Wilco’s forthcoming album, “A Ghost Is Born” (Nonesuch), ends not with a bang but with a wink. The final song, “Late Greats,” takes a wry look at anonymity:
The best songs will never get sung
The best life never leaves your lungs
So good you won’t ever know
You can’t hear it on the radio
A listener familiar with Wilco’s recent past will be tempted to hear those lines as at least partially autobiographical. Three years ago this month, the Chicago band was being shown the door by its old record company. Wilco’s fourth record, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” wasn’t deemed hit-worthy enough for Reprise Records to even bother releasing it.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to record-industry oblivion. Wilco took back its album, released it on the Internet, and then sold it to another label, Nonesuch Records. More than 400,000 sales later, Wilco had become a commercial force and a cause celebre with its own made-for-TV-worthy script (little band trumps big corporation). “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was named album of the year in the annual Village Voice critics poll, and the band concluded its 2002-03 world tour by selling out two shows at the Auditorium Theatre — a $200,000 weekend that by itself would’ve paid for the recording costs of “Foxtrot.”
This non-commercial band was suddenly doing very well commercially, and “A Ghost Is Born” became one of the most anticipated releases of 2004. Then the floor began to give way, again. Keyboardist Leroy Bach quit the band a few months ago, the fifth defection or firing in the band’s 10-year history. His amicable departure was closely followed by the hiring of two new musicians — guitarist Nels Cline and keyboardist Pat Sansone — on the eve of a world tour. Then band leader Jeff Tweedy checked himself into a rehab clinic to try to break an addiction to painkillers brought on by persistent migraine headaches.
“With the new band members and the new album, there was a lot of [expletive] at stake,” drummer Glenn Kotche says. “We were going to be on the road the next two years. Jeff had to do this to get healthy, otherwise it could’ve turned out bad for everyone.”
Tweedy emerged from rehab a few weeks ago with the migraines under control, saying that he felt better than he has in years. And after a handful of canceled tour dates, the new six-piece lineup was preparing for the June 22 release of “A Ghost Is Born” and a sold-out concert Saturday at the Vic. They warmed up with two mid-May shows at Otto’s, a DeKalb club that had become a favored haunt in recent years.
The band sounded formidable even at this early stage, with Cline’s guitar adding muscle and nuance to the attack, and Sansone’s keyboards coupling with Mikael Jorgenson’s to bring orchestral richness to the more ornate songs. “This could be the most exciting live lineup we’ve had,” bassist John Stirratt says.
But even Stirratt realizes it could all end in a flash. “Jeff’s situation makes you realize how precarious it all is, especially when you’re depending on one person,” he says. “If it all ended, I think we’ve had a pretty good run. It’s been a long run, longer than most bands. We’re living on borrowed time in a way.”
That what-have-we-got-to-lose? attitude has served the band well. Rather than progressing in baby steps or simply refining its best moves, Wilco has turned each album into a new opportunity to reinvent itself. The sole exception was “A.M.” (1995), which blended twang with punk, a tentative extension of Tweedy’s work with Stirratt in Uncle Tupelo. “Being There” (1996) was the great leap forward, as it touched on everything from country-soul to noise rock. “Summerteeth” (1999) explored lush orchestral pop, and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002) tucked meditative folk-rock songs inside meticulously layered soundscapes. Sprinkled in between were a pair of “Mermaid Avenue” albums with British folkie Billy Bragg that offered a fresh take on the lyrics of Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie.
No easy routes
“A Ghost Is Born” is yet one more left turn down a dark alley of new possibilities. It finds Tweedy becoming an even more adventurous singer: the intimacy he conveys in the opening seconds of “At Least That’s What You Said,” the falsetto he unveils in “Hummingbird,” the treacherous seductiveness he conveys in “Hell Is Chrome.” The album also showcases a group of complementary musicians who know how to shape a song: Stirratt’s melodic bass playing in “Handshake Drugs,” the luxurious keyboard orchestration of “Company in My Back,” the gospel-tinged accents and shuffling soul moves of “Theologians.”
Then there’s Tweedy’s emergence as a lead guitarist, a job he had previously assigned to other, more technically accomplished musicians in the band. Now he’s out front taking solos that shriek and shudder like the poltergeist referenced in the album title. When he tears loose over Kotche’s boisterous drumming in the final bars of “At Least That’s What You Said,” it’s exhilarating. Two songs later, on “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” his guitar darts in and out over a relentless trance-rock groove. Like many of the songs on “Ghost,” the song had been performed in concert by the band for more than a year, but in a vastly different arrangement.
