Can Recovery Sound Good?

By Romesh Ratnesar

Like all productively tortured artists, Jeff Tweedy knows how to make a virtue of his misery. Since forming the band Wilco a decade ago, Tweedy has battled depression, panic disorder, painkiller addiction, and migraines so intense that he has interrupted live performances to go backstage and throw up. Last February, while the band was finishing its seventh album, A Ghost Is Born, Tweedy quit taking his migraine medication and went into an emotional free fall. "It was terrifying," he says. "I was having such severe panic I couldn't think. It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other." After checking himself into rehab for a month, Tweedy went back to listen to the new album. "It turns out that a lot of what I was going through played out on the record before I could even identify it in myself," he says. "Like the first guitar break on the record--it totally feels like a panic attack to me now."

Anxiety has rarely sounded so good. Sprawling, chaotic and loud, A Ghost Is Born, out on June 22, marks the latest departure for a band whose ability to evoke classic idioms of American pop music, from country to punk, is matched only by its determination to defy them. Wilco's previous album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a collection of well-sculpted melodies buried in layers of static, radio noise and percussion, so bewildered executives at the band's record label, Reprise, that they refused to release it. In response, Wilco left Reprise, bought the rights to the album and released it eight months later on the independent label Nonesuch--a saga chronicled in Sam Jones' 2002 documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. The album sold nearly 500,000 copies, easily the most of Wilco's career.

The core of fans the band built during its earlier incarnation as country rockers has expanded to include indie-rock hipsters and the electronica avant-garde. A Ghost Is Born will probably do even better than its predecessor, though on first listen they have little in common. This time the songs are more loosely constructed, with Tweedy's delicate dirges giving way to roaring, rambling guitar solos. There are no hit singles here--"You can't hear it on the radio," Tweedy acknowledges on the final track, The Late Greats--but the album may still be the year's most addictive rock release. "One of the underlying principles of the band is the idea that there is no formula," Tweedy says, "that it's O.K. to throw everything out the window, including the things you're pretty sure about."

The biggest change has been in Tweedy. The haggard despair shown in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart has been replaced by something approaching salubrity. Since his stint in rehab, he has lost weight, given up caffeine and shaken the migraines. "He looks more fit and together now," says John Stirratt, the band's bassist. "It's hard for me to tell because I see him a lot, but people tell me he looks like he's 25 again." (He's 36.)

Tweedy has made a career out of sifting the wreckage of destructive relationships ("I thought it was cute/For you to kiss/My purple-black eye/Even though I caught it from you," he sings on the album's first song, At Least That's What You Said), so he's unsure how the band will handle the sudden outbreak of optimism. "I've always felt down deep that making music was a way to get past [the depression]," he says over cigarettes and caffeine-free Coke in the band's Chicago rehearsal loft.

Wilco's history has been defined by its strife. Tweedy founded the band in 1994. By 2001, the year of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, three members had left or been forced out; since then, two more have departed. "I wouldn't in a million years have wanted to put together a different band for every record," Tweedy says. "But we've tried to respond to the changes with open arms." Tweedy dismisses the idea that the band's high casualty rate may be related to his emotional undulations--though he admits that "it's a total chore to be around someone so unhappy. I don't doubt that it's difficult for people to work with me on some level." Stirratt says the expectations that Tweedy set for himself after the success of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot contributed to his eventual meltdown. "He has a certain high-mindedness--he really feels people need things in these times to make them feel better," Stirratt says. "We had this little cultural echo, and I think he felt the pressure that he might disappoint a lot of people."

A Ghost Is Born isn't always easy to digest. But its deliberate raggedness reflects Tweedy's newfound confidence in both his writing and the band's musicianship. The organic feel of songs like Muzzle of Bees and I'm a Wheel came out of the recording process, which consisted largely of Tweedy singing lyrics from his notebook and strumming an acoustic guitar while the rest of the band tried to follow along. The album includes Wilco's longest-ever songs: Spiders (Kidsmoke), a glorious 10-minute psychedelic mess about arachnids filling out tax returns on the Michigan shore, and Less Than You Think, an affecting ballad followed by 12 minutes of droning industrial machines. Wilco can still produce damned catchy tunes: Hummingbird and Theologians combine the verve of the Beatles and Bowie with Tweedy's noodlings about losing your identity and recovering it.

It's in moments like these that you get hints that Tweedy is having fun again. "There's more hope in my music than there was in me before I got help," he says. "There's always been some part of me that wanted to figure it all out." He's getting closer.