Wilco have compiled another spectacular CD for Uncut: Noisy Ghosts, hooked around their upcoming A Ghost Is Born anniversary edition, is available for free with the March 2025 issue of Uncut.
Wilco have compiled another spectacular CD for Uncut: Noisy Ghosts, hooked around their upcoming A Ghost Is Born anniversary edition, is available for free with the March 2025 issue of Uncut.
“This record isn’t like any other record we’d done before,” says Jeff Tweedy of Wilco’s fifth album. “That’s the sort of thing I value in my own record collection. Those are the records that are the most unique.”
A Ghost Is Born grew out of an intense period of upheaval for the band, who undertook a series of wild schemes and unusual creative exercises at Soma Electronic Sound Studios in Chicago.
“I was already doing some cut-up techniques and free writing and things like that, which I really enjoyed,” says Tweedy. “I discovered that I liked the stuff that I didn’t think about more than the stuff that I did think about. With the sessions for Ghost, I was trying to find ways to extend that to the band and get everybody else to buy into it.”
It didn’t take much persuading. Those Soma experiments allowed them to reconsider what a Wilco album could be, to the extent that they made up a series of fictional albums in the studio, complete with its own fake artwork and fake titles.
This exclusive Uncut CD, compiled by the band, is another alternate-universe Wilco album. Bookended by two very different versions of album highlight “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” – including one unavailable anywhere else – it features strange experiments and outtakes from the early 2000s. A fine satellite to the new 20th-anniversary A Ghost Is Born boxset, this CD shows how much Wilco changed during just a few years.
1 SPIDERS (KIDSMOKE) (EXCLUSIVE TRACK)
Recorded 3/24/03 at SOMA – Chicago, IL
Originally issued on Noisy Ghosts (Uncut, 2025)
An early — and exclusive! — version of this fan favorite. Tweedy had yet to devise the song’s signature krautrock beat, so they depended on drummer Glenn Kotche to suture the song together. Churchly piano chords fight it out with barbs of guitar distortion, and Tweedy skips the lengthy guitar solo and jumps right into the lighter-raising chord progression. It all wraps up in a tidy five minutes instead of sprawling to nearly eleven. “I didn’t really remember doing this style of the song outside of Sear Sound in New York but apparently we did,” says Tweedy. “When I listened back to it, I was really surprised. Everything happens at different places.”
2 HANDSHAKE DRUGS
Recorded 11/13/03 Take 2 at Sear Sound – New York City
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
(Nonesuch 0075597899009, 2025)
Wilco recorded countless versions of “Handshake Drugs” both in Chicago and later at their official Ghost sessions in New York, but this one might very easily have ended up on the final album. Building from a buoyant pop bounce to a frantic guitar freakout, it’s perhaps Tweedy’s most explicit statement about his mental state during this time, when his intense anxiety attacks and frequent migraines nearly ended Wilco. “There are songs on every record that feel very… not necessarily autobiographical, but they do have a very real, very literal relationship to my life,” he says. “Ghost is pretty abstract, but the songs do work that way.”
3 KICKING TELEVISION
Originally issued on I’m A Wheel (Nonesuch WILCO1/
0075597985177, 2004 UK 7”)
After the departure of Jay Bennett, Tweedy took over lead guitar duties, playing more solos and developing a raw playing style grounded in his post-punk heroes. “Andy Gill and Keith Levene gave me permission to play guitar the way I do,” he says. “At the end of the day, your own technique is the only technique that matters.” This abrasive skewering of self-help culture — or is it an ode to the legendary New York punk band? — didn’t make the Ghost Is Born tracklist but was such a staple on the subsequent tour that Wilco named their 2005 double live album after the song.
4 I’M A WHEEL
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch 0075597980929, 2004)
and I’m A Wheel (Nonesuch WILCO1/0075597985177, 2004 UK 7”)
If “Kicking Television” didn’t make the album, possibly to make way for “I’m A Wheel”. As boisterous as a toddler after too many Oreos, it’s a showcase for Tweedy’s bouncing-off-the-walls guitarwork and his nonsensical cut-and-paste lyrics, but it’s also one of his wildest vocal performances. He wrings great profundity out of a well-placed “ummm” and punctuates the song with a larynx-shredding howl. It also has the distinction of being the only album track released as a seven-inch single, cleverly enacting the sentiment of the song — “I’m a wheel, I will turn on you!” — with each spin.
5 HUMMINGBIRD
Recorded 2/8/02 at SOMA – Chicago, IL
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
(Nonesuch 0075597899009, 2025)
Early in their sessions at Soma, Wilco took a stab at this Ghost track, which originally had a slower tempo, a moodier feel, lots of sticky sound effects, and a skittering dulcimer in the background. Over the next two years the song evolved dramatically, thanks to Mikael Jorgenson’s exuberant piano and Jim O’Rourke’s expressive string arrangement. Tweedy’s father was a fan and even considered it their best song, even if it is a meditation on creative futility: “His goal in life was to be an echo… but in the deep chrome canyons of loudest Manhattans, no one could hear him.”
6 BARNYARD PIMP
Recorded August 2002 at SOMA – Chicago, IL
Originally issued on The Wilco Book (PictureBox Inc.
ISBN 0-9713670-3-5, 2004)
An early experiment from the Ghost sessions, this weird instrumental buzzes and honks with bizarre approximations of farmyard animal cries and strutting drumbeats. It was never considered for the album but did appear in The Wilco Book in 2004, along with several other odd outtakes. Twenty years later, Tweedy laughs at the song and especially its cartoonish title: “There was a period when a lot of things came out of my mouth and were written down, usually just to make Jim O’Rourke laugh. ‘Barnyard Pimp’ is exactly the kind of phrase that would tickle him.”
7 SPIDERS (KIDSMOKE) (LIVE)
Recorded 10/1/04 Live at the Wang Center – Boston, MA
Originally issued on A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
(Nonesuch 0075597899009, 2025)
These songs didn’t settle down even after the album was released. Instead, the band kept tinkering with them on the Ghost tour throughout 2004 and into 2005. During that time, this testy, challenging album cut took on new importance in Wilco’s setlists, and this live version, recorded in Boston, represents a pivotal moment in the song’s evolution: an early indication that “Spiders” would become a concert ritual for years to come. “It just gives everybody that sense of release where we can forget our troubles and just surrender,” says guitarist Nels Cline. “It’s like a collective bonding, where you all lose yourself in rock and roll.”
THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, DAVID LYNCH, THE ZOMBIES, RICHARD DAWSON, PATTERSON HOOD, VASHTI BUNYAN, THROWING MUSES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW