The Bible-Black Predawn: Why You Can Actually Touch Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Every now and then, I'm going to do something close to a music review. One, I feel like this is a skill I should have since I love music, can talk well about music, and have a good amount of musical knowledge, and two, it's a good way to inform ya'll about my favorites, which in my opinion, is one of the main tenets of the blog format. Here goes.



Wilco-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Nonesuch Records (2002)


Until a year ago, the only people I knew who liked Wilco were guys who bought their blazers at the Salvation Army, wore them with jeans, and were always reading a Philosophy text, the author of which only had a last name. As you can imagine, this wasn't the best introduction to a band.

Then one day, I was scrolling through the Cablevision guide, looking for something to watch on one of the HD channels (I had just gotten a 42" plasma, so watching normal programming seemed like a waste). Mojo had something on called, "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," and me being the emo-bitch that I am immediately thought, "Sounds--intriguing."

Turns out "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," a documentary made by Sam Jones (the title is taken from the first track on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), was pretty damn good. It captured the crazy dynamic of the band while undergoing the process of creating Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And I use "undergoing" specifically because their is a fair amount of controversy surrounding the making of the album. Since it's been well discussed, I'll glaze over it fairly quickly:

-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was completed in 2001 and Reprise Records refused to release it. They wanted a crossover album, and they didn't feel that YHF was it. Ironically, the album went gold and remains Wilco's most successful release.
-Wilco made a deal to acquire the rights to the album in exchange for a contract release. They promptly began giving it away for free on their website.
-Nonesuch Records signed Wilco and officially released the album in 2002.
-Early in the recording process (also the first day of filming for Sam Jones), Wilco's drummer Ken Coomer was fired and replaced by Glenn Kotche, a decision made by Wilco's front man Jeff Tweedy.
-Jay Bennett, guitars and keyboards, wanted to engineer and mix the album. Conflict arose here between Bennett and Tweedy, and Tweedy had Jim O'Rourke mix the track "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," and the band was impressed with the results. O'Rourke would eventually mix the whole album, and after the completion of YHF, Bennett was fired by Tweedy.

Knowing all of this, it is easy to see where the emotional texture of the album comes from, as you can almost touch it as it comes out of the speakers. Each track has it's own feel, but they dip and blend together. From the opening lines of "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," Tweedy's hit-of-water-to-cover-that-last-cigarette voice is perfect, singing, "I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I'm hiding out in the big city blinking/What was I thinking when I let go of you." The track continues on, and eventually we get to the gem:

I want to hold you in the Bible-black predawn

This is a line that no matter how many times I hear it, still grabs me. And it's what happens in most of the songs on YHF--one line becomes the nucleus of the rest of the track. In "Kamera," it's the way Tweedy sings "To my eye" throughout the song. In "Radio Cure," the drawn out slur of "Cheer up/Honey I hope you can" is haunting and effective and plays off the desperation of the chorus. In "Ashes of American Flags," it's the chorus, "All my lies are always wishes," and in a song that starts off with, "The cash machine is blue and green/For a hundred in twenties and a small service fee/I could spend three dollars and sixty three cents/On diet coca-cola and unlit cigarettes," you believe him.

What I like most about YHF are the transitions between songs--a source of the strain between Tweedy and Bennett. The bodies of the tracks are the alternative-country mix that Wilco is known for, whereas the beginnings and the ends splinter off into noise control, mechanical whines, static, and even military-code recordings the album's name is taken from. It gives the feeling of turning a radio dial and finding the jewels between the static, like you're plucking something from another place out of the airwaves.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not a perfect album. At time, the drums seems to do nothing more than play the role of metronome. The star of the show is obviously Tweedy's lyrics and the noise experimentation, experimentation that would grow on the band's next full length A Ghost Is Born. But the vibe of the album, the intangible feel of it, is what makes it great, and it seems to lay some credence to the idea that one must suffer for art, as the members of Wilco surely did.

There's a verse in the last track of the album, "Reservations," (on which the nucleus theory is alive and well--tell me the way Tweedy sings, "But not about you," isn't gut-wrenching) that always makes me think, even after the album has come to a close. It might be normal tongue-twister fodder, but in the moment it always seems like more. Tweedy sings:

I know this isn't what you were wanting me to say/How can I get closer and be further away/When the truth proves it's beautiful to lie

Here, Tweedy could have been referring to anything, but knowing the back story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot makes it hard to ignore. The music business is ripe with hypocrisy, and with sales falling off year after year, it becomes even more important to turn a profit, rather than focus on artistic integrity. The irony that lies in the success of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, after being dumped unceremoniously because it wouldn't be successful, makes you wonder if maybe it is better to take risks, to play that game of calling freedom of expression one thing, while hoping to have won the cool/anti-cool tug of war that sometimes generates profits.

The truth may prove that it's beautiful to lie, but in the end, it produced Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a damn fine album, one that deserves to hang around in our collective conscience for quite some time.


More Soon,

JS