Healthy change

On the day before he had been scheduled to play on a Coachella bill featuring Radiohead, the Pixies and the Cure, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy is at home in Chicago, resting after a recently completed stay in rehab that caused the group to cancel all tour dates until the end of May.

The timing of Tweedy’s detour could hardly have been worse.

With its fifth album, “A Ghost Is Born,” due June 22, Wilco figured to build on the momentum that has elevated the sextet from underground favorite status to the verge of household name.

The band’s previous album, 2002’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” earned the ironic distinction of being the record that got them dropped from their Reprise label -- and then, once released, their biggest success, with 445,000 copies sold. With sessions documented by director Sam Jones for the film “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” and the departures of two band members bookending the recording of the album, Wilco racked up enough drama over a two-year span to keep even the most blocked screenwriter well-stocked in plots.

Early this year, however, Tweedy’s five-year battle with addiction to painkillers reached a critical stage. He sought help at a dual-diagnosis center, receiving treatment for depression and anxiety as well. “I was in a really tough spot because I quit taking painkillers for my migraines and I had detoxed on my own,” Tweedy, 36, says in a telephone interview. “I stopped taking all of my medication, and when I did that after about five weeks the panic attacks were so severe I had to be hospitalized.”

Rehab completed, Tweedy says he feels “grateful” to have had the chance to get treatment.

And he has no reservations about a summer touring schedule that includes European festivals and American clubs. “The road is actually a really healthy environment for me, healthier than at home,” Tweedy says. “There’s always been a structure to touring that I’ve responded to well. You know where you’re going to be. I’m kind of free-floating when I get home. I’m more worried about that. Besides, it’s not like we’re Motorhead.”

What Wilco is: a constantly evolving outfit, in terms of sound, style and personnel, with the constant thread between each album being Tweedy’s well-worn vocals and a continuing lyrical fascination with love, death and his relationship with music.

“A Ghost Is Born” arrives with considerably less hullabaloo than its predecessor, but sorting out the new material was no less meticulous, with sessions in the band’s hometown of Chicago and in New York yielding 40 to 50 songs, snippets and half-realized ideas.

“A very similar record to ‘YHF’ could have emerged, obviously,” Tweedy says. “A record that was a lot heavier on electronics could have emerged; [there was] enough material to make a really scatological punk rock record like ‘I’m a Wheel,’ a lot of material like that. And there was a ton of really folky material like some Nick Drake type of thing.

“[‘A Ghost Is Born’] contains a lot of elements of those kind of things.... We stopped worrying about stylistic ideas and focused on playing and accepting what we sound like when we play together, as opposed to ‘YHF’ when we really steered and manipulated what the sound was.”

The stylistic leap from album to album has become a hallmark of Wilco’s work, with the most recent jumps going from the warm, keyboard-heavy ‘70s rock radio vibe of “Summerteeth” to the barren, distant feel of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”

Elastic is the operative word for Wilco’s latest approach, with a couple songs topping out at longer than 10 minutes. Tracks such as the album opener “At Least That’s What You Said” embody the sound of the record. Beginning as the slight piano whisper of a barbed love song, it builds to a crescendo of flailing drums and wailing guitars before spiraling to a close in a sprawling 5 1/2-minute frame.

“I like the way a lot of the songs on the record evolve through time in a pretty patient manner. I also like something like ‘Muzzles of Bees’ where things almost never reoccur; it just kind of keeps morphing throughout the song,” Tweedy says. “We spent a lot of time trying to let musical things as opposed to sonic things illustrate the lyrics on this record. ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ was all about sonic landscapes; on this record I think we just tried to let music do what it does.”

A fan of experimental music and sound -- “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” got its name from “The Conet Project,” a mysterious collection of short-wave radio transmissions -- Tweedy’s latest foray into the avant-garde is the 16-minute “Less Than You Think,” a track whose final 12 minutes consists solely of a piercing, shimmering noise with rumbling undertones.

It’s followed by “Late Greats,” a bouncy, straight-ahead pop confection that laments the state of radio.

“I sequenced the record by listening to it through that song, and stopping at any given point and going to ‘Late Greats.’ Like, ‘How much can I stand today?’ And sometimes I’d listen to the whole thing and sometimes I’d skip one after about five minutes of the noise and ‘Late Greats’ still sounded good to me coming after a skip,” Tweedy says. “I honestly think it’s beautiful and times I’ve spent listening to it in its entirety, and went with it, I found it to be really beautiful. I’m really part of that piece of music.”

Colin Devenish can be reached at weekend@latimes.com