A Ghost is Born is Wilco’s follow-up to the album that earned them a place among rock-and-roll legends, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. True to form, the band has divided its fans yet again, thrown fuel on the fire of its nay-sayers, and prodded some of its faithful to declare it a masterpiece. With results like that, it must be art. Art or madness.

It’s probably best to call it a little of both. The album gives plenty of evidence that the band is at the peak of their powers as musicians. Lead singer and guitarist Jeff Tweedy, who wrote these songs while wrestling with an addiction to painkillers, is clearly fighting his personal demons by using his best weapon: the guitar. And in spite of his condition, he seems more confident here, and at times it sounds like he's actually having fun.

This latest manifestation of Wilco— featuring Tweedy, multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach, guitarist Nels Cline, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, and guitarist and producer Jim O'Rourke—offer some of their most masterful performances here, by turns melancholy, playful, intense, exploratory, chaotic, gorgeous, and at times toeing the line of rock and roll anarchy. Instead of glazing these songs with layers of static and electronic busy-ness, as they did on Foxtrot, Wilco tries a more stylistically eclectic mix this time, bringing more of their live-stage sound to the record. Ghost is characterized by a restless energy that propels the band off the track of predictable songs and off into no-man’s-land, where sometimes they find paths to glory and other times they get stuck on bumpy roads to nowhere.

More often than not, these are glorious roads, even if those glories only reveal themselves to patient listeners who revisit the album faithfully in different contexts and different frames of mind.

One of the rewards is the way that Tweedy turns the strange, skewed lens of his perspective upon himself and reveals himself through storytelling and some surprisingly candid confessions. He doesn't try to hide his struggle with addiction, nor does he avoid the subject of his battle with migraine headaches. In fact, some of the album’s most difficult (and, unfortunately, condemned) passages will be familiar to migraine sufferers like myself—they’re like the audio equivalent of the crazy, flickering lights that often accompany migraines, the searing pulsing madness of the headache itself, and then the lingering, hollowed-out feeling that follows them. If this form of crafting pain into art is liberating to Tweedy, fantastic; but even if it isn’t, it makes for strange and fascinating music.

One thing the album isn’t is angry. And that’s a bit surprising—some of Tweedy’s most popular music has contained echoes of Kurt Cobain’s searing rage. But here, it sounds as though something ... fatherhood, perhaps, or more experience with marriage ... has softened him, and there are moments that could even qualify as gentle. Thus, when the subject of suffering comes up, it’s phrased in expressions that sound more weary than angry, as if he’s resigned himself to endure in order to enjoy those hours when the fog clears and he can see clearly again.

Another thing the album isn’t—overproduced. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot remains a fabulous and poetic work, but you can tell that the band wore themselves out perfecting everything on it. A Ghost is Born captures the live experience of Wilco—the spontaneity, the raw energy, the sometimes intimate connection between Tweedy and audience. The two albums belong together: a seamless, calculated masterpiece followed by a reckless, angular, unpredictable ride through the wilderness that surrounds it. Yet, this is no B-sides or leftovers collection. There are enough recurring themes, enough threads of thought running through it, to distinguish Ghost as a serious, stand-alone work that rewards contemplation.

And the prevalent theme is this: Life is fragile and temporal. You can spoil it by compromising, or by trying too hard to control it. And ultimately, it’s going to slip away from you and disintegrate. You've got to be willing to appreciate it and let it go, ready for whatever is waiting beyond that dark door. There are occasional references to Scripture—to death and resurrection, to a temporary communion that will give way to something new and glorious. Moreover, there are musical references to death and disintegration, so that even some of the most beautiful passages descend into chaos just when most bands would turn up the intensity and head into a euphoric finale. It can be frustrating for the listener, but it feels strangely true.

THE SONGS

You can almost hear Tweedy’s fingers bleeding at the end of “At Least That’s What You Said,” but the song practically tiptoes onto stage to serve as the opening number. Tweedy’s singing about a troubled relationship. Wth a few fleeting lines about strife between the singer and his lover, conflict that has actually come to blows, Tweedy draws our attention to the tenuous tether of love, and acknowledges that true love is a hard and painful road, at least in his experience.

