Opposite such hooks is A Ghost Is Born’s more mischievous anti-pop flipside. “I’m a Wheel” is a gloriously smirking surge of choppy, Replacements-spirited punk rock that sticks out like a forehead zit Tweedy added to his own self-portrait; its lyrics include “uh,” “um,” and “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine/Once in Germany someone said nein.” (Tweedy would occasionally calm his brain by writing out every number from one to 1,000 on gridded pages, which bookend these liner notes as they did The Wilco Book.) The more controversial, penultimate “Less Than You Think” consists of a fragile three-minute piano ballad followed by 12 minutes of each band member holding their own individual drones in unison—Tweedy’s sonic description of a chronic migraine. That part isn’t for everyone, but it works as a savvy, creative form of punctuation for a vulnerable moment. Such a sorrowful song—about finality, free will, and God raising a toast to lightning—earns an unreasonably massive echo chamber. Once accepted, it’s actually a calming and welcome pause, like 12 blank pages between a great book’s last two chapters.
The album ends with one final twist, as the band whirls from its most artsy to its loosest with a shining gold nugget of jangle in “The Late Greats.” Here, Tweedy gives it up for the singers, songs, and bands that deserved to make it big but never did. “Romeo,” “Turpentine,” and “The Kay-Settes Starring Butchers Blind” are all fictional, but the music that they represent—and these lyrics certainly bear some likeness to how Tweedy once described “Before Tonight” by the Illinois alt-country band Souled American—might be the album’s implicit dedication. A second straight Wilco album winds down with the radio on Tweedy’s mind:
The best songs will never get sung
The best life never leaves your lungs
So good you won’t ever know
You’ll never hear it on the radio
A Ghost Is Born would win Wilco’s only two Grammys, including Best Alternative Album. After learning they had won, they opened their show later that night with “The Late Greats.”
A Ghost Is Born’s most interesting distinction, however, is that it remains the only Wilco album with Tweedy as lead guitarist—originally by necessity, after Bennett’s departure, and later at O’Rourke’s emphatic encouragement. What comes through Tweedy’s electric is more kinetic and less compelled toward traditional technique than Bennett and Brian Henneman before him, or Nels Cline after. What his soloing lacks in grace or slick licks, it makes up for in honest reaction, bending around several notes of a motif one second, then shattering into a spur-of-the-moment tremolo the next. He never strays too far from the melody, and he stumbles well, as if refusing to go down while his knees wobble beneath him. On opener “At Least That’s What You Said,” his freaked-out Gibson SG chases the wayward winds of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” after the whole band indulges an eight-bar slam dance of staccato quarter-note mashing. Temporary relief arrives with the warm buzz of “Handshake Drugs,” an enveloping highlight of both the album and its outtakes here, in which Stirratt and Kotche’s brilliantly patient rhythm track thumps along with rock-solid consistency under Tweedy’s sweat-dampened squall, like the earth rotating on in content oblivion while a narrator slips away from a moment’s peace.
