225. Wilco, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"

 

I have, I'm sorry to say, an intense and personal relationship with this record, so you'll have to bear with me on this one; it won't be very objective.  Although this record was initially released in 2001 (just a week after 9/11, as a matter of fact), I am certain that, at some point and maybe even today, if you asked me to list my 20 favorite albums of all time, this would be on the list.  Not that I would ever do such a thing!  Of course I have done such a thing, repeatedly and obsessively, and will post whatever my current list is at the end of this project.

So, back to 2001, when I was a sometimes Wilco fan but for some reason didn't pay a lot of attention to this when it came out.  Pre-Wilco, band leader Jeff Tweedy had been in a band called Uncle Tupelo that I liked quite a bit, but never got to see live.  Wilco, the successor band, put out a few albums before this one, some I liked, some I wasn't really into.  I didn't start really getting into this album until around 2004, the year I broke up with my ex-wife.  All of a sudden, a lot of this album really spoke to me.  There's a particular line in "Jesus, Etc.," one of the best songs on this album, that goes "You were right about the stars/Each one is a setting sun" that's not only beautiful and evocative, but somehow reassuring and comforting?  I'm not sure.  But this album was a constant for me through that difficult breakup and aftermath, so of course it left a permanent mark that persists to this day.  I know every one of these songs inside and out.

What else do the recently broken-up do?  Drink.  The very first line in this album is "I am an American aquarium drinker," and I certainly felt like an aquarium drinker in those days.  That song, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," as described by the annotators at genius.com, "looks at a man who feels isolated and alone in the big city after a tumultuous relationship, seemingly ended by his own misdeeds."  Well.  How could I possibly relate to that?  The song starts out with a cacophony, sort of reminiscent of the swelling breakdown in the middle of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," complete with alarm clock, and turns into a lovely meditation on loss and longing and loneliness.

I could write a paragraph for every song on this album but won't.  Let me just mention a few hughlights: the lyric "Playing Kiss covers/Beautiful and stoned" in "Heavy Metal Drummer;" the whole song "Kamera," a perfectly constructed pop song with a melody so enticing I yearn to know how Tweedy came up with it; the robotic, slightly accented voice mechanically repeating the album title "Yankee... Hotel... Foxtrot" at the end of "Poor Places," sounding like a doomed transmission from a forgotten spaceship, which is really what the end of a relationship feels like.  (As it turns out, that voice was lifted from a record of shortwave radio transmissions and Wilco settled the resulting copyright infringement lawsuit out of court.)

Now Wilco is shorthand for "Dad rock," and they're considered square because they're beloved by Gen X like me and we're square and out of it, but this record was so weird and out there at the time that Wilco's label Reprise turned it down and refused to release it so Wilco signed with Nonesuch, although both were owned by Warner so I guess all the money - or not that much money - went to the same place.  It's not hard to see why - a lot of the song structures are unconventional and it takes a few listens to really get into, but it's so beautiful and stark that it rewards the time you spend with it.  My breakup, as it turns out, was a relief; I didn't know how deep in despair I had sunk until I freed myself of it.  "Radio Cure" said it best: "Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable." But it helps.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Even taken at face value and without my personal baggage, yes.