A Ghost Is Born Wilco

Nonesuch releases a deluxe edition of Wilco’s 2004 Grammy Award–winning album A Ghost Is Born.  The box set comprises either nine vinyl LPs and four CDs or nine CDs – including the original album, alternates, outtakes, and demos, charting the making of A Ghost Is Born – plus the complete 2004 concert recording from Boston’s Wang Center and the band’s “fundamentals” workshop sessions.  It includes 65 previously unreleased music tracks as well as a 48-page hardcover book with previously unpublished photos and a new liner note by Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr.

A Ghost Is Born was released commercially on June 22, 2004, debuting at No. 8 on the Billboard chart.  The album, which Mehr calls ‘an eclectic array of dark ballads, upbeat pop songs, Krautrock chug, noise rock freakouts, and roots rock abandon,’ was widely acclaimed as one of 2004’s best, appearing in year-end lists of Mojo, NPR, NME, the Associated Press, The Wire, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Uncut, among many others.  The album earned the band its first Grammy, for Best Alternative Music Album.  The album also won a Grammy for Best Recording Package.

For the A Ghost Is Born recording, Wilco was Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Leroy Bach, Glenn Kotche, and Mikael Jorgensen; Jim O’Rourke, who mixed the band’s previous release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced the album with Wilco.  Leroy Bach left Wilco at the completion of the sessions and the band announced the addition of two new members: Pat Sansone and Nels Cline.  Sansone and Cline toured with Wilco to promote A Ghost Is Born and that lineup has remained unchanged since 2004.  As Tweedy said to Mehr for his new liner note, “Making that record, and then finding this lineup, that was the start of something – of having a band that can play anything.  That’s why, 20 years later, we’re still here and still going.”

Wilco first began sessions for what would become A Ghost Is Born in early 2002 at Chicago’s Soma E.M.S., where they had mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  Much of the album was tracked live in the studio with O’Rourke and engineer Chris Shaw.  They also reunited there with engineer and soon-to-be-bandmate Mikael Jorgensen.

At Soma, the band began sketching out music using Tweedy’s notebooks of lyrics, poetry, and prose.  Mehr notes: ‘In between more traditional song tracking, the group would engage in a series of conceptual improvisations in the studio.  These musical experiments, broadly known as ‘Fundamentals’… were part of what Kotche said was ‘an attempt to search for a new group identity. To see what we could make this band into.’’

In the fall of 2003, the band relocated to New York to finish recording at Sear Sound.  “It seemed like the band needed to get out of Chicago, get out of the working mode they’d been in, and only be thinking about making a record,” O’Rourke told Mehr.  There, playing together in the corner of a large studio, the album began to take its final shape.

Emerging from a period of addiction and rehab, Tweedy discussed how he feels about A Ghost Is Born in retrospect.  As he told Mehr, “I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore.  But the album was ahead of me as a person.  It was the part of me that I was trying to preserve – enthusiastic and furious about the world, as well as open and loving.  I reached that in the music, before I could get there emotionally on my own.”

A Ghost Is Born was the second Wilco release on Nonesuch Records, preceded by the landmark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  The relationship with Nonesuch would last nearly a decade and include two more studio albums – Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (the album) – along with a live album and a live DVD, plus reissues of earlier records, before Wilco began its own label, dBpm.