Nonesuch releases a deluxe edition of Wilco’s 2004 Grammy Award–winning album 'A Ghost Is Born'. The box set comprises either nine vinyl LPs and four CDs or nine CDs – including the original album, alternates, outtakes, and demos, charting the making of A Ghost Is Born – plus the complete 2004 concert recording from Boston’s Wang Center and the band’s “fundamentals” workshop sessions. It includes 65 previously unreleased music tracks as well as a 48-page hardcover book with previously unpublished photos and a new liner note by Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr.

'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. As Tweedy said to Mehr for his new liner note, “Making that record, and then finding this lineup, that was the start of something – of having a band that can play anything. That’s why, 20 years later, we’re still here and still going.”

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.

At Soma, the band began sketching out music using Tweedy’s notebooks of lyrics, poetry, and prose. Mehr notes: ‘In between more traditional song tracking, the group would engage in a series of conceptual improvisations in the studio. These musical experiments, broadly known as ‘Fundamentals’… were part of what Kotche said was ‘an attempt to search for a new group identity. To see what we could make this band into.’’

In the fall of 2003, the band relocated to New York to finish recording at Sear Sound. “It seemed like the band needed to get out of Chicago, get out of the working mode they’d been in, and only be thinking about making a record,” O’Rourke told Mehr. There, playing together in the corner of a large studio, the album began to take its final shape.

Emerging from a period of addiction and rehab, Tweedy discussed how he feels about 'A Ghost Is Born' in retrospect. As he told Mehr, “I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore. But the album was ahead of me as a person. It was the part of me that I was trying to preserve – enthusiastic and furious about the world, as well as open and loving. I reached that in the music, before I could get there emotionally on my own.”

TRACK LISTING

9LP & 4CD Box Set/9CD Box Set Tracklist:
A Ghost Is Born
1. At Least That’s What You Said
2. Hell Is Chrome
3. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
4. Muzzle Of Bees
5. Hummingbird
6. Handshake Drugs
7. Wishful Thinking
8. Company In My Back
9. I’m A Wheel
10. Theologians
11. Less Than You Think
12. The Late Greats

dBpm: Outtakes/Alternates 1
13. At Least That’s What You Said (8/13/02 SOMA-Chicago)
14. Hell Is Chrome (10/5/03 SOMA-Chicago)
15. Spiders (Kidsmoke) (9/28/03 SOMA-Chicago)
16. Muzzle Of Bees (7/15/03 SOMA-Chicago)
17. Hummingbird (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
18. Handshake Drugs (11/13/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
19. Wishful Thinking (11/1/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
20. Company In My Back (2/8/03 Hothouse-St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia)
21. I’m A Wheel (August 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
22. Theologians (3/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
23. Less Than You Think (11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
24. The Late Greats (7/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
25. Kicking Television (3/18/03 SOMA-Chicago)
26. The High Heat (2/5/02 SOMA-Chicago)
27. Panthers (March 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
28. Diamond Claw (3/21/03 SOMA-Chicago)
29. Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard (June 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
30. More Like The Moon (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
31. Improbable Germany (10/7/03 SOMA-Chicago)

Unstitched: Outtakes/Alternates 2
32. Handshake Drugs (First Version) (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
33. Hummingbird (February 2002 Recorded Live During Tracking At SOMA-Chicago)
34. The High Heat (2/4/02 SOMA-Chicago)
35. Spiders (Kidsmoke) (February 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
36. Diamond Claw (March 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
37. Muzzle Of Bees (October 2003 Sear Sound-NYC)
38. Like A Stone (11/10/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
39. Leave Me (Like You Found Me) (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
40. Losing Interest (11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
41. Old Maid (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
42. Spiders (Kidsmoke) (August 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
43. Panthers (October 2003 Sear Sound-NYC)
44. Muzzle Of Bees (7/16/03 SOMA-Chicago)
45. Diamond Claw (10/9/03 SOMA-Chicago)
46. Losing Interest (7/20/03 SOMA-Chicago)
47. Spiders (Kidsmoke) (October 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
48. The Thanks I Get (6/26/02 SOMA-Chicago)
49. Two Hat Blues (March 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
50. Improbable Germany (January 2002 Pre-Production Loft Session-Chicago)

