Wilco, and the strange comfort of being reminded of bad times

No. 1411: Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

This week’s batch of records was slightly delayed due to inclement weather, and in part because when horrible things are happening and unfolding at a rate that’s a challenge just to keep up with, things like a self-indulgent series of blog/newsletter posts about my record collection fall by the wayside. State-sanctioned murder of a country’s own citizens has a way of disrupting my ability to stay on task. But also it’s cold in Richmond right now. Really fucking cold.

Yet I’ve arrived upon a record that reminds me of the last time I felt such a level of anger and sadness over the horrors inflicted by my own country’s leaders, elected or not. The Bush era produced a lot of politically minded music, some of it made for Broadway like Green Day’s American Idiot, some of it more personal in its outlook like Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat. And some of it that isn’t necessarily so outwardly political, like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but which I can’t extract from the time it was released. At the time it was hard to take lyrics like “I would like to salute the ashes of American flags” or “tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad, sad songs” and not hear them in the context of 9/11 or the thin veneer of pretext for going to war with Iraq. Someone born after 2001 probably wouldn’t necessarily make that connection in the same way I probably wouldn’t have thought that much about, say, the Vietnam War. But at the time, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot seemed to be an echo of my own misgivings with my country, which I believed at the time had completely gone insane. Things are pretty terrible now, but you’ll never hear me saying I’m nostalgic for those days. 

Of course, none of that was intentional. By the time Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released in spring 2002 it had been in limbo for the better part of a year. It’s a well-worn story now: Reprise, a Warner Bros. subsidiary, didn’t think it was commercial enough to release and the two labels parted ways. They eventually released it on Nonesuch (distributed by Warner Bros.), but in fall of 2001 ended up posting the album for free on their website, which led to how I finally ended up hearing it, though it was through a fellow DJ at the SDSU on-campus radio station, KCR. I was finishing up my show and he asked me if I had heard it, which I hadn’t. “They’ve definitely gotten weird,” he said, and gave me a burned copy of the CD.

He was right, but in the best way. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot caught me by surprise, much like it must have with everyone else who heard it for the first time in 2001 or 2002. Mostly it feels bigger, denser, a more psychedelic-ish strata of buzzing and chiming instrumentation on top of their Americana-esque roots, somewhere in the trifecta of OK Computer, Pet Sounds and After the Gold Rush. It’s also, incidentally, how I discovered the Conet Project, the collection of recordings of numbers stations captured on shortwave radio that may or may not be spy codes. The title, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” being one of those maybe-codes. 

I listened to it what seemed like nonstop in 2002, with a new favorite song every couple of weeks, from the opening epic of “I’m Trying to Break Your Heart,” to the gorgeously melancholy “Jesus Etc.”, to the playfully immediate “I’m the Man Who Loves You” and the climactic “Poor Places.” The production and arrangements are breathtaking and strange, but at its core it’s a collection of great songs. Having it early was a blessing and a curse, because on one hand it meant being able to have this precious, rare thing, but I also needed more people to have it so I could talk to them about it. Lord did I need to talk to people about this record. 

In 2026, I’m not sure there’s much to say about the record itself that hasn’t already been many times, its lore both familiar and often repeated, but I’m not sure I ever really unpacked how much it reminds me of such a frustrating and uncomfortable time. I have a habit of forming bonds with records that remind me of things I don’t want to remember, probably because I needed them as a life preserver at the time. They’re the “Rubber Ring” that Morrissey once sang about, long before I began saying his name with an exasperated sigh. 

