Wilco Will Revisit the Turmoil of ‘A Ghost Is Born’ on 20th-Anniversary Box Set
A little more than 20 years ago, in June 2004, Wilco released an album that stands alone in their catalog. A Ghost Is Born was the Chicago band’s fifth album and the first one they made after the label drama and studio innovation of 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It faced high expectations, and it exceeded them, winning rave reviews, an even more dedicated fanbase, and a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. Now, Wilco are revisiting A Ghost Is Born with a super-deluxe box set due out Feb. 7, 2025.
The box set will be available from Nonesuch Records in nine-CD or nine-LP/four-CD formats, each containing the original 2004 album plus more than 65 unreleased demos, alternate takes, a full concert from that year at Boston’s Wang Center, and a 48-page book that includes liner notes by acclaimed rock historian Bob Mehr. You can hear a previously unreleased studio take of “Handshake Drugs” recorded on Nov. 13, 2003, right now.
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A Ghost Is Born captured a uniquely tenuous moment for Wilco. In his 2018 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy recalled his dark mood when he met with bandmates John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Leroy Bach, and Mikael Jorgensen and producer Jim O’Rourke in November 2003 to make the album. As they entered the studio in midtown Manhattan, he was quietly dealing with mounting mental health challenges and an addiction to painkillers: “I was pretty sure I was going to die. I mean that in all seriousness. I thought I was going to die. Every song we recorded seemed likely to be my last. Every note felt final…. I don’t know if anybody else noticed. They were aware that I was unhappy and struggling with depression, but they had no idea how serious my drug use had become.”
Tweedy poured his inner turmoil into the album that took shape, writing in that memoir that he thought of A Ghost Is Born as “a gift to my kids, who could turn to it when they were older and put together the pieces of me a little bit more than I’d been able to put myself together for them in real life… I wanted this record to be an elemental tool for Spencer and Sammy to reconstruct my worldview, to have some deeper connection to the dad they’d lost.”
The new box set will include several recordings of the improvised method that Wilco referred to as “fundamentals” in this period. “We would put on a reel of tape and record an entire album in the time it would take to listen to it,” Tweedy told me in 2020. “I would sit in an isolation booth and just flip through my notebook and make up songs based on random things, and everybody would play along, not having any idea what I was doing… It’s just an exercise to remind ourselves that a record can be anything, and you don’t have to overthink it.”
Around the time of the album’s release in 2004, Tweedy checked into a dual-diagnosis clinic to treat his anxiety, depression, and addiction. He’s been sober and healthy since then. “It’s a daily thing,” he told me last year, speaking about sobriety. “It’s not something you want to lose sight of. It’s not as intense; the feeling of being on a ledge has gone away considerably over the years.”
Tweedy was Wilco’s sole lead guitarist at the time of this album, giving it a distinct sound from anything else in the band’s catalog. (“I love how it goes from extreme quietness to excruciating noise,” Courtney Barnett — one of many younger artists inspired by the LP — told RS in 2015.) Shortly after its release, they added two new members, lead guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, cementing the lineup that has remained in place for the past 20 years of fruitful experimentation. Just a few months ago, they gave fans a surprise full-album performance of A Ghost Is Born at their biannual Solid Sound Festival.
“Making that record, and then finding this lineup, that was the start of something — of having a band that can play anything,” Tweedy says in the new box set’s liner notes. “That’s why, twenty years later, we’re still here and still going.”
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