Scheduled UK Release date: 7th Feb 2025. Release dates are subject to change. |
A Ghost Is Born was released commercially on June 22, 2004, debuting at No. 8 on the Billboard chart. The album, which Mehr calls ‘an eclectic array of dark ballads, upbeat pop songs, Krautrock chug, noise rock freakouts, and roots rock abandon,’ was widely acclaimed as one of 2004’s best, appearing in year-end lists of Mojo, NPR, NME, the Associated Press, The Wire, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Uncut, among many others.
The album earned the band its first Grammy, for Best Alternative Music Album.
The album also won a Grammy for Best Recording Package.
For the A Ghost Is Born recording, Wilco was Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Leroy Bach, Glenn Kotche, and Mikael Jorgensen; Jim O’Rourke, who mixed the band’s previous release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced the album with Wilco.
Leroy Bach left Wilco at the completion of the sessions and the band announced the addition of two new members: Pat Sansone and Nels Cline.
Sansone and Cline toured with Wilco to promote A Ghost Is Born and that lineup has remained unchanged since 2004.
Wilco first began sessions for what would become A Ghost Is Born in early 2002 at Chicago’s Soma E.M.S., where they had mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Much of the album was tracked live in the studio with O’Rourke and engineer Chris Shaw.
They also reunited there with engineer and soon-to-be-bandmate Mikael Jorgensen.
In the fall of 2003, the band relocated to New York to finish recording at Sear Sound.
There, playing together in the corner of a large studio, the album began to take its final shape.
A Ghost Is Born was the second Wilco release on Nonesuch Records, preceded by the landmark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
The relationship with Nonesuch would last nearly a decade and include two more studio albums – Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (the album) – along with a live album and a live DVD, plus reissues of earlier records, before Wilco began its own label, dBpm.
Tracklisting
LP DISC 1: A GHOST IS BORN
Side A:
1. At Least That’s What You Said
2. Hell Is Chrome
3. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
Side B:
4. Muzzle of Bees
5. Hummingbird
6. Handshake Drugs
LP DISC 2: A GHOST IS BORN
Side C:
7. Wishful Thinking
8. Company in My Back
9. I’m a Wheel
10. Theologians
Side D:
11. Less Than You Think
12. The Late Greats