More than two decades since it was released, Chicago indie veterans Wilco have announced a 20th anniversary edition of their fifth album, A Ghost is Born.
The new deluxe edition package arrives via Nonesuch on February 7th, 2025 and complements the original recording with a myriad new extras.
Available in both a nine-CD or nine-LP/four-CD format, the packages include the initial album paired with alternates, outtakes, and demos which chart the record’s conception, in addition to a full 2004 concert recording from Boston’s Wang Center and the band’s “fundamentals” workshop sessions.
In total, 65 previously unreleased tracks are accompanied by a 48-page hardcover book which features liner notes from Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr and previously unpublished photos. Alongside its announcement, the band have also shared an alternate version of “Handshake Drugs”, recorded at New York’s Sear Sound in November 2003.
Released in June 2004, A Ghost is Born arrived as Wilco’s fifth album and as the follow-up to 2001’s difficult (though critically-acclaimed) Yanke Hotel Foxtrot. Peaking at No. 8 on the Billboard 200, it was the group’s highest-charting album up to that point, and garnered reviews that equally labelled it their most “difficult and uncompromising album to date” and “the ever-evolving band’s richest work”.
Notwithstanding, the album went on to be named Best Alternative Music Album and Best Recording Package at the 2005 Grammy Awards, and became revered amongst fans as one of Wilco’s best.
“I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore,” frontman Jeff Tweedy told Mehr as part of the record’s new liner notes. “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.”
