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 proud 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 sometimes 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 Ebook.) 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 power migraine. That half isn’t for everybody, however it works as a savvy, inventive type of punctuation for a susceptible second. Such a sorrowful tune—about finality, free will, and God elevating a toast to lightning—earns an unreasonably large echo chamber. As soon as accepted, it’s really a chilled and welcome pause, like 12 clean pages between an amazing guide’s final two chapters.
The album ends with one remaining 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 offers it up for the singers, songs, and bands that deserved to make it massive however by no means did. “Romeo,” “Turpentine,” and “The Kay-Settes Starring Butchers Blind” are all fictional, however the music that they signify—and these lyrics definitely bear some likeness to how Tweedy as soon as described “Earlier than Tonight” by the Illinois alt-country band Souled American—is perhaps the album’s implicit dedication. A second straight Wilco album winds down with the radio on Tweedy’s thoughts:
One of the best songs won’t ever get sung
One of the best 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 that they had gained, they opened their present later that night time 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 by means of 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 sincere 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 nicely, 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. Non permanent reduction arrives with the nice and cozy buzz of “Handshake Medicine,” 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 underneath 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.
