FILTER REISSUES
Spirits rejoice
Jeff Tweedy’s second straight masterpiece, from June 2004, celebrates its 20th anniversary with 9-CD and 2-LP box set variations.
By David Fricke.
Wilco ★★★★
A Ghost Is Born
NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP
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.
BACK STORY:AVANT ROMANTIC
● In 2007, three years after joining Wilco, Nels Cline was named one of “20 New Guitar Gods” by Rolling Stone, dubbed “The Avant-Romantic” for his rare union of melodic grip and fire-music abandon. By then, the Los Angeles-born guitarist had been recording for three decades, making his debut on a 1979 LP by free-jazz saxophonist Vinny Golia. Cline’s 160-plus releases as a leader and sideman include outings with Yoko Ono, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and Lydia Lunch; a 1999 guitar-drums re-imagining of John Coltrane’s 1967 duo session Interstellar Space; and a 1997 shred-fest with Thurston Moore recorded live at an LA record store.
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 BeingThere, 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 Bob Mehr in the linernotes, “I’d finally found what I was looking for.”