How Wilco’s Massive ‘A Ghost Is Born’ Box Set Complicates the Album’s Harrowing Myth

Jeff Tweedy is so well-versed in the standard mythologies of rock’n’roll—rebellion, drug abuse, near-death dramatics—that he can embody them, tweak them, and be embarrassed by them all at once. This prismatic perspective is presented in full within the expansive new box set celebrating Wilco’s 2004 classic, A Ghost Is Born. This is the album that Tweedy almost didn’t live through, the one where his longtime struggles with migraines, panic attacks, and anxiety led to a painkiller addiction so serious that he thought he might die each night when he went to sleep. “Every song we recorded seemed likely to be my last,” he wrote in his memoir. “Every note felt final.”

As a music critic, I’m also well-versed in rock’n’roll myths—and sometimes embarrassed by my susceptibility to them. Basically since its release, A Ghost Is Born has been my favorite Wilco album. It’s because I love the songs, how they are sad and funny and strange and catchy. It’s because I love Tweedy’s lyrics, and the way he couches the confessional inside the incomprehensible. It’s because of Tweedy’s raucous guitar solos that explode throughout, their punk essence, the way they make short-circuiting sound transcendent. It’s because the record came out just as I was graduating college (near Wilco’s hometown of Chicago!), and I felt like I was embarking upon a terrifying new phase along with the band. But if I’m being honest, my affection for this Wilco album is also wrapped up in its story: How Tweedy faced off against addiction and death, coming away with his heartbeat intact. How he, you know, plumbed the depths of his tattered soul for his art. Because if he hadn’t come so close to calamity, how could he have made a freakily anthemic 11-minute epic like “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”?

The A Ghost Is Born box set both deepens and complicates the album’s legacy. It’s insanely comprehensive, with 80 tracks (including 65 that were previously unreleased) spanning more than nine hours of music. There’s also a 48-page book with a detailed retelling of the album’s genesis, including new interviews with the principal players, by the veteran rock writer Bob Mehr. (An abridged version of the set is available on streaming, but you’ll need to shell out for the full 9LP/4CD package to hear everything.) I’ve listened to this album hundreds of times, and this super-deluxe edition made me consider it anew.

The true story of A Ghost Is Born can be heard most clearly in this set’s eight (!) different versions of “Spiders.” There are four alternate takes of the song that go from when Wilco started putting the album together in February 2002 to when they were getting ready to properly record everything in October 2003. There are two versions taken from improvisatory sessions dubbed “Fundamentals,” where Tweedy would play and sing on one side of the studio glass, while the rest of the band was on the other, and Tweedy couldn’t hear what they were doing. There is the beloved album version, with its motorik strut and Tweedy’s frayed guitar and that gargantuan instrumental hook. Finally, there is a victory-lap live version.

Each one is fascinating in its own way. But the version that literally made me softly gasp on the subway the first time I heard it was the earliest one, recorded at Soma Studios in Chicago near the start of 2002. There are elements of the “Spiders” fans know—the impressionistic lyrics about leggy insects filling out tax returns on a private beach in Michigan are there, as is the steady beat and the riffy hook. But there are big changes, additions, and omissions. Instead of leaning on Tweedy’s fried electric guitar, this one glides on a stunning fingerpicked acoustic figure. And instead of evoking the highway-friendly pulse of 1970s German bands like Neu!, the rhythm and ambient synths bring to mind U2’s work with Brian Eno in the ’80s, specifically “With or Without You.” I mean, the beginning of this version sounds a lot like a sped-up “With or Without You”! Go ahead and listen for yourself:

Generally, though, the biggest difference is a matter of attitude and tone. The early take is calm, polite, at peace; the album version is the exact opposite. In February 2002, when that first version was recorded, Wilco were still high off the accolades they received after releasing the previous year’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That album that fulfilled another type of rock’n’roll myth—the one where the artful band goes to war with its tiny-brained label and comes away triumphant. They were embarking on a huge tour, and being regarded as the most important American rock band of the young century. I saw them on that tour, in May 2002, when they played Chicago’s Riviera alongside Elliott Smith. Wilco were fantastic and daring; Smith was a wreck. Alone onstage, the singer-songwriter struggled to complete his intricately fingerpicked songs, at one point saying to the crowd, “It’s like having stuff on your hand and you can’t get it off.” Smith, who long suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction, passed away on October 21, 2003.

