Wilco

In celebration of their 20th anniversary, Wilco releases "What's Your 20", a compilation album of essential tracks culled from the band’s previously released studio recordings that span from 1994 to 2014. These are the first compilations of Wilco music of any kind.

Track 1. Spiders (Kidsmoke) is an exclusive track. Included with the March 2025 issue (TAKE 336) of Uncut magazine.

Wilco Announce New Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP. The six-song record comes out June 28—just in time for Solid Sound Festival

This 2 CD Expanded Edition features the original album plus a disc with 19 previously unreleased tracks.For 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.

"A ghost is born" merges traditional rock elements of guitars, drums and keyboards with the band’s signature sonic experimentation, resulting in a record that is arguably the band’s most organic and live sounding effort to date. The album was tracked live in the studio with co-producer O’Rourke and engineer Chris Shaw (Bob Dylan). It was mastered at London’s Abbey Road.

In 1994, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy formed Wilco with three of his band mates following the break-up of alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo. Daring in its own right, "Summerteeth" foreshadows the even more experimental work to come on the band's Nonesuch debute, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot".

Wilco Announce New Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP. The six-song record comes out June 28—just in time for Solid Sound Festival.

First off, forget everything you thought you knew about Wilco. Forget the cheery country rock tunes like "Casino Queen" and "Box Full of Letters" you loved so much on their debut, "A.M.". But most of all, forget for the seventy-three minutes it will take you to get through this double-shot that Tweedy was in a band called Uncle Tupelo, because, apparently, he has. If "A.M." was Wilco's "Hard Day's Night", about what you'd expect considering the track record, then "Being There" is their "Revolver", chock full of unexpected sounds and styles, giddily tossing right and left hairpin turns at an audience who will likely not know what hit them.

Great artistic transformations are by nature traumatic, but rarely has a single musical statement been the source of more controversy and change than Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, now remastered and reissued for its 20th anniversary. Anyone who's seen the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart witnessed the project's two creative engines, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, driving themselves mad in the process. Arguably, Wilco's best work were products of the Tweedy-Bennett partnership. Bennett, who came off as unduly obsessive and off kilter in the film, was fired from the band after the album's completion (and sadly died in 2009 from an accidental overdose at age 45); original drummer Ken Coomer was also let go during the recording process.