YHF turns 10

[xTonyWonder]

Saw this on twitter this morning...

 

http://stereogum.com...10/top-stories/

[Sparky speaks]

Here's an idea. Maybe, they can play the whole album at the MassMoca benefit? Wishful thinking...

[bleedorange]

That's a pretty good write-up on what will most likely always be my favorite album of all-time.

[LouieB]

one of the great album covers of all time too.

 

LouieB

[SarahC]

I remember going to the store and getting it the day it came out. It was one of those rare times my mom took me to the mall on a school night.

 

Can't believe that was 10 years ago... the songs are so timeless.

[augurus]

Happy birthday, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot! And happy way belayed birthday, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot!

[kidsmoke]

The songs have certainly stood the test of time. Hundreds of listens later, they still move me.

[Dreamin']

Someone ties a bow

In my backyard to show me love

[uncool2pillow]

I wish I could remember buying it. I know I dl'd it from Napster first. Some of the tracks were incomplete and I'm pretty sure I got some of the sequencing wrong when I burned a CD. I remember listening to it on the way home from Omaha to Des Moines after a Bob Mould show. At the time, Bob was my favorite. But this was the tour in support of his crappy electronic album, Modulate. That ride home was, in retrospect the beginning of the switch from Bob to Wilco being my favorite.

[smells like flowers]

I was talking to my daughter's babysitter yesterday, and she'd seen the montage of Wilco ads for the St. Augustine show on my fridge. She said she was a fan and had spent her junior year of high school riding around in the car with her girlfriends, smoking cigarettes and listening to YHF. Suffice it to say she's MUCH younger than me. It was cool sharing that with her, though, and then I find out that the very day of our conversation was the 10-year mark!

[Queen Amaranthine]

Yesterday I had to make a solo road trip for work so what better opportunity to play YHF in its entirety on my way home? The 75-mile drive allowed for a whole lotta YHF love. It hit me that it was the first time in probably 9 years-10 months that I'd listened to that album in its entirety--even ALL the noise or lulls at the end of Ashes and Reservations--not just skipping past songs or cuing into what I wanted to hear at a given moment. So it was a treat. 10 years later, it's still absolutely gorrrrrgeous.

 

What stood out to me during that listen is Radio Cure. Funny, I remember the first time I heard that song, before I knew a thing about Jeff (not even his name) or the band at all, I thought, that guy's voice is way too shaky--didn't the band think they should have re-recorded that? After more listens and now knowing what we all know about Jeff and Wilco, it makes sense. It's a song I usually skip over on the album, so most of my experience with the song has been through hearing it in live shows or show recordings, where Jeff's voice sounds more melodic and smooth. I hear it as agonizingly intense on the album, very raw and open in a way that Reservations is, as discussed in another topic here recently. This song, though, is like a personal breakdown in the making.

 

Also, Jesus Etc. is breathtaking. I hadn't heard it in a long time, and I know some frequent show-goers got sick of it awhile back, but it holds up as a beautiful, poetic song. I'm not a romantic--which is why I listen to Wilco rather than crooning pop country dudes and the like--but that song is about as romantic as I can internalize! (That, and Far, Far Away...clearly I have a strange sense of what is heartfelt romance, but, oh well).

[The High Heat]

Radio Cure was the first song I took to in my first few listens of YHF, a great and under-acknowledged song.

[luke79]

I saw them 8 times on that tour, god love it. I'm hoping to beat that record on the Whole Love tour. I've seen 4 shows already.

[rhino4evr]

^{I remember buying at a local Best Buy that summer.}

 

^{It's funny because I never knew it came out on April 23rd...until this year. And April 23rd is my wedding anniversery. We even spend one of our anniverseries in Chicago, directly across from the "Wilco Towers" We could see it from our hotel room.}

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

Nice article from the Atlantic

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/what-yankee-hotel-foxtrot-said/256320/

 

What 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' Said

 

By Spencer Kornhaber

 

 

 

Wilco's legendary album, which turned 10 last week, was about how hard it is to communicate honestly—a problem that would seem to be more relevant than ever today.

 

 

Nonesuch

There's a lot to say about the best rock record of the new millennium, but too few people talk about what it actually said. When it turned 10 last week, the appreciations for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot largely focused on the trivia surrounding it: the way it was rejected by one Warner Bros. subsidiary only to be bought by another; the fact that it was streamed online at a time when doing so was unheard of; the acclaimed documentary about its creation; and the spookiness of the fact that its songs—replete with references to falling buildings, charred flags, and nameless dread—were originally set for a Sept. 11, 2001 release.

But the album endures because of its music, not its mythology. And that's not just because of the often-cited fact that it mixed folk and rock with other genres—Wilco and plenty of other alternative-leaning bands had already gone experimental in the '90s. Rather, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's triumph was in how it captured a facet of human nature: the way we all send signals, hoping that someone will understand them but also anxious about what happens when someone does. You'll sometimes hear the album get called cryptic, or self-conscious, or difficult. And that's fine. It's really a soundtrack for the ways in which people ask to be misunderstood.

