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. In particular there’s a piece of music — “Less Than You Think” — that ends with a 12-minute drone that was an attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music. I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had.
Jeff Tweedy discusses his lifelong problem with migraines, their similarity to panic attacks, and their influence on A Ghost Is Born on the NYT's Migraine blog. Via Jonah Lehrer's wonderful The Frontal Cortex.
