A Ghost Is Born

Recording began in November 2003 under the working title Wilco Happens, and Jim O'Rourke, who had mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced. With Jay Bennett gone, Tweedy became the band's lead guitarist and wrote composed solos rather than improvised ones, influenced by Television. He called the solo at the end of At Least That's What You Said a musical transcription of one of his panic attacks. The band first played the songs live, edited and arranged them in Pro Tools, then re-recorded them with minimal overdubbing. It was the first Wilco album with Mikael Jorgensen, who had worked as an engineer on the Minus 5 collaboration. Leroy Bach left after the sessions, and Nels Cline and Pat Sansone came in.

The album includes the 15-minute Less Than You Think. Reviewing the 2025 deluxe edition for Pitchfork, Steven Arroyo wrote that the animals in the lyrics, each standing for an aspect of Tweedy's personality, belonged to a Noah's Ark concept album that he ditched midway through. O'Rourke wrote the fingerpicked opening of Muzzle of Bees. Jorgensen's keys turned Hummingbird from a drone-based idea into a piano-pop track, and he wrote the 20-second piano intro to Hell Is Chrome, which began as a separate piece called Two Hat Blues. Company in My Back features Kotche on hammered dulcimer, and Tweedy narrates it as a bug at a picnic.

Tweedy entered a Chicago rehab clinic in May 2004 for addiction to prescription painkillers, and European tour dates were cancelled. The album, first due on 8 June, came out on 22 June. The band streamed the album online in a promotion with Apple, and buyers were offered a five-song EP. It reached number 8 on the Billboard 200 with more than 81,000 copies in its first week, the band's best at the time. Jon Pareles of Rolling Stone called it as eerie as anything Wilco had recorded yet, while Pitchfork's Rob Mitchum found it wildly uneven. In 2005 it won the Grammys for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Recording Package.