Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Design by Nadia Rose

It was the end of a long day as a sophomore at Boulder High School when I climbed into Max Rudolf’s 1993 bimini blue Ford Probe with my best friend, Ada. As he drove us to Ada’s house, Max connected his phone to a rinky-dink auxiliary cord that you had to twist a certain way to get it to work. He loaded up the album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by the band Wilco, clicked play on one of its hit singles, “Jesus, Etc.,” and began to recite the words. I added the song to my library that very minute and would go on to listen to it often with friends and family. Three years later, I finally listened to the full album, giving it multiple listens in order to explore its complexities. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been commonly misunderstood and critiqued as convoluted, as it’s not as understandable on the first listen-through as Wilco’s previous albums, like Summerteeth, released in 1999. But through my listening to the album, I discovered that Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is an indie folk and rock album deserving of its status as an early 2000s icon. 

Critics have often claimed that Wilco’s work with odd instruments and noises in this album is an over-complication, that the experimental elements of their sound did not add quality but were simply an attempt to add more surface-level complexity to their music. One review I read went as far as to say lead singer Jeff Tweedy “meanders through a meaningless jumble of lyrics, and the bits of background noise sound random and pointless” (altrockchick, 2022). But in the first track of the album, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” one can truly see the intentionality that went behind the inclusion of these unique sounds. The artistic decisions made in the song further the melancholic mood and reflect the artist's scrambled mind as they discuss their difficult breakup. The decision to include the layering of unconventional clanking and buzzing sounds alongside the principal instruments in between the different verses and during instrumental interludes feels reminiscent of the layers of thoughts that run through one's head as they grieve and process the ending of a relationship. The end of the song also displays these experimental decisions as it dissipates into synth, dissonant piano chords, and distortion, alongside Tweedy’s shift into a talk-singing method that creates a pleading effect as he states, “I’m the man who loves you.” This composition choice was, contrary to the critics' descriptions, surely intentional and intelligent as it so beautifully replicates the feeling of descent into madness as one pleads for the lover they’ve lost to return to them. 

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has not only faced criticism surrounding its instrumental composition but also regarding its lyrics. Similar to people's critiques of its musicianship, people have claimed that the lyrics on the album are overall too confusing and convoluted. But this disregards the beauty of poetic songwriting and the art of really digging into a piece of music in order to understand what it means. The experience of this album is so great because it is made to be really listened to. The third track on the album, titled “Radio Cure,” is an example of a narrative song written in complex poetic form. It tells the story of a long-distance couple’s relationship. The speaker, and one half of the relationship, is going through something emotionally, and hopes that though they are being emotionally distant, and are physically distant from each other, their partner can still feel content in their relationship. “Cheer up, honey, I hope you can,” sings Tweedy, “there is something wrong with me.” But the lyrics don’t stop at this surface-level description. The speaker explains their “mind is filled with silvery stars,” “radio cures,” and “electronic surgical words.” The repetition of the many things filling their mind, as well as the repetition of the aforementioned line, “Cheer up, honey,” throughout the song are employed to display helplessness and the manic energy of the speaker. This true nature of the narrative is later clarified by the line “Oh distance has no way / Of making love understandable,” which further explains that the difficulty of understanding what's going on inside the speaker's mind is also a way of displaying the disconnect between them and their partner due to the distance between them. 

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot proves why it’s so important to give albums a chance and trust artists' intentionality, especially as music becomes more commercialized and more commonly written with the goal of commercial success rather than genuine creativity. Music is a reflection of someone's mind and soul. You don’t expect to understand somebody the first time you meet them. You put in the effort to learn them over time. It may not be as straightforward as simple listening, but there’s something really beautiful about truly knowing an album just as there is about truly knowing somebody. Why shouldn’t we give music the same consideration we give our friends?