Then, Tweedy abandons lyrics all together and channels his feelings about the fierce and glorious struggle of love into passionate solos. These guitar licks make it sound like he’s trying to speak words through the guitar, but he can’t quite bend the notes into the right phrases, so he keeps trying, keeps pushing harder. The band offers him their full support, managing to keep up with him and give the song some shape and structure. The sound rings out like some call to action for guitar heroes like Neil Young to come running and join in.

And this juxtaposition of the lovers’ rocky relationship and Tweedy’s wrestling match with his guitar gives us the first picture of the album’s theme. A Ghost is Born is an album about how beauty is possible when love takes hold, but love rarely occurs without failures, frustrations, trials, suffering, and in the end it disintegrates no matter how fleeting and precious it is. It’s an album about difficult marriages—between lovers, between practicality and imagination, between success and celebrity, between body and spirit, order and chaos.

Deepening this theme of “No pain,” or “Nothing good comes free,” the next track changes the context to Hollywood, to fame, to success and its price. “Hell is Chrome” describes the seductive nature of evil.

Wilco, having achieved such fame with Foxtrot, clearly could have followed that up with a record of hits that would have established them as the inheritor of the alterna-pop crown, the one that has fallen off the head of R.E.M. Refusing this crown in the name of integrity, Wilco have delivered this album instead, one that gives fame the middle finger and determines to preserve Wilco’s artistic vision and integrity whatever the cost. You can hear the echo of familiarity in the lines, “I was welcomed with open arms / I received so much help in every way / I felt no fear / I felt no fear.” Whether or not it was fear or wisdom, Wilco clearly have sensed the lie of the road that’s been paved for them, and they’ve steered clear of it.

And so they launch into a song that’s the farthest thing from radio-ready. “Spiders” rides on a keyboard loop—one that sounds like it means go on forever, and it almost does—provides a simple structure on which Tweedy can spin wild guitar flourishes, punctuated by fragments of lyric about accountants, contracts, art, and youth, and every so often busting into unapologetic power chords a la '80s hard rock. I can’t say I understand it, but I love all ten minutes of its crazy internal logic.

“Muzzle of Bees” takes an entirely different tone, as warm and golden as a lazy summer afternoon. The phrase “half of it’s you, half is me,” becomes a delicately beautiful refrain, like a child’s attempt to describe the first flush of love. That audio sunshine, glimmering through Tweedy’s intricate acoustic guitar picking, gradually sets the melody on fire until it’s ablaze, consumed by rising electric guitars, feedback, and another roaring solo. This, more than any song on the record, shows off what a great band Wilco can be.

“Hummingbird” shifts into blatant Beatles mode, with a sing-song chorus so chipper you can almost hear McCartney singing harmonies while the string section saws away merrilyi in the background. The cheery tone can’t mask the confessional mode of the song. It's the story of a man with a broken heart who can’t let go of his lost love, who thinks of himself like Christ, one who came, who ministered, who departed unappreciated. There’s an echo of “Hell is Chrome” as he refers to the society that denied him—the “deep chrome canyons” where his voice was drowned out by the clamor.

There’s some suggestion that this, too, is a song about how Wilco, for the sake of love, have chosen obscurity, the life of a footnote in musical history. Tweedy sounds like he’s expecting to shuffle off this mortal coil at any time, willing himself into his songs so they will represent him when he’s gone, either from life or the pages of Rolling Stone. “His goal in life was to be an echo / the type of sound that floats around / and then back down like a feather / but in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans / no one could hear him. “

Looking back again in “Handshake Drugs,” the storyteller reminisces about how, as a young man, he fell into the rhythm of buying drugs in search of happiness, a happiness that the lyrics suggest he may have finally found in a better, more fulfilling pla. While there’s a fond familiarity with the drug beat, there’s also a tone of wanting to better himself.

This theme of persevering toward integrity and love in spite of painful obstacles continues in “Wishful Thinking,” another song that would be a hit if it weren’t so interesting.