That’s why I keep returning to it—the comfort and beauty of it is still here, and my decision to buy a copy at a shop in Stony Point means I can keep returning to that. It’s been said many times in many different ways that the best thing music can do is to make us feel less alone, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been a constant companion.  Rating: 10

Listen: “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

No. 1412: Tim Maia - World Psychedelic Classics Vol. 4: The Existential Soul of Tim Maia

This week’s Autobiographical Order arrives after a cold-as-hell winter storm in Richmond, which kinda put us in hibernation mode for a few days. And it’s still going to be cold for a while, so it’d be fitting if the next installment was all dark ambient and black metal. But not here. No, this warm-weather MPB funk comp is another excavation into the music of a Brazilian cult icon, the amazing Tim Maia. And “cult icon” carries several meanings here. (More on that shortly.) From the early 1970s up to his death in 1998, Maia released a whole lot of records, many of them drawing heavily from the psychedelic soul of the U.S. At his best, his music is a lot like The Isley Brothers with lyrics in Portuguese, and you know I can get down with that. But his music wasn’t ever that easy to come by, stateside, and still isn’t for the most part. But David Byrne, aficionado and mensch that he is, released a compilation through his Luaka Bop label chronicling some of Maia’s best moments of the 1970s, and it’s all funky as hell.

Somewhere on the order of half of this compilation comprises highlights from his two Racional albums, which have become his most acclaimed releases in spite of their curious place in his catalog. Basically: He joined a cult and made a couple records about being blessed by cosmic rational energy or something. It’s a little hard to make heads or tails of what it’s all about, but Wikipedia classifies the rationalists as a UFO cult, which makes this all the more amazing. Kooky stuff, but damn if the records aren’t funky as hell. He quit the cult not long after the records were released and then destroyed all the copies in his possession. They’ve since been properly reissued, but for a time this was the best way to get those songs on record, and friend, they’re worth it, odd though the conceit might be.

I picked this up along with the Wilco record at a shop in Richmond in a half-vacant mall, mainly because I was still in my seeking-out-local-shops phase of my first year in the city, and it’s an odd shop—mostly used stuff, some cool new things, lots of random merch—but I came away with two killer platters, so I can’t complain. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Que Beleza”

No. 1413: The Kinks - The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

The Kinks are a fascinating band. A great band, obviously, but likewise fascinating because they did follow what was popular in the late-1960s. For a while they did—their earlier albums and singles had a harder edge than even the Beatles or Stones in the mid-’60s. Listen to “All Day and All of the Night” and there’s a raw, garagey sensibility that feels a lot more punk. (So punk they were banned from the US for five years in 1965!) But they gradually moved away from that toward something more invested in a Britain that had been gone for quite some time. I wrote about this a little in my Something Else post, about how they took influence from “music hall” (whatever that means) and stories steeped in nostalgia and time that’s slipped away.

Its follow-up, The Village Green Preservation Society, doubles down on that idea with a title track that’s more or less a mission statement for a fictional group invested in keeping the old ways of doing things exactly as they are: “God save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety.” I was listening to this at home a while back and my wife made a comment about how the concept behind the song was “pretty square,” and whether or not it was based in any real belief. The answer is yes and no, in that during their ban from touring the states, Ray Davies focused his attention on more explicitly British ideas, focusing a song cycle of sorts around a series of people and places in a small English town. But it’s essentially a work of fiction, like a rock opera without the grandeur that usually comes with such things. It’s really a magnificent set of songs, and in a sense something like a The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s but through the lens of a more distant past. 

Village Green Preservation Society is quaint and charming but there’s a thread of melancholy that courses through it; the titular society is trying to preserve something that’s already gone, they’re fighting a battle they can’t win. To a degree I sympathize; as I get older, being a luddite is far more appealing (maybe it’s bad that we have casinos and fascist propaganda machines in our pockets at all times!), and I’ve lamented how we’ve lost something special by not having art deco sculptures on the entrances of buildings anymore. (There’s only a couple in Richmond but they’re pretty cool, regardless.) But also, sometimes the old ideas have to die for us to end up somewhere better. This album doesn’t have an agenda per se other than to shine a spotlight on people and places where time stands still, and both the enchantment and sadness inherent to that. Amazing album, and one that, as I’m writing this, I realize I’m still drawing new thoughts and ideas out of after all this time. Rating: 10.0

Listen: “Do You Remember Walter?”

