🎉 READ ALL ABOUT DRIFT’S 2024 RECORDS OF THE YEAR HERE

Basket 0

👌 Your order qualifies for free shipping You are $85 away from free shipping.
No more products available for purchase

Leave a note for us...
Leave a gift message
Subtotal
View Basket
Continue to the checkout to apply any gift cards or discount codes and to review shipping and collection options.

Your basket is empty

This product is a Pre Order and is scheduled to be released 7th February 2025

This product is available on preorder with a limited discounted price.

Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

$37.00

This product is available on pre order with a limited discounted price.

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  It includes 65 previously unreleased music tracks as well as a 48-page hardcover book with previously unpublished photos and a new liner note by Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr.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.”

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.

Edition Info

• Deluxe LP box: 9 heavyweight 140-gram high-performance vinyl discs plus 4 CDs and book

• Deluxe CD box; 9 discs and book.

• Available on 2LP Heavyweight 140-gram high-performance double vinyl.

• Available 2CD Two-disc softpak

Tracklisting

2LP and 2CD editions;

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

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

Note; The deluxe editions are absolutely too wild to list. They are COMPREHENSIVE!!

Scheduled: 5 February 2025

Shipping & Delivery

Drift gladly ship all items Worldwide using Royal Mail Tracked® and DHL services. There is a shipping calculator available in the basket. Read More

Click & Collect

Available on all orders from Drift. Select the Click & Collect option during the checkout process. Read More.

UK Free Shipping

We offer free delivery on orders of £85 and over, sent within mainland UK. To qualify for free delivery, your order will be sent as one dispatch. Read More.

Global Shipping & Tax

If you are based outside the UK and EU, all prices will appear without tax at the checkout. Drift is IOSS registered and collects tax on all EU orders at point of purchase. Read More.

Drift Extras

Earn [points_amount] when you buy this item.

[{"variant_id":"52577581924736" , "metafield_value":""},{"variant_id":"52577581891968" , "metafield_value":""},{"variant_id":"52577581957504" , "metafield_value":""},{"variant_id":"52577585758592" , "metafield_value":""}]
                               

Pre Order FAQ

When is this released?

Wilco - A Ghost Is Born is available for Pre Order now and has a scheduled release date of 7th February 2025.

In the event of any delays to this date, we will try to keep this page updated in the '⚠ Updates' tab.

When will I get it?

We ship pre order items to arrive with you on or as close as possible to release day. We are limited naturally by when the stock arrives with us in Totnes, but we work hard to ship them in a timely fashion.

⚠ If you make a purchase from Drift that includes both Pre Order titles and in-stock titles, we will ship your entire order as one when all items are released. Read More.

What is the discount?

Every Pre Order product has a discount of between 10% and 15%. This is already factored into the price and will revert to full RRP during the week of release.