Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Among my favorite memories of this era was seeing a few (intense!) shows before the album was officially released and watching everyone singing along with the new stuff they'd already all heard.

Had the realization over the weekend that YHF is actually my least favorite of the Wilco albums from the 00s. Sky Blue Sky is the best.
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Thursday, September 19, 2019 11:31 AM

hmm, interesting thought — even though i'd agree sky blue rates very high. i definitely think yhf is better than wilco the album tho.

overall, i'd have a tough time picking between sky blue, ghost is born, and the whole love.

Oh yeah, that's true. I was thinking Wilco The Album was 2010, but it's 09.

don't mean to bash wilco the album tho — it's p solid, e.g. 'bull black nova', 'everylasting everything', etc.

Jeff Tweedy's lyrics on this are NOT terrible.... they are beautiful, more clever than he ever was before

yeah - probably very uncool to say this but to me YHF towers easily above the rest of his oeuvre, esp lyrically.

he has some great moments on Summerteeth and AGIB but YHF is back to back awesome lyrically

"Heavy Metal Drummer" just showed up on a playlist. I've never heard this before. This ... sounds like Pavement? Was Wilco supposed to be a band that sounded like Pavement? I have never heard them identified as such. Obviously I mean "relaxed Gold Soundz / much of Brighten the Corners" type Pavement" not "Debris Slide pavement"

I don't really mean the production, just mostly, the way the vocal line sounds and the way the words fit into the lines?

it sounds a lot like cut your hair yeah

Right, it sounds like Cut Your Hair covered in the style of Range Life

It's kind of funny to me that you're enough of an indie fan to know the nuances of the types of Pavement songs but in all these years you've never encountered YHF? I'm not scoffing at it, but it's a little surprising- a hard album to avoid for this many years with all the worship it received in the indieverse.

We're somewhere around the 20th anniversary of when YHF was originally supposed to be released.

Yeah, it was an outlier in their catalog for sure, especially at the time. I always felt like it didn't belong on YHF, better as a B-side that becomes a live favorite or something.

It's kind of funny to me that you're enough of an indie fan to know the nuances of the types of Pavement songs but in all these years you've never encountered YHF? I'm not scoffing at it, but it's a little surprising- a hard album to avoid for this many years with all the worship it received in the indieverse.

Indie is a big tent, I listened to a ton of Pavement and Belle and Sebastian and Mountain Goats in the 90s but have never listened to a Wilco or Radiohead or Neutral Milk Hotel album all the way through and couldn't hum a song by any of them except "Creep"

I'm a Pave head but have never heard this song (to my knowledge). I don't think it sounds too much like Pvmt, tbh, though I guess I hear what folks are saying.

"Can't Stand It" was the one on "Summerteeth" that was iirc supposed to be the big single. It wasn't, but it fits perfectly well on the record. "Heavy Metal Drummer" sticks out like it was supposed to be the big single, and while it wasn't released as a single, it still kind of sticks out. I've always found it mildly annoying but mostly innocuous (like a few of REM's similarly annoying but harmless songs), and I suppose it does well breaking the mood up a bit.

The essay (by Bill Bentley?) in the box set about the YHF period is pretty funny: The incoming head of Reprise declaring "There'll be no ugly bands on my label!" and sending the singer of his (unnamed) favored signed group to a fat farm for a makeover.

I remember that Wilco tour supporting the album (when it actually came out, not when it was in limbo). It was one of my first concerts, and it was fun singing along with "Heavy Metal Drummer" - it definitely felt like it should've been a hit single. It seemed to fit just fine at the time, and I guess in the grand scheme of things I have nothing against rock albums that throw in a track like that because there's nothing wrong with having some fun even when you're swinging for the fences. Aspiring to high art shouldn't mean humorlessness. I remember when detractors tried to knock that album for being pretentious or self-important, and it's like really? "Heavy Metal Drummer"? "I'm the Man Who Loves You"?

... starting a song and album with the words "I Am An American Aquarium Drinker"

Wilco (The Song) came on once and despite owning that (disappointing) album I spent a few seconds trying to remember which late-period Pavement song it was

Went to the 20th Anniversary show in Chicago last night. It was wonderful. Full band + 3 horns + a string quartet. Did the whole album front to back with all the interludes and studio details performed live, no commentary or talking that I recall. YHF is canon for me, and to see it played with such care and reverence was very cool. The run of "Heavy Metal Drummer" -> "I'm the Man Who Loves You" (Jeff on lead guitar) -> "Pot Kettle Black", with horns, nearly brought the house down.

After the album they played a handful of older and rarer songs, including a YHF outtake I'd never heard. Closed with "Monday" and "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" -- again, the horns really took these to another place.

yeah saw them with horns about a decade ago, I remember "Monday" and "Pieholden Suite" were both fantastic. I'm going to Solid Sound for the first time next month - I wonder if they'll do the YHF set, I haven't seen it announced anywhere...

