Ray Carney, writing specifically about cinema in his book The Films of John Cassavetes, made intuitive observations on the creations of the ambitious artist: "[They] can only teach us new understandings by forcibly denying us old ones, and that can be bewildering. They can only freshen and quicken our responses by altering our habitual modes of perception, and that can be disorienting". This idea can be directly applied to what we're required to do as listeners with Ghost: refine our sensibilities, restructure our expectations, and wholly cleanse an existing palette for a new experience. The refusal to grow stagnant with rehashed complacency is what keeps Wilco meaningful; Ghost is yet another manifestation of this ideal, albeit in an entirely different form. "I'm a wheel," Tweedy squeals in the record's final third, "I will turn on you". This is an apt summation of what Ghost does: it turns on you, rotating at will, inciting you to focus as its wheel goes round and round.