Jeff Tweedy asks to be misunderstood from the first verse, after the toddling rhythms and warm acoustic guitar strumming of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" lock into something resembling a song. "I am an American aquarium drinker," Tweedy sings sleepily. "I assassin down the avenue." Huh? All diehards have their interpretations, but they should be premised upon the idea that Tweedy's lyrics are poetry. That's not in the sense of "so good that it's poetry" but in the sense that the words were chosen for their shapes, for shadows they cast, and for the ways they can be misheard.

This isn't empty, trying-to-be-deep evasiveness. It's self-conscious, afraid-to-be-honest evasiveness. Again and again, Tweedy returns to the disconnect between what's on his mind and what's on his tongue. The angst here, and there's plenty of it, is over the way that that disconnect is both self-created and agonizing. "Radio Cure," one of the album's stranger-sounding songs, puts it most plainly. On it, Tweedy addresses a lover who doesn't feel very loved. "Something's wrong with me," he confesses, and then lays out a dichotomy. His "mind is filled with silvery stuff / honey, kisses, clouds of fluff" but it's also "filled with radio cures / electronic, surgical words." He holds affection, but is too shy, vulnerable, or drugged out to communicate it. So he signals. It comes out all wrong. And the distance between himself and the person he loves just gets wider.

The band translated Tweedy's lyrics by taking unvarnished pop tracks and reverse-engineering them to be weird.

Even the seemingly straightforward tracks confront the challenge of being straightforward. On "I'm the Man Who Loves You" he tries to pen a love letter but botches it. The lounge gait and country fiddles of "Jesus Etc." back up the words of a man who can't even reassure his "honey" without his mind drifting to the apocalypse. The strum-along folk of "Poor Places" dissolves into the static-y, cryptic radio transmission that titles album—just another encoded broadcast on a record full of them. Two tracks in, Tweedy imagines a device to help him communicate authentically: a camera to "hold to my eye / to see what lies I've been hiding." Of course, the name of the gadget is misspelled as "Kamera." More self-imposed signal interference.

He sounds happiest over the neon power pop of "Heavy Metal Drummer," on which he reminisces about carefree teenage summers. It's crucial that the album's most direct track looks backwards. There's the shield of time to mute real feeling; nostalgia works as distortion, making the colors brighter, emphasizing the happy. Elsewhere, when he tries to put words to the idea of what clarity might look like in the now, the result is impressionistic nonsense. "Ashes of American Flags," for example, lumbers in a head-achey haze until a gorgeous bridge where Tweedy attempts, wooden-tonguedly, to envision serenity: "I want a good life / and a nose for things."A big part of the band's genius here was in translating Tweedy's lyrical conceit into sound. Wilco's first three albums had proven that its members could write catchy, complicated folk-pop songs—the same kind of songs that make up Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But as the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart showed, the band took those unvarnished tracks and reverse-engineered them to be weird: to float along uneasily on "Radio Cures," to sputter maniacally as in "I'm the Man Who Loves You," to disintegrate and rebuild as on "Pot Kettle Black." The fuzziness of how people relate to one another was in that weirdness; the reasons people bother trying to relate in the first place was in the pop.

The rise of the Internet over the past decade would seem to lend Tweedy's lyrics even greater resonance. "All my lies are always wishes"; "I'm down on my hands and knees every time the doorbell rings"; "It's become so obvious you are so oblivious to yourself"—these could be the drunken tweets of the poster-child for, say, the recent Atlantic cover story about how social media can isolate people and screw with relationships. But Tweedy's really singing about a universal, timeless crisis of communication. That's why so many people continue to take Yankee Hotel Foxtrot very personally. In high school, it sounded like Tweedy was speaking for me: This is how shy guys talk to people. In the time since, I've realized that no, this is how everyone talks to everyone. Saying what you mean is hard. What's astonishing about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is that it actually did it.

[choo-choo-charlie]

Taking a break from my A.M. vinyl to read the board...

 

The Atlantic article links to a few other "YHF turns 10" stories...some good, some ok. The Atlantic story is one of the better ones I've seen.

[rhino4evr]

Would love if they would play a mostly YHF set when I see them in a few weeks. The first time I saw Wilco was on the YHF tour and I was a die hard fan ever since

[welch79]

came here to post the atlantic story. crow beat me to it!

 

good read. spinning yhf presently.

 

[kidsmoke]

I love that Atlantic piece.

[Magnetized]

I love that Atlantic piece.

Me too. I thought I had read or thought of everything there was to say about those lyrics, but this was incredibly well written and insightful. One of the best pieces I've ever read about any album.

[rhino4evr]

so by some crazy chance ive never listened to the "engineer demos". Should I be excited. Also what is this difference between those and the "demos" and what is this "unknown studio session" from?

[choo-choo-charlie]

so by some crazy chance ive never listened to the "engineer demos". Should I be excited. Also what is this difference between those and the "demos" and what is this "unknown studio session" from?

 

I never checked out the studio session because I had heard it wasn't much to get excited over. However, I would suggest geabbing those engineer demos. There are some similarities to the other demos, but there are some alternate takes as well.

[bleedorange]

Those are definitely worth a listen.

[rhino4evr]

Are they supposed to have lots of audio bugs and clips. Just want to make sure I got a legit copy

[choo-choo-charlie]

Not that I've heard. Just grab the version off O&B and you should be good to go, friend: http://wilcoarchive.com/Wilco%20-%20YHF%20Demos%201/.