Man, I should've caught one of the NYC shows. One of the very first rock concerts I ever saw was from their 2002 tour, so I didn't feel a need to go, but it didn't occur to me how different and more elaborate they would sound for these anniversary shows. The core band itself was smaller for those 2002 shows, and they didn't have a horn section and a string quarter joining them either.

Also, I imagine most people here saw the tracklist of the upcoming box set. Eight discs for the CD version...it's tempting, but I've barely touched the bootleg of demos and studio material that I already have.

thinking pretty hard about going to solid sound (wilco's festival in western mass.). the first night is billed as a "special set" from wilco, so i imagine that will be yankee hotel foxtrot.

11 LPs...geez.

I was at the saturday show, same setlist but with 'i got you' swapped for 'monday'. I was surprised at how exacting it was in terms of all the transitions and noises and such.

a lot of the boxset looks likely be the demos/early studio versions that have been floating around for ages, but there's some stuff there that hasn't been available before & it'll be cool to have them all properly contextualised

most interesting is the yhf-era versions of "hummingbird" which i had no idea existed, and the "stravinsky mix" of "ashes of american flags" which tweedy said has an excerpt of stravinksy's "symphony of psalms" playing throughout the entire song but they couldn't clear the sample for the original album and cited it as one of his favourite things he's ever done

A serious question of the utmost importance: do y'all consider this album as being from 2001 (the year of its band-sanctioned internet leak), or 2002 (the physical release)? These days, an album would undoubtedly be seen as belonging to the year it became digitally available, but this was kind of a pioneering record in that regard. I've been putting together some yearly best-of compilations, and I wouldn't want future generations stumbling upon them and thinking me an utter fraud for so horribly misrepresenting this album's place in something as epoch-defining as some dude's personal Apple Music playlists.

I actually remember the 2001 stream being of very low quality - like Real Audio or something like that. When I got the CD in 2002, it was an enormous improvement, even for someone like myself who was listening to most of their music on a portable player and headphones. So I usually peg it as 2002 simply because the presentation wasn't completely there until then.

I will say when releases get delayed substantially, I sometimes end up going with the earlier "leak" date. Like Dylan's "Basement Tapes" will always be 1967 to me partly for that reason. Then there's the Modern Lovers album which came out 1976, but I think of it as an earlier release, even though the date is still hazy, like 1971 or 1972. Same with Big Star's Third.

i must have nabbed it from filesharing bc the CDR i remember listening to was definitely better than realaudio stream quality. i firmly peg it as a 2001 release, both bc thats the year the band released it and thats the year that i was steeped in it & everyone was talking about it. when i think about YHF i think about fall 2001.

Aw man, I wish I did file sharing then but I didn't have good internet at home, just at the library or school.

Very much think of it as 2001 album--listened to the mp3s so much before the physical release, to the degree I forgot it was so much later.

There's a new podcast called Kitschfork whose first episode covers this album. The hosts look at the album itself in detail and consider the massive press response to it as part of their overall project of looking back at Pitchfork's influence in the 00's indie music scene. I thought it was pretty interesting!

anybody heard this?

(a few of the tracks are certainly not new to me, but the rest would be.)

the early "hummingbird" from the unified theory of everything disc would be right at home on amnesiac

this version of "i am trying to break your heart" stays permanently in drones + wild percussion mode, cool to hear but really emphasises how much the album was a triumph of the mixing desk

"ashes of american flags (stravinsky mix)" is really cool

lmao the wah pedal that's all through "pot kettle black" is so goofy

oh wow this "poor places" is the biggest difference, totally different arrangement

where are you hearing this

it's out on streaming today

ahhh!

cannot find it in the UK though

it's listed as 'yankee hotel foxtrot (deluxe edition)'

though the digital release isn't the full boxset, it's missing the other three discs of outtakes/demos/early versions, so i haven't heard those yet

found it thanks.

Unified Theory is not simply Jay's mix then? What is it?

it's definitely not his mix (i don't think he made a full mix of the album to begin with, only a few tracks), it's just a set of alternate versions of tracks from what's clearly fairly far along in the process - though i expect the full liner notes in the boxset explains it. they spent a long time messing around in the studio recording many different arrangements of every track & it's some of the results of that + an early version of "hummingbird" that didn't make the album. some of the arrangements are very different from the final version, & some are just incomplete and in an earlier state or only part of what was used in the final mix. "ashes of american flags (stravinsky mix)" was intended for the final album though but they couldn't clear the stravinsky sample that goes throughout the entire track originally.

combined with the long-ago-leaked "engineer demo" collections that also probably make up some of the other discs in the set it's an extremely cool insight into the creative process of the album