The same month Smith died, Tweedy entered Manhattan’s Sear Sound studio with the rest of Wilco and producer Jim O’Rourke to lay down the official version of A Ghost Is Born. This was when Tweedy’s migraines and depression—and subsequent pill intake—were reaching catastrophic levels, when he thought of the album he was creating as a potential message from beyond the grave to his two young sons. The relatively spare final version of “Spiders” is a direct result of his harrowing state at the time. “Because of its length, getting a great full take felt unlikely with the window on my ability to remain upright closing fast,” he wrote of recording the track in his memoir. “So we restructured the song to be as minimal as possible with the fewest number of chord changes. This allowed me to just recite the lyrics and punctuate them with guitar skronks and scribbles to get through the song without having to concentrate past my headache too much. We attempted two takes, and take one is the one on the record. Take two was incomplete.” His wild guitar work on the song plays like an exorcism, like he’s using the scattershot notes and distortion to push all of the sickness and distress out of his body; it also kind of sounds like he has stuff on his hand that he can’t get off.

The anchor lyric of “Spiders,” the line that brings Tweedy’s buggy images and impressionistic musings down to Earth, is simple: “It’s good to be alone.” Thankfully, he wasn’t alone. He had his family. He had help; he soon went to rehab and was able to reset his life. And he had his band, who sound like they’re carrying him over the finish line on the album. This feeling is emphasized on the live take of “Spiders” included in the box, recorded in October 2004, when Tweedy was on the mend, and the band, with new additions Nels Cline and Pat Sansone on board, was in the pocket. The guitars are still twitchy and raw, but the song’s collective power is in full focus. From the stage, it doesn’t sound like a cry for help as much as a battle cry, with Tweedy and Cline trading fuzz and feedback.

Listening to all eight versions of “Spiders” on this set—along with all the other alternate takes and jammy explorations—made me realize that the song, and the album, was the result of careful planning and creative camaraderie as much as Tweedy’s own troubles. If the band hadn’t explored all the permutations of “Spiders” before hitting the studio in New York, they likely wouldn’t have been able to adjust to their leader’s hobbled reality, and the song may not have become a live staple.

There are other epiphanies in the set that prove a similar point. Like a raucous alternate version of “Handshake Drugs” in which Tweedy’s singing is palpably more frustrated compared to the album take, and which ends with yet another extended guitar freak-out instead of the final version’s droning outro. If A Ghost Is Born were meant to only be a mirror of Tweedy’s angst, Wilco would have gone with the more harried version of “Handshake Drugs,” but instead they chose a subdued take that adds balance and nuance to the album as a whole. The same could be said of “Hummingbird,” which evolved from a ragged crescendo of a song, flecked with bits of disorienting static, to the album’s pristine piano pop. Also, some of the most tortured-sounding, sad-sack contenders for the album, including the lonely folk songs “Like a Stone” and “Losing Interest,” were left off the record. And just to show how in-the-zone Tweedy was as a songwriter during this era, the set includes a couple of priceless early takes of “Impossible Germany,” which would eventually bloom into the best song on Wilco’s next album, 2007’s Sky Blue Sky.

For all of A Ghost Is Born’s myth, this deluxe edition lets us hear how the album came to be after nearly two years of the entire band pushing and questioning what a Wilco album could—and should—sound like. Tweedy’s anxieties and addiction are crucial to the story, but they don’t tell the full story. 

Perhaps selfishly, this revelation also makes me feel absolved as a listener. A Ghost Is Born is hardly just a tortured-artist touchstone, a fact that Tweedy himself was relieved to learn too. “When I got better, I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore,” he said in the box set’s liner notes. “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.” Looking back, the record ultimately perpetuates an undersung type of rock’n’roll myth—of reflection, vulnerability, and overcoming—and is that much better for it.