Wilco Detail 20th Anniversary Edition of “A Ghost is Born”

More than two decades since its release, 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 Unparalleled on February 7, 2025 and supplements the original recording with a myriad of new extras.

Available in nine-CD or nine-LP/four-CD format, the packages include the original album along with alternates, outtakes and demos detailing the disc's conception, in addition to a complete 2004 concert recording from Boston's Wang Center and workshop sessions “key elements” of the complex.

In total, 65 unreleased tracks are accompanied by a 48-page hardcover book, which includes liner notes by Grammy Award-winning writer Bob Mehr and previously unpublished photographs. Along with its announcement, the band also shared a alternative version of “Handshake Drugs”, recorded at Sear Sound, New York in November 2003.

Released in June 2004, A Ghost is Born It arrived as Wilco's fifth album and the follow-up to 2001's Difficult (though critically acclaimed). Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Peaking at No. 8 in Bulletin board 200, was the group's highest-charting album up to that point, and drew reviews that called it both their “hardest and most uncompromising album to date” and “the band's richest, ever-evolving body of work”.

Despite this, the album went on to be named Best Alternative album and Best Recording Package at the 2005 Grammy Awards and is revered among fans as one of Wilco's best.

“I was worried that the album would be like something dark and not me anymore,” frontman Jeff Tweedy told Mehr as part of the new liner notes for the record. “But the album was in front of me as a person.

“It was the part of me that I was trying to keep – enthusiastic and furious about the world, as well as open and loving. I got there musically, before I could get there emotionally on my own.”