Free Shipping On Orders Over $100
10 products
A Ghost Is Born
Regular price $39.98 Save $-39.98For the A Ghost Is Born recording, Wilco was Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Leroy Bach, Glenn Kotche, and Mikael Jorgensen; Jim O'Rourke, who mixed the band's previous release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced the album with Wilco. Leroy Bach left Wilco at the completion of the sessions and the band announced the addition of two new members: Pat Sansone and Nels Cline. Sansone and Cline toured with Wilco to promote AGIB and that lineup has remained unchanged since 2004. As Tweedy said to Mehr for his new liner note, "Making that record, and then finding this lineup, that was the start of something-of having a band that can play anything. That's why, twenty years later, we're still here and still going. "Wilco first began sessions for what would become A Ghost Is Born in early 2002 at Chicago's Soma E. M. S. , where they had mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Much of the album was tracked live in the studio with O'Rourke and engineer Chris Shaw. They also reunited there with engineer and soon-to-be-bandmate Mikael Jorgensen. At Soma, the band began sketching out music using Tweedy's notebooks of lyrics, poetry, and prose. Mehr notes: "In between more traditional song tracking, the group would engage in a series of conceptual improvisations in the studio. These musical experiments, broadly known as 'Fundamentals'... were part of what Kotche said was 'an attempt to search for a new group identity. To see what we could make this band into. '"In the fall of 2003, the band relocated to New York to finish recording at Sear Sound. "It seemed like the band needed to get out of Chicago, get out of the working mode they'd been in, and only be thinking about making a record," O'Rourke told Mehr. There, playing together in the corner of a large studio, the album began to take it's final shape. Emerging from a period of addiction and rehab, Tweedy discussed how he feels about A Ghost Is Born in retrospect. As he told Mehr, "I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore. 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. "
Track List
A Ghost Is Born (9LP/4CD box set)
Regular price $249.98 Save $-249.98This Deluxe Edition features a 9LP/4CD box set; all jacket interiors feature photography by Michael Schmelling)(original studio album plus alternates, outtakes and demos; and the complete October 2004 concert at the Wang Center in Boston)4 CDs (the complete Fundamentals, housed at the back of a 48-page full-color hardcover book [with previously unpublished photos and a new in-depth recording history of the album by Grammy winning writer Bob Mehr]. All encased in 2-piece box (slipcase in slipcase), holographic foil type on spineFor the A Ghost Is Born recording, Wilco was Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Leroy Bach, Glenn Kotche, and Mikael Jorgensen; Jim O'Rourke, who mixed the band's previous release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced the album with Wilco. Leroy Bach left Wilco at the completion of the sessions and the band announced the addition of two new members: Pat Sansone and Nels Cline. Sansone and Cline toured with Wilco to promote AGIB and that lineup has remained unchanged since 2004. As Tweedy said to Mehr for his new liner note, "Making that record, and then finding this lineup, that was the start of something-of having a band that can play anything. That's why, twenty years later, we're still here and still going. "Wilco first began sessions for what would become A Ghost Is Born in early 2002 at Chicago's Soma E. M. S., where they had mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Much of the album was tracked live in the studio with O'Rourke and engineer Chris Shaw. They also reunited there with engineer and soon-to-be-bandmate Mikael Jorgensen. At Soma, the band began sketching out music using Tweedy's notebooks of lyrics, poetry, and prose. Mehr notes: "In between more traditional song tracking, the group would engage in a series of conceptual improvisations in the studio. These musical experiments, broadly known as 'Fundamentals'... were part of what Kotche said was 'an attempt to search for a new group identity. To see what we could make this band into. '"In the fall of 2003, the band relocated to New York to finish recording at Sear Sound. "It seemed like the band needed to get out of Chicago, get out of the working mode they'd been in, and only be thinking about making a record," O'Rourke told Mehr. There, playing together in the corner of a large studio, the album began to take it's final shape. Emerging from a period of addiction and rehab, Tweedy discussed how he feels about A Ghost Is Born in retrospect. As he told Mehr, "I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore. 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. "
Cousin (150 Gram Vinyl, Gatefold LP Jacket)
Regular price $29.00 Save $-29.00Wilco’s thirteenth studio album, Cousin, was recorded in the band’s legendary Chicago studio – The Loft – over a period of two years. The ten new tracks are written by band leader Jeff Tweedy and feature musical performances by the longtime lineup of Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Glenn Kotche, John Stirratt, Pat Sansone and, of course, Tweedy on lead vocals.
After a short detour back into their country-influenced roots via last year’s Cruel Country double album, Cousin sees Wilco back in their more familiar progressive and experimental rock territory. Tweedy’s singular songwriting voice is in full evidence, with lyrics weaving across a variety of topics – from the iconoclastic to the introspective.
