I'm always afraid Wilco is falling apart, but so far I've always been wrong. As of today, you can listen to their new album on their web site. A Ghost Is Born is due out June 22.

When Uncle Tupelo broke up shortly after I first heard of them, I wasn't sad. It always felt like the two principals, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, were doing two different things, anyway. They made some good records together, but they made even more of them separately, Farrar with his band Son Volt and Tweedy with the remaining Tupelo players, rechristened Wilco (as in, "Yes, we will fulfill the Tupelo contract, but no we are not they. Will comply.").

People have always tried to wedge these guys into ill-fitting boxes. Farrar and Tweedy were the Lennon and McCartney of Uncle Tupelo, they say, with Tweedy being the lightweight. Or Tweedy was the guy who left the confines of country to make pop-rock that he wasn't suited for. But these are lies, all of them. First of all, Tweedy's no lightweight, and even if Farrar was the more sophisticated — or at least opaque — of the two at the time, Tweedy gave Tupelo great songs like "New Madrid" and "We've Been Had" where his lyrics and his raspy voice seemed to marry the energy of youth with the hard-luck lives of the folk musicians on whose shoulders Tupelo stood.

Second, when Tweedy followed his muse into an ever widening musical universe, any shocked responses were either disingenuous or ill-informed. Uncle Tupelo was no country band. They combined the Carter Family with Neil Young and the Sex Pistols. The Youngian guitar solos may have been Farrar's, but the energy and eclecticism, I'm convinced, were Tweedy's, and he carried both over to Wilco. At one of the most memorable shows I've ever seen at San Francisco's fabulous Fillmore Auditorium, Wilco's Jay Bennett broke a guitar and Tweedy ended up in the audience screaming a version of "Passenger Side" that would have made Johnny Rotten blush.

A lot of Wilco's energy came from Bennett, of course, the virtuoso who joined the band for their second album, Being There, a disjointed, ambitious 2-disc set of rock tunes as good — and as brooding — as they come. He helped lead the band into lush pop territory with the next album, Summer Teeth, on which no steel guitars appear anywhere.

But, like I said, I'm always afraid Wilco is falling apart. Not enough people bought those three albums. These guys will always remain obscure, I thought. They'll have to struggle to get their music heard. Most bands give up.

Then Bennett left the band while they were making their fourth album, and the next show at the Fillmore, a quiet, low-key affair — performed after they'd been dropped by their label and the new album was in limbo — left me thinking, "Well, that's probably the last time we'll get to see Wilco."

But then that album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was picked up by a different label and became an unlikely hit. This turbulence and serendipity are the subject of a documentary called I Am Trying To Break Your Heart that chronicled not only Bennett's departure but also the record label's waning interest in Wilco's noodling and the ironic twist that validated the band's approach and made the suits look like a bunch of weasels.

The band's fortunes have turned around miraculously. But will they handle the success? They've spent an unusually long time between albums, releasing only two in the last five years. That's not bad by most standards, but Tweedy and gang used to crank out one a year.

Will they handle the departure of Bennett? The forthcoming album will be the first since their debut to be made without his involvement.

Can Tweedy keep a band together? Their long-time multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach left the band recently.

Can Tweedy keep his lyrics from becoming too abstract? Can he continue to create melodies that are strong enough to hold together the increasingly sparse arrangements? Can he kick the pain killers?

Once again, I'm ready to treat the new album like it's the last we'll ever hear from them. Thankfully, they've crafted each of their albums since Being There with the same attitude. Everything's riding on this one. This time, we lay it all on the line. Every single time.

I've given the new album a single listen, streamed off of their web site. It's a big, strange, melancholy, piano-driven rock record, denser than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, something to sink your teeth into. Tweedy's voice is higher and wispier in some places than it's been before, combined with a soulful crunch here, a 10-minute pulse-and-drums groove there, an experimental guitar drone filling wide-open voids but not testing my patience, and lovely lovely melodies here and here and here. On "I'm A Wheel" Tweedy sounds like Big Star's Alex Chilton, not a bad model to be following all these years, as long as Wilco gets to keep making records and we get to keep hearing them.

I can't wait to see the live show, if and when it rolls into my town. I'm leaning toward "when," but I'll keep my fingers crossed just in case.