ART BLANCHE: A Ghost Is Born

Through his publishing company, PictureBox, writer and artist director Dan Nadel has published countless books about music and album art covering everything from Wilco to Hipgnosis. Somewhat surprisingly for a designer with his pedigree, Dan has only ever designed one album cover in his entire career: Wilco's A Ghost Is Born.

CD cover of A Ghost Is Born (Image courtesy of Dan Nadel)

“I’m much more of a book guy,” he said, laughing.

Fittingly, it was one of PictureBox’s books that led Dan and his co-designer, Peter Buchanan-Smith, to A Ghost IsBorn in the first place.

“I started in 1999 publishing an anthology with some friends of mine called The Ganzfeld and that is how I initially hooked up with Wilco,” explained Dan. “I got really into the idea of books about music and had the idea of doing something about Wilco back in the year 2002, I think, and they said yes.”

“So we (Dan and Peter) did this book called The Wilco Book with them and that rolled into working on that record cover. Since then I’ve published lots and lots of books under my [publishing company] Picturebox, but I’ve never designed a record cover since then. That was the one.”

Having developed a relationship with the band while working on The Wilco Book, Dan and Peter found a smooth transition to working on A Ghost Is Born, with Dan calling it “an organic process because we were already so in touch with the band.”

As “organic” as the process was, designing an album cover was still a new experience for both Dan and Peter, and it required a much different approach than their previous work.

“It is a different kind of thing – it was about finding this one image that we really felt could encapsulate what the record was about… [which] was this amazing, kind of quiet, but then very noisey record,” Dan said.

Contrary to Wilco’s typical process of picking through hundreds of possible cover options for their records, the cover for A Ghost Is Born was one of Dan and Peter’s early ideas for the record. Inspired by the concept of birth that was alluded to in the album’s title, Dan and Peter were quick to suggest using an image of an egg.

“The egg is a perfect shape and obviously the birth theme is delved into an egg,” Dan said. “I can’t remember what else we tried, but I think it was one of the first ideas that we had and then [it] wound up, after going through a bunch of iterations, being the final idea.”

For the album’s vinyl release, they decided to have some fun with the cover, swapping out the egg for a nest.

“It was purely to have some fun, just try something else.”

Vinyl cover of A Ghost is Born (Image courtesy of Dan Nadel)

Despite the relative ease at which the two designers conceptualized the album’s cover, the rest of the art didn’t come without its few quarks.

“There was a lot of that uncertainty (in the process), of figuring things out as we went along. I remember transcribing Jeff [Tweedy]’s lyrics from his notebook and I had to add all the punctuation, DIY. I sat with Tony in the studio, in my former studio, working out the punctuation on those lyric sheets: ‘Does this go here? Does that go there?’ What in the hell is going on?,” Dan said. “Usually it would come from somebody on the management side of it but this was all kind of happening on the fly.”

In addition to the lyrics hand-transcribed by Dan, A Ghost Is Born’s liner notes also featured artwork from Chicago artist Gladys Nilsson.

“She was part of a collective called the Hairy Who, who I’ve written about a lot, and Jeff saw those images in an issue of The Ganzfeld, the journal I used to publish, and was interested in having her as well. So we added those in… the thought of those images was being very analogous to a bunch of the songs on A Ghost Is Born like “Muzzle of Bees” – particularly “Muzzle of Bees.” That sound seemed to resonate with the images.”

The liner notes from A Ghost Is Born (Image courtesy of Dan Nadel)

Elegant in its simplicity, the cover art on A Ghost Is Born is easy to digest yet striking to see. But at second glance, there’s an often-overlooked piece to the cover that subtly hints at its own story: the ≤ symbol.

In 2004, when A Ghost Is Born was released, Wilco was in a state of flux: the band’s lineup was going through some drastic changes. This was not lost on Dan, Peter, or their final design. After talking with the band, they decided to replace the typical dash that separates the band’s name from the album’s title with the less than or equal to sign to symbolize this transition.

“Jeff, as I recall, wasn’t sure what the band was at that stage, so we tried to echo that in the typography,” Dan said. “By that time, the band that recorded (the album) didn’t really exist anymore… It was like ‘Well, what’s Wilco? Whatever Wilco is is this record right now.’ So [the idea] was Wilco is less than or equal to this record.“

“It’s a funny, weird thing,” Dan added.

All in all, everything worked: A Ghost Is Born took home the Grammy for Best Recording Package.

“The reception was unbelievable. It was crazy. It was great. It was fabulous… You couldn’t really ask for a better reception.”

-Dylan Singleton

I.M.P. presents Wilco at DAR Constitution Hall on February 7, 2015.