Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

by Lana Fleischli

Sometimes I’m not in the mood to digest an intense album, and I have a loss on what to listen to. It’s not because there isn't anything new to listen to. There are endless amounts of albums out there that I haven't listened to yet. Plus, there’s the pressure that I feel of needing to educate myself more in music history. I don’t want to be a poser and write about music if I don't know where it came from, or who impacted it most. 

So, there are just those times that I just need a beautiful and complex album to listen to. One that provokes thought, but is easy and calming to listen to. As I do for most things, I asked my mom. She suggested that since I interviewed the creators of Mirror Sound, which includes Spencer Tweedy (if you haven’t read the book or the interview it, you should!), she said that I should listen to Wilco, specifically Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. 

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was just what I felt like I needed this week. The thing is, I had heard many of these songs before, which was hinted by the “downloaded” icon next to some of the songs. My mom created a playlist called “Lana’s Rules of the Road” when I was ten, and has been adding to it ever since with songs she thinks I might like. It has accumulated almost 2,000 songs on it. When I saw the “downloaded” icon, I knew those songs had made it onto “Lana’s Rules of the Road”.

It’s easier to listen to an album when I’m familiar with it because, at least with this one, it made me feel like I was having a deja vu. It was the same feeling I had when I listened to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” when I was maybe nine, and realizing that it wasn’t a song that my preschool made up, even though we all learned it together as if it were a camp song. The craziest realization was that it was actually by The Rolling Stones (obviously), which in my mind was crazy because The Rolling Stones came off as a very hard rock band, because I had just listened to the song “Bitch”, and couldn’t imagine that the two songs were by the same band. 

When I listened to “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”, I immediately felt like I heard it before. In my head, I remembered being in a car, midday, on the freeway(?). I’m not sure. I feel like we were driving past downtown LA. There’s a grecian-looking, kind of cheesy, apartment complex on the right of the freeway that came to mind when I heard this. It wasn’t one of the downloaded songs either, but I definitely knew it.

I really liked “War on War” because, like a lot of the album, the instrumentals seem very comforting. Like you can hear for sure that it's an acoustic guitar, which to me, just screams “wholesome” and “comforting”. But it also, like other songs on this album, has some random effects that sound like space-guns. (Yes, that’s the only way I can describe it.) I guess it also sounds like distortion if you want to get all nit-picky about it. If you haven’t listened to “War on War”, listen to it, I’m curious if anyone else thinks it sounds like space-guns (I don’t even know what “space- guns” are or sound like, but that’s what it sounds like to me.) 

I think a big part of analyzing an album is finding the feeling. Sometimes it is obvious. Sometimes I have no idea. The tone is kind of sad, but the drum beats are consistently upbeat. The guitars in this album seem to let the listener know the feeling in each part by using major or minor chords. Plus, where there is acoustic guitar, there is a fuller sound to the emotion. 

The thing with this album is that it made me think of being very young. (I am still very young, but I mean like elementary-school young.) That is probably because I heard it when I was younger, but it made me think of music classes, or car rides, or my friends’ parents that would play songs for us. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a great album for me to listen to this week. When I hear the songs, I just feel sentimental in a good way.