Feb. 19, 2025
In 2022, I invested in the big superdeluxe box for Wilco’s most successful album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. Across 11 pieces of ‘silver’ vinyl and one CD, the box set showed the tortuous process that Wilco went through to create that album. It’s a magnificent collection of music, though if you don’t like hearing multiple versions of the same song and are not fond of unfinished material, it’s not going to be as pleasant an afternoon as it is for me.
That said, getting the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot box was not the best experience, which is probably why I haven’t written about it before now. The vinyl version takes a “how few pieces of vinyl can we use?” approach and messes up some of the track ordering. The box itself got held hostage for a month by FedEx, which made me swear I would never willingly use them again. No prizes for guessing who delivered this one. Calling the tagging for the digital version’s MP3s amateurish would be charitable. Then, when the box finally arrived its lid was damaged. Were it not for the quality of the contents, I would have been seriously miffed.
So you’ll understand why I had a moment’s pause when the corresponding box was announced for “A Ghost is Born”. But it’s my favourite Wilco album, and one of my favourite albums full stop. As I am not of repeating, this blog’s name came from my username on a Wilco message board. The pause was literally one exact second. It was so exact that scientists are now debating whether my pause could replace the previous scientific definition of a second. After all, who has time to count 9,192,631,770 periods of the ground-state hyperfine transitions of caesium-133 these days? Not me, I’ve got box sets to order.
The superdeluxe edition of “A Ghost Is Born” is on a more modest nine pieces of Robin Egg Blue vinyl and 4CDs. At the time of writing this review, I’ve not listened to any of the CDs yet. I will explain why in a second. The vinyl pieces are the original album over two discs, which has been remastered and sounds phenomenal. AGIB has always had a beautiful sheen to its sound that coats the whole album. And the songs are great. You could argue that the highs of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”, “Kamera”, “Jesus Etc”, “Poor Places”) are very high, but the craft and musicality present on “A Ghost Is Born” has always meant I put it higher on average.
The vinyl continues with two more collections of out-takes, each presented as a double album. The first, named “dBPM” for a working title of AGIB that eventually became the name of their record label, is perhaps more polished set of out-takes. They present the point at which demos start to take the recognisable forms of what would actually appear on the record. The tracklist roughly follows AGIB before presenting a few tracks that either didn’t make it or ended up being released later. This is also the additional material that is included in the digital version.
The second out-takes collection is rougher, and hews closer to the album’s original concept of a Noah’s Ark of songs in which Jeff Tweedy wrote about various aspects of his personality in the guise of animals. That menagerie is present in the finished version: titles of tracks include spiders, hummingbirds, and bees, while “Company In My Back” is told from the point of view of a bug gatecrashing a picnic. This collection gives us more: “Panthers” (which was a b-side and is a song I love) and “Diamond Claw”. There’s probably a few other references I’ve missed.
The other aspect of the second collection is that it gives us some of the jams that became the musical basis for “A Ghost Is Born”. The most obvious example is “Two Hat Blues” by Mike Jorgensen, which became the basis of “Hell Is Chrome”. I also think the sequencing of “The High Heat” and and an early version of “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” is not a coincidence. “Hummingbird”, which also appears on the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” box, has a very early live tracking version included that shows it could have been a very different song.
Around that time in 2002 and 2003, Wilco were writing new material in an unusual way. That’s the basis of the 4CDs of “Fundamentals” that I haven’t listened to yet. Perhaps I will give them their own review. The band setup in the studio so that Jeff Tweedy worked on new songs alone with a guitar, while the rest of the band improvised around him. Jeff couldn’t hear the rest of the band as they did this. The seven tracks (each is about 30 minutes) on the 4CDs are the results. Some of these have been released before, but I’ve never been fortunate to hear them before. It feels like listening to three and a half hours of that will be an experience, so I’ve been waiting to be in the right headspace!
Finally, there’s a triple album of a live performance at the Wang Art Centre in Boston in October 2004. Obviously, I would have preferred the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth a few months earlier! Nevertheless, it’s a very good recording and a decent setlist. They play every track from “A Ghost Is Born” except for “Less Than You Think”, which is much less of a song without the drone section. (Oh yeah, unless it’s on the Fundamentals there are no dummy runs of the drone section… which is either technically impressive because the whole thing was one and done, or sad because who doesn’t need more migraine-imitating drones in their life?) The selections from outside the album are all bangers and there’s a nice bit of banter when their version of “Christ For President” runs afoul of their curfew.
The other two great things about the box are the book that comes with it and the box itself. The book is a great account of the making of the album, which seems to veer between the excitement of a band realising a new form of its own creativity while also dealing with Jeff’s physical and mental health issues. My only quibble is that the photos aren’t captioned throughout and it would be nice to know who is in them and where they were taken. The box is just lovely. It has the egg from the original album cover on it and reveals an opened egg on the inside. The spin has holographic lettering. It’s a thing of beauty and best of all, I’ve not managed to damage it yet!
I saw Wilco in June 2004, just as “A Ghost is Born” was released. Some of the songs at that stage hadn’t convinced me, I was there for the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot songs. But the absolutely ear-splitting solo on “At Least That What She Said” that night and the amazing drawn-out version of “Spiders”, among others, totally convinced me. And 21 years later, I still am.