The Hook At The Wang (Live October 1, 2004 At The Wang Center-Boston, MA)
51. Muzzle Of Bees
52. Company In My Back
53. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
54. A Shot In The Arm
55. Hell Is Chrome
56. Handshake Drugs
57. Jesus, Etc.
58. Hummingbird
59. I’m Always In Love
60. At Least That’s What You Said
61. Ashes Of American Flags
62. Theologians
63. I’m The Man Who Loves You
64. Poor Places
65. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
66. She’s A Jar
67. A Magazine Called Sunset
68. Kingpin
69. The Late Greats
70. I’m A Wheel
71. Via Chicago
72. California Stars
73. Christ For President

Fundamentals (On CD In The LP Boxset)
74. Fundamental 1
75. Fundamental 2
76. Fundamental 3
77. Fundamental 4
78. Fundamental 5
79. Fundamental 6
80. Fundamental 7


2CD Tracklist:
CD1 - A Ghost Is Born
1. At Least That’s What You Said
2. Hell Is Chrome
3. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
4. Muzzle Of Bees
5. Hummingbird
6. Handshake Drugs
7. Wishful Thinking
8. Company In My Back
9. I’m A Wheel
10. Theologians
11. Less Than You Think
12. The Late Greats

CD2 - DBpm: Outtakes/Alternates
13. At Least That’s What You Said (8/13/02 SOMA-Chicago)
14. Hell Is Chrome (10/5/03 SOMA-Chicago)
15. Spiders (Kidsmoke) (9/28/03 SOMA-Chicago)
16. Muzzle Of Bees (7/15/03 SOMA-Chicago)
17. Hummingbird (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
18. Handshake Drugs (11/13/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
19. Wishful Thinking (11/1/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
20. Company In My Back (2/8/03 Hothouse-St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia)
21. I’m A Wheel (August 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
22. Theologians (3/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
23. Less Than You Think (11/11/03 Sear Sound-NYC)
24. The Late Greats (7/19/03 SOMA-Chicago)
25. Kicking Television (3/18/03 SOMA-Chicago)
26. The High Heat (2/5/02 SOMA-Chicago)
27. Panthers (March 2003 SOMA-Chicago)
28. Diamond Claw (3/21/03 SOMA-Chicago)
29. Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard (June 2002 SOMA-Chicago)
30. More Like The Moon (2/8/02 SOMA-Chicago)
31. Improbable Germany (10/7/03 SOMA-Chicago)


2LP Tracklist:
1. At Least That’s What You Said
2. Hell Is Chrome
3. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
4. Muzzle Of Bees
5. Hummingbird
6. Handshake Drugs
7. Wishful Thinking
8. Company In My Back
9. I’m A Wheel
10. Theologians
11. Less Than You Think
12. The Late Greats

Following Wilco’s acclaimed 2023 album Cousin, Wilco revisited unfinished material from these sessions to craft ‘Hot Sun Cool Shroud’. Collaborating again with engineering mixer Tom Schick, the band crafted six tracks that expand on the sound of Cousin. According to Jeff Tweedy, they have “a summertime-after-dark kind of feeling. It starts off pretty hot, like heat during the day, has some instrumentals on it that are a little agitated and uncomfortable, and ends with a cooling breeze.” 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A superb set of abstractions of some of the vibe and *some* of the outtakes of the sessions for 'Cousin'. Here we get the pieces stretched into balmy, avant country and jagged pseudo-thrash ('Livid') before melting into a warm puddle towards the end of the EP. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Hot Sun
2. Livid
3. Ice Cream
Side B
4. Annihilation
5. Inside The Bell Bones
6. Say You Love Me

THIS IS A BLACK FRIDAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON FRIDAY NOVEMBER 29TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8AM ON SATURDAY NOVEMBER 30TH).

Down with Wilco is the ffth album by The Minus 5 - Produced by Scott McCaughey and Jeff Tweedy, it is a collaboration between McCaughey and Wilco, recorded at SOMA Studios Chicago in September and December 2001, in the wake of 9/11 - The LP has been out of print for years, but is being re-released as a single LP RSD Exclusive, on Sky Blue vinyl with new artwork and a poster!

This is a limited edition pressing of 1,200 copies and is only available at participating Record Store Day stores on RSD Black Friday 2024

TRACK LISTING

The Days Of Wine And Booze
Retrieval Of You
That's Not The Way That It's Done
The Town That Lost It's Groove Supply
Daggers Drawn
Where Will You Go?
Life Left Him There
Formerly Hail Centurion
The Family Gardener
The Old Plantation
What I Don't Believe
View From Below
I'm Not Bitter
Dear Employer

Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the critically acclaimed album, Wilco ‘Summerteeth.” Originally released in 1999, this genre-bending album showcases a blend of pop, rock, and experimental sounds. Featuring tracks like "Via Chicago" and "When You Wake Up Feeling Old" to the title track "Summer Teeth,” this tracklist showcases Wilco's talent for crafting emotionally impactful music using a distinctive range of sounds and styles.