It was “a bombastic track that reminded us a little too much of Coldplay or U2,” Stirratt says. In the studio, Kotche and Stirratt locked into a rhythm pattern that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on an early album by German art-rockers Neu! The band cut two epic versions of the song, and called it a day.
“We were just jamming on it — I thought we’d go back to it and edit it together later,” Kotche recalls. “But no, sure enough, it was two full, complete takes, and one of them ended up on the album.”
The spontaneity of “Spiders” epitomized the spirit of the entire album, which was less about the studio-as-instrument experiments that characterized “Summerteeth” and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and more about the musicians playing together in a room with a minimum of overdubs. Whereas Kotche applied a variety of drums and percussion instruments on “Foxtrot,” he used a single trap kit for most of “Ghost.” The arrangements are more spacious, the interaction of the band as crucial as the words. For Tweedy, celebrated for his forthright lyricism, this marks a bold departure.
“I was having a tougher time getting all the emotion I wanted to get out of the words,” Tweedy says. “I started to trust my guitar-playing more, just by working at it, and I felt a lot of things come out that I wasn’t able to get to lyrically. I’m not as fast or proficient as 90 percent of the guitarists out there making a living. But I can sound like me.”
Not thin-skinned
Darin Gray, an old musician friend of Tweedy’s from pre-Uncle Tupelo days, says the guitarist’s willingness “to just put it out there, no matter what anyone says,” has enabled him to take risks other artists avoid. “I don’t think he’s saying, `Look at me, I’m a great guitarist,’ but he’s confident in his ability to express himself. Before he might default to other, more accomplished musicians, like Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo or Jay Bennett in Wilco, but now there are no crutches left. He’s just more confident in his own skin, but he’s also of the mind-set that `What have I got to lose?’ It’s not worth it to him if there’s not a sense that he’s turning a corner and trying something new.”
That approach doesn’t always sit well with the fans, who are already upbraiding the band on various Internet message boards for turning the concert favorite “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” into an 11-minute guitar “wankfest,” and for appending a 12-minute instrumental drone to one of Tweedy’s most intimate songs, “Less Than You Think.”
Tweedy understands the fans’ consternation, though he makes no concessions to it. “I know that 99 percent of our fans won’t like `Less Than You Think,’ that they will think the record is flawed because of that, or that it was a ridiculous indulgence. But I wouldn’t have put it on the record if I didn’t think it was valuable, that it wouldn’t reward someone’s attention if they decided to sit down and just listen.”
The song sits near the end of a record that Tweedy feels is about identity, or the lack of one. In song after song, the question of “What do you want me to be?” recurs. In “Less Than You Think,” identity is subsumed completely by music. Each Wilco member set up a sound installation in the studio, running their instruments through a series of effects boxes. The noise was recorded, then sculpted into a slow-moving sonic parabola that ascends, peaks, then fades. The sound of a ghost being born?
`Higher power’
“Nobody plays anything — there is so much less to this than you think,” Tweedy says. “It’s identity again. Why is this here? Because anybody could do it. Anything can happen. It’s not up to us. It’s that big idea of a higher power.”
“Less Than You Think” melts into album finale “The Late Greats,” which serves as something of a subtle punch line. Tweedy pokes fun at his self-indulgence, and those who might’ve fast-forwarded through the previous track. “The greatest lost track of all time,” he sings. “Can’t hear it anywhere you go.”
At that moment, another theme threading its way through “A Ghost Is Born” becomes apparent. When Tweedy insists that “the best songs will never get sung, the best life never leaves your lungs,” he posits that all we need to “be” is ourselves. But as the monthslong Internet discussions about the merits of “Spiders” and “Less Than You Think” illustrate, Tweedy and Wilco make music that also demands something more. It’s not enough simply to be. “A Ghost Is Born” is also an attack on complacency. It is the sound of a band challenging itself to work outside its prescribed boundaries and challenging its audience to respond, even if it means walking across the room to push the fast-forward button on the stereo.
“Hearing the songs is just as important as singing them,” Tweedy says. “And what the listeners bring to them, and what they pour into it, and how they see themselves is everything about how this album, and that song in particular, will work. It’s something that’s come up before in our albums, only now I’m making the point in much more aggravating fashion: That it’s your album too.”
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Tribune music critic Greg Kot is the author of the unauthorized biography “Wilco: Learning How to Die” (Broadway Books).
