viciously distorted guitar against a garage march and bullying piano – a classic rock not entirely of this earth and even nastier in an earlier blast with Tweedy chewing the air on wah-wah guitar. Another take of Spiders (Kidsmoke) is more mid-tempo Replacements than Faust with harmonised, grungy guitars playing that descending turnaround. And the beautiful desolation of Company In My Back turns up again in a spare grace of bush-ballad guitar and church-like keyboard, recorded in Australia.
You don’t need to know how many times and ways Wilco addressed these songs over two years to be dazzled and moved by the madrigal-guitar and astral-piano dance in Muzzle Of Bees, or the jaunty pop-psych bait of Handshake Drugs with its undercurrent of helplessness and allusion to Tweedy’s own battle with prescription medication (soon won through rehab). But it’s an instructive windfall in dedicated experiment and resolve – “I’m really into patience right now,” Tweedy noted that day in New York – with effectively two alternate versions of the album that sometimes leave you wondering, “What the hell?” On Ghost, Wishful Thinking is muted and solemn, Tweedy singing through cobwebs, Kotche keeping time on what sounds like a suitcase. On Disc 2, it’s the lush intensity of a bar band striving for the melodrama of a Roy Orbison 45, hardly a bad idea. At the same time, it was Tweedy’s call – over producer Jim O’Rourke’s argument – to keep the 13 minutes of Revolution 9-style abstraction attached to the fragile goodbye of Less Than You Think. To hear what might have been, the ballad alone is on Disc 2. If you miss the rest, the four “Fundamental” discs in the 9-CD box – running-tape excerpts from the sessions, songs and arrangements creeping forward in stark, trial form – are for you.
Ironically, the Boston show from October 2004 could have been taped yesterday. Before taking A Ghost Is Born on tour, Tweedy replaced departing pianist Leroy Bach with multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone from Stirratt’s baroque-pop side-project The Autumn Defense and added guitarist Nels Cline, a jazz and free-rock veteran. Nothing has changed, including much of this setlist and Tweedy’s sentiment near the end in The Late Greats. The closing song on Ghost, it’s a loving joke with a frustrated edge, Tweedy’s roll call of fictional rock giants exiled to history (“Can’t hear it on the radio”) yet cranked up like The Band at Big Pink. It’s a jubilant revenge – and still in full effect.
A Ghost Is Born 20th Anniversary Edition is out February 7 via Nonesuch.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
TRACKLISTING:
9CD VERSION
CD 1: A Ghost is Born
At Least That’s What You Said
Hell Is Chrome
Spiders (Kidsmoke)
Muzzle of Bees
Hummingbird
Handshake Drugs
Wishful Thinking
Company in My Back
I’m a Wheel
Theologians
Less Than You Think
The Late Greats
CD 2: dBpm: Outtakes/Alternates 1
At Least That’s What You Said (8/13/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Hell Is Chrome (10/5/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Spiders (Kidsmoke) (9/28/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Muzzle Of Bees (7/15/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Hummingbird (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Handshake Drugs (11/13/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
Wishful Thinking (11/1/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
Company In My Back (2/8/03 Hothouse-St. Kilda, Melbourne
I’m A Wheel (August, 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
Theologians (3/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Less Than You Think (11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
The Late Greats (7/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Kicking Television (3/18/03 SOMA-Chicago)
The High Heat (2/5/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Panthers (March, 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
Diamond Claw (3/21/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard (June, 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
More Like The Moon (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Improbable Germany (10/7/03 SOMA-Chicago)
CD 3: Unstitched: Outtakes/Alternates 2
Handshake Drugs (First Version – 6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Hummingbird (February, 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
The High Heat (2/4/02 SOMA-Chicago) (3:04)
Spiders (Kidsmoke) (February, 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
Diamond Claw (March, 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
Muzzle Of Bees (October, 2003 Sear-NYC)
Like A Stone (11/10/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
Leave Me (Like You Found Me) (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Losing Interest (11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
Old Maid (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Spiders (Kidsmoke) (August, 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
Panthers (October, 2003 Sear-NYC)
Muzzle Of Bees (7/16/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Diamond Claw (10/9/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Losing Interest (7/20/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Spiders (Kidsmoke) (October, 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
The Thanks I Get (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Two Hat Blues (March, 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
Improbable Germany (January, 2002 Pre-Production Loft session)
CD 4: The Hook at The Wang (Live) – Pt 1
Muzzle Of Bees (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Company In My Back (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
A Shot In The Arm (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Hell Is Chrome (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Handshake Drugs (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Jesus, Etc. (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Hummingbird (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04
I’m Always In Love (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
At Least That’s What You Said (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Ashes Of American Flags (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04
Theologians (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
CD 5: The Hook at The Wang (Live) – Pt 2
I’m The Man Who Loves You (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Poor Places (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Spiders (Kidsmoke) (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
She’s A Jar (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
A Magazine Called Sunset (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Kingpin (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
The Late Greats (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
I’m A Wheel (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Via Chicago (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
California Stars (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
Christ For President (Live at Wang Center-Boston, MA 10/1/04)
CD 6: Fundamentals 1 & 2
Fundamental 1
Fundamental 2
CD 7: Fundamentals 3 & 4
Fundamental 3
Fundamental 4
CD 8: Fundamentals 5 & 6
Fundamental 5
Fundamental 6
CD 9: Fundamental 7
Fundamental 7
2CD VERSION
CD 1: A Ghost is Born
At Least That’s What You Said
Hell Is Chrome
Spiders (Kidsmoke)
Muzzle of Bees
Hummingbird
Handshake Drugs
Wishful Thinking
Company in My Back
I’m a Wheel
Theologians
Less Than You Think
The Late Greats
CD 2: dBpm: Outtakes/Alternates
At Least That’s What You Said (8/13/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Hell Is Chrome(10/5/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Spiders (Kidsmoke)(9/28/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Muzzle Of Bees(7/15/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Hummingbird(2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Handshake Drugs(11/13/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
Wishful Thinking(11/1/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
Company In My Back(2/8/03 Hothouse-St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia)
I’m A Wheel(August 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
Theologians(3/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Less Than You Think(11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
The Late Greats(7/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Kicking Television(3/18/03 SOMA-Chicago)
The High Heat(2/5/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Panthers(March 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
Diamond Claw(3/21/03 SOMA-Chicago)
Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard(June 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
More Like The Moon(2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
Improbable Germany(10/7/03 SOMA-Chicago)
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