To celebrate the anniversary of this unique album in their catalog, Wilco will release a box set with over 65 unreleased tracks and a complete concert from 2004.
A little over 20 years ago, in June 2004, Wilco released a unique album in their catalog. A Ghost Is Born was the Chicago band's fifth album and the first they made after the studio innovations of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, released in 2002. Expectations were high, and the album exceeded them, winning rave reviews and the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album while expanding its audience. Today, Wilco revisits A Ghost Is Born in a super-deluxe box set which will be released on February 7, 2025.
This box set will be available from Nonesuch Records on nine CDs or nine vinyls/four CDs, each containing the original 2004 album as well as over 65 previously unreleased demos, alternate takes, a full concert performed that year at the Wang Center in Boston and a 48-page book including notes by rock historian Bob Mehr. You can now listen to a new studio take of “ Handshake Drugs », recorded on November 13, 2003.
A Ghost Is Born captured a particularly sensitive moment for Wilco. In his 2018 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)Jeff Tweedy remembers his somber mood when he reunited with bandmates John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Leroy Bach and Mikael Jorgensen, as well as producer Jim O'Rourke, to make the album. When they entered the studio in midtown Manhattan, he was quietly dealing with increasingly serious mental health issues and an addiction to painkillers: “ I was almost sure I was going to die. I say this very seriously. I thought I was going to die. Every song we recorded seemed like it was going to be our last. Each note seemed to me to be the last…. I don't know if others noticed it. They knew I was unhappy and struggling with depression, but they had no idea the severity of my drug use. »
Tweedy put it all into the album that took shape, writing in his memoir that he considered A Ghost Is Born as “ a gift for my children, who could refer to it when they were older and put the pieces of me together a little more than I had been able to do for them in real life… I wanted this record to be an elementary tool for Spencer and Sammy to rebuild my view of the world, to have a deeper connection with the father they had lost. »
The new box set will include several recordings of the improvisation method that Wilco called ” fundamentals » at that time. “ We would put on a reel of tape and record an entire album in the time it took to listen to itm'a dit Tweedy en 2020. I would sit in a recording booth and go through my notebook and make up songs based on random things, and everyone would play along, without having any idea what I was doing… It's just an exercise to remind us that a record can be anything, and that we don't need to think too hard about it. »
Around the time of the album's release, in 2004, Tweedy checked himself into a clinic to treat his anxiety, depression and addiction. Since then, he has been sober and in good health.
Tweedy was Wilco's only lead guitarist at the time of this album, giving it a sound distinct from everything else in the band's catalog. Shortly after its release, they recruited two new members, guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, cementing the lineup that has remained in place for the past 20 years. Just a few months ago, the band treated their fans to a surprise performance of the entire album A Ghost Is Born during his Solid Sound festival.
« The recording of this record, then the formation of this group, marked the beginning of something: having a group capable of playing anythingexplains Tweedy in the liner notes of the new box set. This is why, twenty years later, we are still here and we continue to exist. »
Simon Vozick-Levinson
Translated by the editorial staff