No. 1414: Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone is a noteworthy album for me for a somewhat insignificant reason: It’s the last album I bought on CD. I didn’t know it was going to be, and I didn’t plan it to be, but after maybe another 6-12 months, after realizing I was only buying records, it just kind of hit me: I’d retired the format. Maybe in the scheme of things, it’s not that big of a deal, and it isn’t, really, but a piece of insignificant trivia hits you every now and then, like there’s more meaning embedded in that event than you realize. In the long run it meant that I had limited space and eventually had to choose what came across the country with us, and CDs lost that battle. Anyone who’s made a big move understands this, whether it’s CDs or books or DVDs or whatever. But at the time, I think all it meant was that the CD was available, but vinyl wasn’t. 

It’s kind of fitting that I should be writing about it this week, as the Richmond area and greater Virginia is hit with severe winter storms and power outages as a result of ice accumulation. In San Diego, it was the second time in two years, about the same time of year (late winter-ish) that I happened to come home to a power outage. My wife was working late, the house was dark, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I did what I always do: I went to the record store. M Theory had power, so a little light, heat and something to do suited me just fine.

For a while I had a habit of buying everything Neko Case released, and while that’s maybe not always the case anymore, I at least ensure I give it a good listen. She’s one of the best American songwriters by a good margin, but also one of the hardest to crack at times. Her melodies don’t always go where you think they might. And she has a way with phrasing lyrics where they’re simultaneously cryptic and you know exactly what she means, e.g. “She is the centrifuge that throws the spires from the sun.” As a result I feel like I’m always failing to write about her music adequately, but the attempt is always interesting, regardless.

Middle Cyclone is one of her best albums, the third of a four-album run that features her best string of material. In this case that includes “This Tornado Loves You,” a surrealist song about a tornado’s infatuation with a person and the devastation that follows, as well as “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” which is a variation on the idea that nature is not to be fucked with. Some of the arrangements are starker and eerier, some of them bigger and richer, all of it outstanding. Glad I eventually replaced the CD I had to let go, an interesting reminder of the end of an era. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “This Tornado Loves You”

No. 1415: Iron & Wine - The Sea and the Rhythm

I didn’t plan for this batch of records to be overwhelmingly nostalgic for me, but music has a way of doing that. That’s kind of this whole exercise in a nutshell, isn’t it? Documenting the past through music, in a sense (I’ve never kept a journal, but this is that, essentially), and the person I was is never the person I am at the present moment. I often think about the indie hipster twenty-something who listened to a bunch of music that, today, I’ve kind of lost the taste for. Well, maybe not a bunch, but my thoughts and feelings about the music I spun regularly in my twenties isn’t what it used to be. Some of those artists I pretty much never listen to anymore (My Morning Jacket), some of them I fell out of love with and then found a new appreciation for (Xiu Xiu), and some of them I lost touch with, but never stopped enjoying.

Like Iron and Wine for instance. The Sea and the Rhythm is a good example; I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s my favorite recording from Sam Beam, and I didn’t seek it out—it was a used grab at Vinyl Conflict (along with the previous two—surprisingly none of them punk or metal!), yet it’s the only Iron and Wine I have on vinyl. I’ve mostly kept up with Beam’s music over the years, though I didn’t hear his last album. Yet his second collaboration with Calexico, 2019’s Years to Burn, was a good reminder of what I enjoyed about his music in the first place—simple, melodic, beautiful, understated. “Comforting” isn’t a word most artists like to hear about their music, but in this case it fits. With that soft voice and those gentle tones, how could it not be?

Listening back to it, I can’t help but feel that same sense of comfort and familiarity. But where comfort often denotes a retreat into safety, this still has a penetrating poignancy to it that most comfort listens don’t. The standout song “Jesus, the Mexican Boy” is a perfect example, a pretty enough song on its own, but one that intertwines storytelling with allegory, Jesus and Judas references, and a simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming conclusion about someone who’ll still love you even when you’ve felt that you’ve betrayed them. I felt myself getting choked up listening to it this week, and while that’s not an unusual thing for me these days (while I frequently find it embarrassing when it happens, I think it’s better that I’m softer and less guarded now), it still caught me off guard. Comfort alone can’t do that. Rating: 9.0

Listen: “Jesus the Mexican Boy”