#6 - Phil

Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2002

An unfamiliar rocket ship-like sound is blanketed with a light drum tap and soft snare hits. Gradually these noises dissolve, leaving the ringing of alarm clocks to fill the space. The piano hides in the background, slowly making its presence felt. Finally, the guitar strum enters and prefaces the grand entrance of Jeff Tweedy’s elegantly lucid voice.

I just described the first minute of Wilco’s magnum opus, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and if one desired they could write pages and pages reliving this album’s countless parts. A record that has become a unanimously recognized milestone in modern music, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot veritably altered the way I conceptualized albums. Before I believed they were simply nice compilations of songs under one umbrella; since I have learned they can challenge and confuse us by not always fitting nicely into prescribed rules and structures.

“Radio Cure” is a track that’s embedded itself into me since our first meeting. It’s driven by a deep drum pound and encircled by natural instruments entering and leaving in sporadic fashion. Tweedy’s lyrics are as ambiguous as ever, “My mind is filled with silvery star / Honey kisses, clouds of fog,” yet the raw intensity of the song makes us feel that we understand just what he’s saying. In a much different way, the same could be said for “Jesus, etc.,” the record’s simplest but most captivatingly beautiful piece: “Tall buildings shake / Voices escape, singing sad, sad songs / Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks / Bitter melodies, turning your orbit around.” Tweedy’s imagery is stark, but the way he entangles it together is what makes the songs so rich. It sill dazzles me that this album became as popular as it did, and it’s reassuring proof to me as a musician that rules and structures are not a necessary ingredient to moving large audiences. Thank you, Wilco, for courageously demonstrating this for me. -P.W.

Jeff Tweedy and company have not put out many albums that I would outwardly criticize, but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was definitely an amazing departure from their more standard-fare alt-country style of previous records. These iridescent country songs are fully realized and utterly brilliant. But I must admit, it took me a while for this record to really set in. Not that I didn’t enjoy it on first listen, but I guess it took me a while to completely understand these phenomenal pop songs pieced together after being fractured into sometimes dissonant soft-spoken epics. - Ryan

Hearing this record now just reminds me of when I used to cut my folk's lawn and listen to "I'm The Man Who Loves You". After the last couple of Wilco records, an image as suburban as that only seems all the more fitting. I digress, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" is a great album. Filled to the brim with excellently crafted tunes showcasing the group's strength in combining enchanting melodies and accessible experimentalism. This record will forever remind me of this decade, my high school listening habits and the sheer volume of Wilco records I sell everyday at the Fetus. - Steve