Jeff Tweedy and I are cut from the same cloth. A devotee of Rock history, Tweedy first made a name for himself as part of the Alt-Country heroes Uncle Tupelo, a band which married the workman’s ethic and DIY attitude of Punk Rock with the everyman melody and instrumentation of American Country. Upon forming Wilco, Tweedy and his bandmates would mine Classic Rock’s every nook and cranny, channeling Rolling Stones circa Exile on Being There, the proto-Punk chugging of early Velvet Underground on Summerteeth, and brash Americana of Woody Guthrie (literally) on Mermaid Avenue. But where Tweedy and I perhaps are most alike is our dealings with general anxiety disorder and depression.

A Ghost Is Born is a record that I appreciated for its sonic qualities upon its release but which in the intervening years has been a lifeline at times when I’ve struggled with anxiety, specifically after deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Ghost is an album about freaking the fuck out about one’s own existence, about the struggle to regain one’s footing, and how the chaos that erupts from one’s anxiety can be strangely poetic, if still altogether unwelcome.

The album begins with a lone, soft piano and Tweedy singing softly to his lover, wondering “Maybe if I leave you’ll want me to come back home.” The song builds slowly and ominously before erupting into a discordant fury of electric guitar and pounding percussion. Tweedy’s guitar playing is front and center after the departure of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennet. Whereas previous records featured Tweedy and Bennet adopting a largely Classic Rock guitar style, Tweedy was influenced by Post-Punk bands such as Television to create jagged, angular guitar solos which he often described as musical interpretations of panic attacks he had regularly suffered from for years. Tweedy’s solo on “At Least That’s What You Said”, the aforementioned album opener, is precisely so powerful because it so acutely captures what sheer panic feels like. It is not a liberating or triumphant solo, but one that feels claustrophobic, nearly unhinged, and filled with panic and dread.

On the following track, “Hell Is Chrome”, Tweedy describes a chrome Devil leading him to a Hell where he is “welcomed with open arms, I received so much help in every way.” For anyone who has ever suffered from depression, one of the commonalities among many cases is a feeling that depression is comforting. One knows that it’s a terrible place, and yet that Hell can come to feel like “sunny late-winter days” where one feels like they truly belong. Later, on “Handshake Drugs”, Tweedy takes an unflinching look at his ongoing addiction to painkillers he used to treat his lifelong battle with chronic migraines, an ailment that exacerbated his depression and anxiety and formed a giant feedback loop into his migraines.

Throughout A Ghost Is Born, Tweedy feels cut off from the rest of the world, including his own band. In a way, this was very much the case. Tweedy would often record his guitar and vocals in an isolation booth while the other members of the band played along with him in separate booths. The other band members would be able to hear Tweedy but he could not hear any of the music they were playing along with him. O’Rourke would later assemble the songs in ProTools to be fiddled with by Tweedy and the rest of the band. The result is immediately noticeable. A song like “Handshake Drugs” finds Tweedy closed in and tied off from the world both figuratively and literally, a metaphor that further reinforces his ongoing anxiety issues. Tweedy would later describe in a New York Times article the state he was in while making the record: “The cycle of pain and pain relief and pain killer abuse got really difficult to dig out of. I was rarely able to function for more than a few hours a day. For a lot of that record I was just trying not to be too drugged out and as a result I was suffering from enormous migraine type throbbing pain. Quite a bit of that came out on “A Ghost Is Born.” There is a lot of material that mirrored my condition.”

After my deployments I knew all too well what Tweedy felt. I was fortunate enough to not have any real brush with death or trauma, though there were a few times that my own mortality knocked loudly on the inside of my psyche and made itself known with alarming clarity. After the second deployment in particular, I began to feel symptoms of depression and social anxiety. I didn’t want to be around anyone who didn’t understand what I had been through, which was a good deal of my friends and family. I felt, as Tweedy did,”Holy shit, there’s a company on my back.” I could feel myself falling under the warm, comforting spell of depression as a means of numbing my anxiety when I did decide to go out. Even now my tolerance for interpersonal interaction has a much lower threshold than it once did. I am far more comfortable alone than I am in large groups and loud spaces. Like Tweedy, I have felt cut off when surrounded by the music of my friends and colleagues. That comes coupled with a frustration and sometimes a bitterness, acknowledging as Tweedy does that “I’m a wheel, I will turn on you.” When that wheel starts turning, it feels inevitable and inexorable. Gravity takes hold and does the rest.

There’s a tendency to over-analyze why people become depressed or develop anxiety, but as Tweedy sings on the penultimate 15-minute drone piece, “There’s so much less to this than you think.” I don’t have a good reason why I developed these issues. People who have experienced far worse things in their lives have emerged better adjusted and less maligned than I. Knowing that, in a way, only compounds one’s depression with feelings of guilt and shame. Tweedy was in one of the most critically acclaimed Rock bands in the world, had just produced and album that was hailed as a commercial and critical triumph (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), and yet he still suffered. I deployed to a war zone where I worked in relative safety, came home uninjured having done my job with personal satisfaction, and yet I suffered. I can’t explain it. It just happened. The full force of what happens over there isn’t always perceptible. It grows on oneself over time, its effects linger and sometimes fester. But there is comfort in solidarity. As Patti Smith once said “Those who have suffered understand suffering and thereby extend their hand.” Though A Ghost Is Born was released nearly eight years before my time in Afghanistan, and without his realizing it, Tweedy extended a hand to me with this record. it was a way I could understand and help exorcise my frustrations. I could view my anxiety and depression with the same poetic analysis that Tweedy did, and could work towards actualizing the same self-awareness in my own day-to-day life. I understood that within these ailments lies so many other conflicting feelings: anger, sadness, hopelessness, acceptance, hope, and even appreciation. Appreciation for a new-found empathy and understanding of a heretofore hidden suffering. And finally, hope in the chance to move on, to overcome, to re-align best self with one’s actual self. As Tweedy asks in one of the album’s most lucid moments, “What would we be without wishful thinking?”