10 Best Wilco Songs

4. Spiders (Kidsmoke)

After he was drafted in to remix, pare down, and generally mess up Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco enlisted fellow Chicagoan Jim O’Rourke as producer for the follow-up, 2004’s A Ghost Is Born. Nowhere is his influence felt more than on the 11-minute robotic Spiders (Kidsmoke).

At its time of release it was by far Wilco’s most experimental song, which is saying something as they’d become known as a band not shy of trying the weird or the different.

With more in common with Krautrock than the band’s alt-country roots, the first “chorus” doesn’t even come in until the track is four minutes old, and on its first outing, it’s completely instrumental. We finally get a chorus with words after almost eight minutes, which ends with the line “There's no blood on my hands, I just do as I am told”.

For all its sinister repetitiveness and avant garde flourishes, it’s brilliantly hypnotic.