10 Best Wilco Songs

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.