Reverse such hooks is A Ghost Is Born’s extra mischievous anti-pop flipside. “I’m a Wheel” is a gloriously smirking surge of uneven, Replacements-spirited punk rock that stands out like a brow zit Tweedy added to his personal self-portrait; its lyrics embody “uh,” “um,” and “One, two, three, 4, 5, six, seven, eight, 9/As soon as in Germany somebody stated nein.” (Tweedy would often calm his mind by writing out each quantity from one to 1,000 on gridded pages, which bookend these liner notes as they did The Wilco Guide.) The extra controversial, penultimate “Much less Than You Assume” consists of a fragile three-minute piano ballad adopted by 12 minutes of every band member holding their very own particular person drones in unison—Tweedy’s sonic description of a persistent migraine. That half isn’t for everybody, but it surely works as a savvy, artistic type of punctuation for a susceptible second. Such a sorrowful track—about finality, free will, and God elevating a toast to lightning—earns an unreasonably large echo chamber. As soon as accepted, it’s truly a relaxing and welcome pause, like 12 clean pages between an incredible e book’s final two chapters.
The album ends with one last twist, because the band whirls from its most artsy to its loosest with a shining gold nugget of jangle in “The Late Greats.” Right here, Tweedy provides it up for the singers, songs, and bands that deserved to make it huge however by no means did. “Romeo,” “Turpentine,” and “The Kay-Settes Starring Butchers Blind” are all fictional, however the music that they symbolize—and these lyrics actually bear some likeness to how Tweedy as soon as described “Earlier than Tonight” by the Illinois alt-country band Souled American—may be the album’s implicit dedication. A second straight Wilco album winds down with the radio on Tweedy’s thoughts:
The most effective songs won’t ever get sung
The most effective life by no means leaves your lungs
So good you gained’t ever know
You’ll by no means hear it on the radio
A Ghost Is Born would win Wilco’s solely two Grammys, together with Finest Different Album. After studying they’d gained, they opened their present later that evening with “The Late Greats.”
A Ghost Is Born’s most fascinating distinction, nevertheless, is that it stays the one Wilco album with Tweedy as lead guitarist—initially by necessity, after Bennett’s departure, and later at O’Rourke’s emphatic encouragement. What comes via Tweedy’s electrical is extra kinetic and fewer compelled towards conventional method than Bennett and Brian Henneman earlier than him, or Nels Cline after. What his soloing lacks in grace or slick licks, it makes up for in trustworthy response, bending round a number of notes of a motif one second, then shattering right into a spur-of-the-moment tremolo the following. He by no means strays too removed from the melody, and he stumbles effectively, as if refusing to go down whereas his knees wobble beneath him. On opener “At Least That’s What You Stated,” his freaked-out Gibson SG chases the wayward winds of Neil Younger’s “Like a Hurricane” after the entire band indulges an eight-bar slam dance of staccato quarter-note mashing. Momentary aid arrives with the nice and cozy buzz of “Handshake Medication,” an enveloping spotlight of each the album and its outtakes right here, during which Stirratt and Kotche’s brilliantly affected person rhythm observe thumps together with rock-solid consistency beneath Tweedy’s sweat-dampened squall, just like the earth rotating on in content material oblivion whereas a narrator slips away from a second’s peace.