Wilco

Tweedy contrasts this reaction with that of the white-collar patients (toward whom he admits having a predisposition to not liking). “They would always have the least ability to look outside of themselves. It seemed like, ‘Wow, he just doesn’t get it.’ Like, ‘I’m not going to go into any meetings with these lower-income people.’ It’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ That’s why they say in the program that it’s harder for a lot of those people to get through all their layers of identity that they’ve built up and accept themselves, that you’re an addict or you’re f---ed-up and you need to take your meds. You’re not king of the universe. People that come in there off of the streets and don’t have anybody, it’s pretty easy for them to believe that right away and start building.” For Tweedy, making A Ghost is Born was both excruciating and enjoyable. “My internal struggles made it probably a little bit harder than any other record I’ve ever made,” he admits. “I was just not feeling so good, not feeling so happy, so it made it more of a bloodbath for me emotionally.”

At the same time, the band jelled musically and personally. “It was a lot more relaxed,” Tweedy says. “The band dynamic was a lot more vibrant, engaged and symbiotic and all those things that you would imagine would be there. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a harder record to make, and that really wasn’t even because of being dropped or because of Jay Bennett or any of the other things that went on at that time. It was just a more frustrating process because it just took a long time to get to where we wanted to go. This record, everything was working musically pretty much the whole way.”

Nonetheless, learning the new songs was a multi-year endeavor. In February 2002, almost as soon as YHF was completed, the band began work on A Ghost is Born. “Anytime we weren’t on the road, we’d generally book some studio time or at least record stuff up here [in the loft]—always try and stay active,” Tweedy explains. The goal was to continually deconstruct the songs and learn to play them live until they had a version that worked; then they’d lay down final tracks. “By the time we got to New York [last November for the primary recording session], we had pretty much written and arranged and recorded almost all the songs at least once and had relearned them,” Tweedy says. Spending a total of two months in the studio with producer Jim O’Rourke, the band tracked for two-and-a-half weeks, then mixed. O’Rourke’s role on Ghost was more limited than on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The band involved him only after they’d fashioned their songs and were ready to record. “Jim was hip to the idea of being like a really traditional producer,” Tweedy says. “Mostly, his responsibility was to say, ‘That was a great take,’ or ‘You guys can do that better.’”

That’s not to diminish his importance, however. “He was as active as a great producer can be—not overhauling arrangements but suggesting little things like how loud to play, pacing, tempos and things like that. You can really trust him to help you get to your vision of what you want it to be in the most efficient way.”

The result: “I think it’s just a little bit closer than I’ve ever gotten to fulfilling what I wanted to say,” Tweedy says. “I think it’s a really warm recording. I like the continuity of the sonic textures. It’s about as close as I think we’ve ever gotten to making a record that feels as inviting as a lot of ’70s recordings do to me. There’s just a softness to the whole thing. At the same time, it’s sort of raw and naked sounding.”

Popular Wilco mythology holds that avant-garde composer/Sonic Youth member O’Rourke bears the responsibly for the band’s recent sound experiments (i.e., “the noise”). Not so, Tweedy explains. On Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, O’Rourke’s contribution was more in removing sounds from mixes Jay Bennett and Tweedy gave him so they could get to the core of songs before rebuilding them. As a musician and a friend, O’Rourke was and is an important influence on the singer/songwriter/guitarist, but the continual remaking of the band is driven by Tweedy.

That’s what it takes to make an existing record, he explains. “Maybe once a year, you discover an album you really, really love. We want to have that same experience with our own stuff. At some point, we might just feel like the most exciting record to make is the one that’s just a kind of refinement of the one we made before it, but the way it seems to have panned out is each record has had a slightly different band and a different lyrical slant to enough of a degree where you want to cast the lyrics in a different environment. That’s really kind of the main thing we’ve done.” “The lyrical transitions have been a lot slower and more measured than the sonic transformations,” Tweedy confesses.