What I'm listening to: Wilco - A Ghost is Born.
I've played this CD a dozen times since I bought it on Sunday. Wilco is hypnotic music - a little like Radiohead, a little like "Twin Peaks." You keep listening to find the pieces you didn't get the first time. And every time you listen, you're rewarded with new surprises. The piano melody on "Muzzle of Bees." The Marc Bolan snarl on "I'm a Wheel." The falling-down-the-stairs solos on "Spiders."
I got into Wilco with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," and like many other bands, I learned about their history in reverse. I was intrigued by the whole Wilco vs. Warners' drama, and then heard the album, and was just amazed. It certainly wasn't "Metal Machine Music." (Details on MMM: http://inmyroom.omnihosts.net/metalmachinemusic.html) It was sublime, and beautiful, and insecure, and remarkable. I was hooked. Then I heard "Summer Teeth," and it was a whole different band. Every album seems to be a different band, held together by piano, acoustic guitar, Jeff Tweedy's golden hook generator and shaky singing voice.
A Ghost is Born ought to kill all of the alt-country albatrosses that hang around Tweedy's neck. It's a rock album, straight up. No Louvin Brothers covers. No mandolin. Just great songs, and guitar solos to spare.
Let me talk about the way Jeff Tweedy plays guitar. I keep trying to do the rock-critic cheat and come up with artists he resembles, so here's that list.
Sonny Sharrock. Neil Young. John Lennon, when he played solos. Jimi Hendrix (for about ten seconds.) Jonny Greenwood. Jeff Beck.
Who'd have thunk it? We heard a tease of Jeff Tweedy, rock god, on "I'm the Man Who Loves You," with that jagged twitchy solo at the end of the song. But the solos on "Ghost" shriek and wail and have a life of their own. Notes float away like telegraph dots and dashes on "Handshake Drugs." They bark and squeal on "Spiders (Kidsmoke)." "Spiders" is an amazing thing: a ten-minute eruption that ends too soon. I found myself wishing that it went on for another five minutes, another solo or two.
I read an article about John Lennon playing guitar. There's a point during that medley on side two of "Abbey Road" where John and George (and maybe paul?) trade licks. John said once about that part that it was obvious which guitar parts were his. He said something like "It's not pretty, but you know it's me." That's Jeff Tweedy on guitar.
Jeff apparently doesn't play all of the lead guitar parts. He has Nels Cline to back him up, who is identified as a "jazz artist," has recorded on dozens of albums, and often sees his name in close proximity to the word "avant-garde." Hey, whatever, man. It's a brilliant choice, as illogical and inspired as Matt Johnson hiring Eric Schermerhorn to light up "Naked Self." He adds blurring waves of sound that sound bizarrely out of place, and just right.
The lyrics are up to Jeff's standard of excellence: paranoid, wistful, wishful poems. There are beautiful moments: the guy in "Hummingbird" whose goal in life was to be an echo. The tragic relationship in "At Least that's what you said."
Go buy this album. Close the windows, send everyone away, and listen to it alone. Like YHF, this is an album that speaks best when it's just you and it in the room.
2:45:16 PM 
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