Adding a unique and new element to the recording process was the attachment of Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon as producer – the first time an outsider has been actively involved in a Wilco recording session for more than ten years, since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Le Bon brought her unique musical perspective to the band’s trademark sound and provided them with an inspiring new challenge to push their musical boundaries.
Sky Blue Sky
Regular price $39.98 Save $-39.98Wilco's first studio album in three years, Sky Blue Sky, has been perhaps the most ardently awaited release of '07. Eager fans had taken to shouting out pleas for information to bandleader Jeff Tweedy during his recent solo acoustic tour, and the web chatter has been virtually deafening. Critic Katie Toms of London's the Observer addressed fan speculation in an advance review, declaring, with unalloyed delight: Boy, was it worth the wait... Simple and soothing, yet rich and rewarding, this is an album you unknowingly yearn for, like a cool hand on a hot forehead. A great album from a band in their prime Sky Blue Sky is as eloquently straightforward as Wilco's last studio recording, the Grammy-winning a Ghost Is Born, was daringly experimental. Tweedy's lyrics deal forthrightly with romantic separation and reconciliation, their bittersweet quality giving way, as the album progresses, to a more uplifting, redemptive mood. Tweedy quite literally banishes the darkness on the penultimate track, the inspiring, gospel-tinged What Light the album's first single and concludes with a deeply affecting, 'til-death-do-us-part lullaby, on and on and On. There are hints of early-seventies Southern California folk-rock sweetness in the harmonies throughout the band-produced Sky Blue Sky, a bluesy Allman Brothers feel to the guitar /keyboard interplay, and plenty of brash guitar solos that take songs like You Are My Face and Shake It Off in thrilling, unexpected directions. This is especially good news for the crowds that will fill the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, this June, where the band plays the first U.S. date of it's 2007 world tour in support of Sky Blue Sky. Principal songwriter Tweedy cut these tracks in the band's Chicago studio with members John Stirratt (bass, vocals), Glenn Kotche (drums), Mike Jorgensen (keyboards), Nels Cline (guitars) and Pat Sansone (guitars, keyboards, vocals) all of whom are also becoming notable performers in their own right. A Ghost Is Born co-producer Jim O'Rourke returns as music contributor. The is the double vinyl version. It comes in 180 gram half speed master by Stan Richter. Plating was pressing was done at R.T.I.
Track List
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2022 Remaster)
Regular price $37.98 Save $-37.98Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was widely acclaimed as one of 2002’s best albums, appearing in year-end lists of Mojo, NME, Q, Rolling Stone, and Uncut, among many others. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot also was featured in multiple decade-end lists, with Rolling Stone naming it #3 Album of the 2000s, as well as many Greatest Albums of All Time lists, including in the NME.Among Yankee’s inspirations was a recording Tweedy bought at Tower Records in the late 1990s, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. As Bob Mehr points out in his new album note, the record got “deep under Tweedy’s skin.” Tweedy said in his 2017 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “It was as fascinating to me as anything being made by actual musicians using actual instruments … I wanted to know why it was so hypnotic to me. Why could I listen to hours of this stuff, even though I had no clue what any of them were saying. That question became the foundation for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot … the way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate.” The album takes its title from a haunting recording of a woman repeating those words that is included in The Conet Project; that recording is sampled in the penultimate song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, “Poor Places.”“Conceptually, Tweedy had decided to focus on a big idea for the next album: the state of America. His lyrics—often distilled from scribbled pages of free verse or poetry—became a form of inquiry,” Mehr continues. Tweedy said, in 2004, “I wanted to write about the stuff right in front of my eyes, microscopically looking at America and asking questions about each little thing … How can there be all these good things and things that I love about America, alongside all of these things that I’m ashamed of? And that was an internal question, too; I think I felt that way about myself.”Mehr says, “Exploring those questions, while weaving in strands of Eastern philosophy and bits of autobiography—Yankee lyrics would be loaded with the pained imagery of someone suffering from migraines and mental health issues—Tweedy would conjure a deep examination of both country and self.”Describing the uncanny, strangely prescient feeling of the album, which Wilco began offering as a free stream on its website in 2001, Mehr notes: “In the wake of 9/11, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot would be burdened with unintended meaning. The disc had originally been scheduled for a September 11 release. Its cover—a Sam Jones-shot image of Chicago’s twin Marina Towers angled in looming fashion—bore an eerie resemblance to the felled World Trade Center towers. And the songs—with titles like ‘Ashes of American Flags’ and ‘War on War,’ and lyrics about how ‘tall buildings shake, sad voices escape’—took on a terrible new resonance.”