TRACK LISTING

1. Can't Stand It
2. She's A Jar
3. A Shot In The Arm
4. We're Just Friends
5. I'm Always In Love
6. Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway (Again)
7. Pieholden Suite
8. How To Fight Loneliness
9. Via Chicago
10. ELT
11. My Darling
12. When You Wake Up Feeling Old
13. Summer Teeth
14. In A Future Age
15. 23 Seconds Of Silence
16. Candyfloss
17. A Shot In The Arm

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

Beautiful x3 LP Vinyl boxset of original album + rare bonus material. Very limited!

“I’m cousin to the world,” frontman Jeff Tweedy confesses. “I don’t feel like I’m a blood relation, but maybe I’m a cousin by marriage.” Produced by Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, Cousin marks the first time Wilco have worked with an outside producer since Jim O’Rourke’s involvement with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Sky Blue Sky. Le Bon’s influences — among them the inclusion of saxophone, cheap Japanese guitars, and a cinematic, New Wave-style drum machine — drive the album into the future. The result is Wilco’s most pointed and evocative album, one related but not tied to our present moment, truly new ground for a band that has tested musical boundaries throughout its lengthy career.

Longtime admirers of each other’s work, Wilco and Le Bon first met at the band’s Solid Sound Festival in 2019, where they formed an immediate connection, inspiring Tweedy to invite Le Bon to the band’s famed Chicago studio, The Loft, in 2022 to work on Cousin. Le Bon pushed the band to take risks, repurposing Wilco’s established strengths and challenging them to oppose habits — all the while maintaining what has, for the last thirty years, defined Wilco as a band, their fearlessness, made possible by musical virtuosity and the secret language only a family shares. “The amazing thing about Wilco is they can be anything,” Le Bon says. “They're so mercurial, and there’s this thread of authenticity that flows through everything they do, whatever the genre, whatever the feel of the record. There aren’t many bands who are able to, this deep into a successful career, successfully change things up.”

Le Bon arrived in Chicago to rebuild: to create a scaffold with Glenn Kotche’s architectural drumming and John Stirratt’s contrapuntal bass lines; a scene with Mikael Jorgensen’s cold, lonesome synths, Pat Sansone’s plaintive piano work, and guest instrumentalist Euan Hinshelwood’s mangled saxophones; and a topographic pattern out of Tweedy’s electric guitar bends and Nels Cline’s textural explosions, which Le Bon describes as “the weather,” to carve a path for Tweedy’s yearning lyrics.

“Cate is very suspicious of sentiment,” Tweedy says, “but she’s not suspicious of human connection.” With Le Bon’s direction, Cousin evolved into something icier and more nighttime-ish than anything Wilco have created before, while retaining the earnest quality of Tweedy’s lyrics and voice. Tweedy delivers his feelings, now, from an environment that reflects the one we live in and the one inspiring the songs in the first place. The album’s statement on human connection is writ small, revealed in vignettes of the lowest social unit: a pair. “Evicted,” the album’s first single, sees a narrator grappling with his responsibility for losing love counterpointed by Marc Bolan-inspired guitars. “I guess I was trying to write from the point of view of someone struggling to make an argument for themself in the face of overwhelming evidence that they deserve to be locked out of someone’s heart,” comments Tweedy. “Self-inflicted wounds still hurt and in my experience they’re almost impossible to fully recover from.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another perfectly manicured outing from Wilco, this time sees them following on more from 'Ode To Joy' thank last year's 'Cruel Country', with upbeat guitar lines and Tweedy's voice in full crackle. It's a weighty and beautifully written selection, helped tremendously by Cate Le Bon's unique production aesthetic. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. Infinite Surprise
2. Ten Dead
3. Levee
4. Evicted
5. Sunlight Ends
6. A Bowl And A Pudding
7. Cousin
8. Pittsburgh
9. Soldier Child
10. Meant To Be