In the album’s only dead end, “Company in my Back,” those stifling forces get the upper hand, and the singer is reduced to crawling around and vomiting. Still, you've got to hand it to him for making the song brave and light instead of indulgently morose. It doesn't work, but it could have been worse.

Fortunately, “I’m a Wheel,” a rocker that will probably be a concert favorite, gets things back on track just in time. Tweedy messes with the simple chorus by tying on a few cryptic lines about life’s strange turnabouts and how he “invented a sister, populated with knives.” What’s it mean? You tell me.

In “Theologians,” Tweedy turns philosophical and defiant in a way that would have pleased John Lennon. Rejecting the judgments and narrow definitions of legalistic religious spokespeople, he declares, “They thin my heart with little things/ and my life with change / in so many ways/ I find more missing every day.” And to twist the knife, he starts quoting the Pharisees’ own Lord and Savior back at them: “I’m going away / where you will look for me / where I’m going you cannot come.” 

This isn’t so much a put-down of faith as it is a put-down of Pharisees who have reduced the mystery of Christ to a cold mathematics of questions and answers, of logic and reason, who believe that we can look at each other’s lives and decide for ourselves who’s “saved.” Tweedy’s respect for the beauty and mystery of life, and his anticipation of the great mystery beyond, has a lot more in line with Christ’s own teaching than those who commandeer Scripture to use as a tool in labeling and condemning others.

So we come at last to the home stretch of the album’s long journey out of tangible details and into the mystery that beckons the singer from beyond his sufferings. “Less Than You Think” sounds like a song about surrendering life’s disintegrating forms and being carried off into oblivion, acknowledging that all of our worries and cares were blown out of proportion. And, as if to underscore the point, the song itself is fleeting, followed by an ocean of sound that seems to represent some strange new cosmos, a new world as perceived by a newborn who has no way to articulate it.

That abstract sound goes on for almost ten minutes, challenging listeners to make it through without skipping to the next track. It’s become notorious, an easy target for music critics who consider Tweedy merely indulgent.

I may be wrong. It might not represent life after death. It may be indulgence. Or, perhaps Tweedy’s emphasizing how quickly beauty can be swallowed up in the monotonous, drawing us to value the brief song that disappears into so much chaos.

Or, maybe he’s just inviting us to suffer a musical migraine with him.

As the poet Scott Cairns has said, "I have one rule: It's not a mystery if you understand it." I appreciate the mystery.

Whatever the case, it’s a whopper of a conclusion, unforgettable, whether you like it or not. It’s the irrefutable proof that Wilco’s not trying to capitalize on the success of the last album. They’re listening to their own muse, following their own path, and they’re not going to bribe us into coming along with them or pander to an audience that wants everything spelled out and neatly packaged.

And then, as if to reward those who just want to hear another great radio smash from the band who recorded “Summerteeth,” here comes an encore … a bonus track that will get everybody cheering.  “The Late Greats” is a tribute to all of those brilliant bands who never made it to the top, who never won Grammies or even got a song on the radio. As if choosing to be their patron saint, Wilco revels in their rebellious status by naming bands we haven’t heard of, immortalizing bands they noticed and will remember. They close by legitimizing the hinterlands of music.

CONCLUSION

Thus, A Ghost is Born reveals itself as ultimately about accepting death—physical death, relationship death, career death. As Tweedy sang on Foxtrot, paraphrasing Christ himself, “You gotta learn how to die if you want to be alive.” He wants us to share his journey in learning to accept life’s disappointments and appreciate its fleeting joys before the next big mystery pulls us out of this shell and into something new.

This preoccupation with the Great Beyond is unsettling, and can sound at times almost like a death-wish, like another rock star flirting with suicide. But I have not walked in Tweedy’s shoes, and I can’t imagine what life would be like for someone who has struggled with his affliction or suffered the consequences of the painkillers that poisoned him. I am grateful that he chooses to craft his experiences into songs that challenge me, inspire me, and move me. He is making his own life incarnate in his work, affirming that beauty exists in the chaos and the suffering—indeed, that suffering can be redeemed by art. I’m glad he’s with us. I’m blessed by his strict adherence to his own artistic vision. And I look forward to every song he writes, a work that clearly does not come easily.