A Ghost Is Born (20th Anniversary Expanded Edition) Wilco

• 1 At Least That's What You Said 05:32
• 2 Hell Is Chrome 04:38
• 3 Spiders (Kidsmoke) 10:46
• 4 Muzzle of Bees 04:56
• 5 Hummingbird 03:11
• 6 Handshake Drugs 06:07
• 7 Wishful Thinking 04:38
• 8 Company in My Back 03:46
• 9 I'm a Wheel 02:37
• 10 Theologians 03:36
• 11 Less Than You Think 15:04
• 12 The Late Greats 02:33
• 13 At Least That’s What You Said (8/13/02 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 05:12
• 14 Hell Is Chrome (10/5/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:45
• 15 Spiders (Kidsmoke) [9/28/03 SOMA-Chicago Version] (48kHz) 04:46
• 16 Muzzle Of Bees (7/15/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 05:08
• 17 Hummingbird (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:51
• 18 Handshake Drugs (11/13/03 Sear Sound-NYC Version) (48kHz) 07:46
• 19 Wishful Thinking (11/1/03 Sear Sound-NYC Version) (48kHz) 04:40
• 20 Company In My Back (2/8/03 Hothouse-St. Kilda, Melbourne Version) (48kHz) 04:21
• 21 I’m A Wheel (August 2002 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 02:35
• 22 Theologians (3/19/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:26
• 23 Less Than You Think (11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC Version) (48kHz) 02:56
• 24 The Late Greats (7/19/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:47
• 25 Kicking Television (3/18/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 02:59
• 26 The High Heat (2/5/02 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:02
• 27 Panthers (March 2003 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:54
• 28 Diamond Claw (3/21/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:29
• 29 Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard (June 2002 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 02:22
• 30 More Like The Moon (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 06:34
• 31 Improbable Germany (10/7/03 SOMA-Chicago Version) (48kHz) 03:38
• Total Runtime 02:25:35

Info for A Ghost Is Born (20th Anniversary Expanded Edition)

20th Anniversary deluxe reissues of Wilco's 2004 classic album, "A Ghost Is Born". The super deluxe edition includea the original album along with alternate versions, outtakes, and demos. This comprehensive set also features a complete live recording from a 2004 concert at Boston's Wang Center, as well as sessions from the band's "fundamentals" workshops. In total 65 previously unreleased music tracks.

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.

“Another engrossing, unorthodox record," said Mojo. "With the low-key yet magnificent A Ghost Is Born Tweedy's offering plenty more reasons to believe in the redemptive powers of Wilco.”

“There's a sense that every note and sound on Ghost," said Rolling Stone, "even the spontaneous ones, have been selected for private but rigorous reasons. A drum tap here, a glimmering hammer dulcimer there, a jab of distorted guitar, an echo suddenly opening new spaces—on Ghost, they say what words cannot.”

“Spectacular," exclaimed Uncut in a five-star review. "Their most engaging album yet. Wilco are getting closer and closer to their essence.”

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 AGIB 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, twenty 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.

Jeff Tweedy, vocals, guitars, synthesizer, acoustic bass, loops
Jim O'Rourke, guitars, piano, organ, synthesizer
Leroy Bach, guitars, piano, organ, synthesizer
John Stirratt, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, synthesizer, background vocals
Glenn Kotche, hammer dulcimer, synthesizer, drums, percussion, loops
Frankie Montuoro, hammer dulcimer
Karen Waltuch, viola
Mike Jorgensen, piano, Farfisa, synthesizer
Jim O'Rourke, ARP synthesizer, bass
Tim Barnes, percussion

Digitally remastered

Please Note: This album consists of different sampling rates. See track list - behind each track you'll find the sampling rate.

The Chicago rock band founded in the mid-’90s by singer, guitarist and songwriter Jeff Tweedy last year launched and headlined the inaugural Solid Sound Festival, while Tweedy produced and wrote two songs for the Grammy- winning release by soul legend Mavis Staples, You Are Not Alone, which won Best Americana Album at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards in February.

Staples joined Wilco, Avi Buffalo, Vetiver, the Baseball Project and more to perform at the first Solid Sound Festival, held Aug. 13-15, 2010, on the grounds of MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), a converted textile mill in North Adams, tucked away in the scenic Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Wilco has already announced the second incarnation of Solid Sound June 24-26. Along with a pair of headline performances by Wilco, this year’s version features the Levon Helm Band, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, New Zealand rocker Liam Finn, alt-country duo The Handsome Family and folk couple Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion. Also performing are soul singer Syl Johnson, jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas and Chicago retro-soul band JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound, plus indie-rockers Here We Go Magic, Sic Alps, Purling Hiss and a rare live set by Pillow Wand, a collaboration between Moore and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. Comedian John Hodgman hosts this year’s Comedy Cabaret, featuring Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac and comics Eugene Mirman and Morgan Murphy. Tickets are available via solidsoundfestival.com.

Also, Wilco this winter founded dBpm Records, headquartered in Easthampton, MA, to release future Wilco albums. Speaking of which, the band is currently recording the follow-up to its Grammy-nominated 2009 release Wilco (The Album) at the band’s studio in Chicago, The Loft.

It’s the latest chapter for Wilco, which Tweedy founded in 1994 after the dissolution of his previous group, Uncle Tupelo. From its raucous roots-rock origins, Wilco over the years has expanded its sound to encompass classic pop and genre-spanning experimentalism on acclaimed albums including 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (the subject of Sam Jones’ 2002 film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) and 2005’s Grammy-winning effort A Ghost is Born. Wilco also teamed with English singer Billy Bragg in the late ’90s at the invitation of Woody Guthrie’s daughter, who invited them to collaborate on setting to music some of the folk icon’s previously unrecorded lyrics, resulting in a pair of highly regarded Mermaid Avenue albums.

The current Wilco lineup solidified in 2004 with the addition of guitarist Nels Cline and guitarist/keyboardist Pat Sansone, who rounded out a roster featuring Tweedy, founding bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen. Kotche joined the band during the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Jorgensen helped with live sound manipulations on that tour before switching to piano and becoming a full-time member of Wilco.

In life beyond Wilco Stirratt and Sansone play together in the folk-pop group Autumn Defense, Jorgensen fronts the pop-rock band Pronto and Cline performs in multiple side projects, most notably with the free-jazz instrumental group The Nels Cline Singers. Kotche performs with bassist Darin Gray in On Fillmore and as a composer and a solo percussionist. He has also collaborated with Tweedy on the Loose Fur side project.

This album contains no booklet.