Wilco's 12th studio album, Cruel Country, is the band's exploration of the genre they've often been defined by but, until now, never fully embraced. The double album features 21 Jeff Tweedy-penned tracks, made almost entirely of live takes, created with all six members together in The Loft for the first time since the 2011 release The Whole Love.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1 I Am My Mother 
2 Cruel Country 
3 Hints 
4 Ambulance 
5 The Empty Condor
6 Tonight's The Day
SIDE B 
1 All Across The World 
2 Darkness Is Cheap 
3 Bird Without A Tail / Base Of My Skull 
4 Tired Of Taking It Out On You 
5 The Universe 
SIDE C
1 Many Worlds
2 Hearts Hard To Find
3 Falling Apart (Right Now)
4 Please Be Wrong
SIDE D
1 Story To Tell
2 A Lifetime To Find
3 Country Song Upside-down
4 Mystery Binds
5 Sad Kind Of Way
6 The Plains

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was widely acclaimed as one of 2002’s best albums, appearing in year-end lists of Mojo, NME, Q, Rolling Stone, and Uncut, among many others. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot also was featured in multiple decade-end lists, with Rolling Stone naming it #3 Album of the 2000s, as well as many Greatest Albums of All Time lists, including in the NME.

Among Yankee’s inspirations was a recording Tweedy bought at Tower Records in the late 1990s, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. As Bob Mehr points out in his new album note, the record got “deep under Tweedy’s skin.” Tweedy said in his 2017 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “It was as fascinating to me as anything being made by actual musicians using actual instruments… I wanted to know why it was so hypnotic to me. Why could I listen to hours of this stuff, even though I had no clue what any of them were saying. That question became the foundation for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot… the way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate.” The album takes its title from a haunting recording of a woman repeating those words that is included in The Conet Project; that recording is sampled in the penultimate song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, ‘Poor Places’.

“Conceptually, Tweedy had decided to focus on a big idea for the next album: the state of America. His lyrics – often distilled from scribbled pages of free verse or poetry – became a form of inquiry,” Mehr continues. Tweedy said, in 2004, “I wanted to write about the stuff right in front of my eyes, microscopically looking at America and asking questions about each little thing… How can there be all these good things and things that I love about America, alongside all of these things that I’m ashamed of? And that was an internal question, too; I think I felt that way about myself.”

Mehr says, “Exploring those questions, while weaving in strands of Eastern philosophy and bits of autobiography – Yankee lyrics would be loaded with the pained imagery of someone suffering from migraines and mental health issues – Tweedy would conjure a deep examination of both country and self.”

Describing the uncanny, strangely prescient feeling of the album, which Wilco began offering as a free stream on its website in 2001, Mehr notes: “In the wake of 9/11, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot would be burdened with unintended meaning. The disc had originally been scheduled for a September 11 release. Its cover – a Sam Jones-shot image of Chicago’s twin Marina Towers angled in looming fashion – bore an eerie resemblance to the felled World Trade Center towers. And the songs – with titles like ‘Ashes of American Flags’ and ‘War on War,’ and lyrics about how ‘tall buildings shake, sad voices escape’ – took on a terrible new resonance.”

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the first Wilco release on Nonesuch Records following the band’s infamous split with Reprise (both labels are part of Warner Music Group). It was also the first release featuring the line-up of drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach joining founding members Jeff Tweedy and John Stirratt. The 2002 Sam Jones film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documented the fraught recording and mixing process, personnel changes, and label issues.

The relationship with Nonesuch would last nearly a decade and include three more studio albums – the Grammy Award-winning A ghost is born, 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. The band’s current lineup of Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen, Patrick Sansone, and Nels Cline has been together for nearly twenty years.

The Chicago (US) band Wilco presents Star Wars, the Grammy-award winning band’s ninth studio album and its first since 2011’s The Whole Love. 

Wilco has been a pioneer of pre-releasing albums and making its music available for free since 2001 when the band streamed its breakthrough release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The decision to make Star Wars available quickly and for free continues to see the band exploring new ways to release its music and reach its fans, while keeping the album release process fun and interesting to its members.

"Why release an album this way and why make it free? Well, the biggest reason, and I'm not sure we even need any others, is that it felt like it would be fun,” Tweedy said. “What's more fun than a surprise? Enough of this 20th anniversary already, here's something fresh.”

The new album was recorded at the band’s Chicago loft and features 11 original Wilco-penned tunes.

“Star Wars sounds like a band having an absolute blast with both the pop music form and the ways in which we hear it.” (4/5 – THE GUARDIAN)

TRACK LISTING

1.EKG
2.More...
3.Random Name Generator
4.The Joke Explained
5.You Satellite
6.Taste The Ceiling
7.Pickled Ginger
8.Where Do I Begin
9.Cold Slope
10.King Of You
11.Magnetized