Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — Wilco’s Accidental Soundtrack to 9/11 and its Aftermath
Osama Bin Laden’s demise bookends a decade of American history largely defined by the 9/11 attacks and our responses to them. As we remember the attacks and the fierce debates over what constituted an appropriate response, it’s worth taking a look back at the unusual story of how Wilco, in the words of a New York Times music critic, “recorded a beautiful album about 9/11—months before 9/11.”
Though some critics were still calling them “alternative country” at the turn of the millennium, the band had gradually moved away from the Gram Parsons/Harvest-era Neil Young sound of their debut album A.M. Songwriter Jeff Tweedy absolutely hated being pigeonholed in the market segment he had helped create as a member of Uncle Tupelo. He was so sick of hearing about Gram Parsons that when I asked “what bands were the biggest influences on the new album?” during an interview the week Being There came out, he paused and said “Throbbing Gristle.” Sarcasm aside, it was clear that this sprawling, two-disc hodgepodge of a second album was a response to being boxed in: “Misunderstood,” the feedback-drenched opening track, ended with him screaming “I’d like to thank you all for nothing at all!” over Sonic Youth-like guitar noise.
Being There had broadened the band’s range considerably, but it was with 1999’s Summerteeth that the band left the alt-country thing completely. Juxtaposing dark lyrics over Beach Boys-style harmonies, layers of mellotron and synthesizer parts, and lots of effects pedals, the album sounds like a darker, looser, more flawed version of the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, which came out at the same time. Summerteeth was a bit jarring at first, but after a few listens, the excessive synthesizer parts stopped drowning out the songwriting. The complex structure of songs like “Pieholden Suite” and “Via Chicago” betrayed the influence of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and Smile; like the classic 60’s bands Wilco was borrowing from, the band’s musical experimentation had sparked better songwriting. The anticipation started building: what would they do next?
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was originally scheduled for release on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. After the band finished recording the tracks, Tweedy brought Chicago post-rock/noise veteran Jim O’Rourke into the band’s studio to mix the album. When the band delivered the album to Reprise in June 2001, the label didn’t hear a finished record, and demanded that the band polish it up. Wilco refused to make further changes, and left the label, buying out the rights to the new album. Not surprisingly, news of the split spread like wildfire through the Wilco fan base and the music industry in general. They were dropping WILCO?!? The band Woody Guthrie’s daughter had recently chosen to record music for her father’s previously unheard songs? And the word from people who had heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was that it might be their best album yet.
Not long after the split from Reprise, someone leaked Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to the internet. I got my hands on it the last week of August 2001. What stood out about the album on the first few listens was its production. The opening track, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” managed to sound stripped-down and ornately crafted at the same time, like one of the demo versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” A sound collage built on layers of guitars, pianos, loops, and ringing alarm clocks, the song keeps threatening to fall apart, until around the five-minute-mark, when it finally does, disintegrating into a cacophony of crashing mechanical noises. The first week or two I had it, I mostly listened to “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” skipping the somber, subdued songs that made up most of the rest of the album.
Then 9/11 happened. On Wednesday night, thirty-six hours after the attacks, I was sitting at my computer in my apartment in Brooklyn, after a long day of realizing I didn’t have any skills that could be of use. They didn’t even need blood. I was reading the news online, listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, when chills ran up my spine. “Wait, WHAT? Skyscrapers are scraping together?” All of a sudden, half of the lyrics on the album seemed like they could have been written about the events of the last couple of days. I quickly realized I wasn’t the only one who had noticed – the Wilco bulletin boards were blowing up. The mournful “Jesus, Etc.,” probably the most traditional-sounding song on the album, got the most attention:
Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around
Voices whine
Skyscrapers are scraping together
Your voice is smoking
Last cigarettes are all you can get
Turning your orbit around
An album recorded in early 2001, originally set for release on 9/11, had a song with lyrics about tall buildings shaking, voices lamenting, and skyscrapers shaking together? Even if the weirdness had ended there, “Jesus, Etc.” would have earned Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a footnote in ‘Did You Hear The Crazy Thing About This Album?’ history. But it didn’t end there. If “Jesus, Etc.” sounded like it could have been written about the attacks themselves, lyrics from a slew of other songs seemed like they could have been written about their aftermath.
The next track on the album, the dirge-like “Ashes of American Flags,” culminates with Tweedy singing “I would like to salute/The ashes of American flags/And all the fallen leaves/Filling up shopping bags” as the song dissolves into gusts of feedback which could have doubled as incidental music for a cinematic fire or earthquake. It sounded the way Lower Manhattan looked. And it was hard not to associate the line about “fallen leaves” with the little fragments of financial books, sales reports, and human resources manuals that were turning up in people’s yards all over Brooklyn.
“Kamera” contains the album’s first reference to war (“I’m counting on/A heart I know by heart/To walk me through this war/Where memories distort”). The chorus brought to mind the thousands of photocopied “MISSING” signs that were plastered all over Manhattan street corners and telephone poles by the morning of the twelfth: “Phone my family/Tell ‘em I’m lost on the sidewalk/And no, it’s not okay.” In earlier demo versions of “Kamera,” Tweedy had actually set the song in New York City with a line about “counting down those days in Central Park.”
(Photograph courtesy of Flickr user Lakah, used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.)
“War on War” opens with Tweedy repeating that “It’s a war on war,” conjuring up the contentious debates we would have over how the United States should respond to the attacks in the months and years that followed. The chorus offers a cryptic warning: “You have to lose/You have to lose/You have to learn how to die/If you want to want to be alive.” But did that mean we had to learn to sacrifice more lives in a war on terror, or that we had to learn to accept that the risk of terrorism was part of living in a free society? “Poor Places” seemed to parody America’s pre-9/11 worldview: “They cried all over overseas/It makes no difference to me/When it’s hot in the poor places tonight/I’m not going outside.” Post-9/11, it was obvious that what happened in the rest of the world—even somewhere as poor and remote as Afghanistan—had ramifications here.
The name of the album provides one more fascinating unintentional tie-in to the 9/11 attacks. At the end of “Poor Places,” as Tweedy repeats the chorus an unusual sample fades into the mix. A woman with a British accent repeats “Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.” It’s taken from The Conet Project, a compilation of recordings of the mysterious “numbers stations” that broadcast streams of numbers, letters, or Morse code over shortwave radio. While no one claims responsibility for these stations, which started broadcasting shortly after World War II, it is generally accepted that intelligence agencies use them to transmit coded messages to sleeper agents operating under cover in foreign countries—not unlike the way members of Al Qaeda used coded messages to communicate with sleeper cells here in the US.
In August 2001, the targets and date of the attack were finalized through a series of coded emails between an Al Qaeda operative in Germany and Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the sleeper cells here in the US, who was staying at a motel in New Jersey. “Architecture” referred to the World Trade Center, “arts” meant the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” the White House. They used a riddle containing two branches, a slash, and a lollipop, to convey the chosen date: 11/9, or September 11th in the European style of writing dates. It was an email chain that would live in infamy; in the decade since 9/11, the federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in its efforts to intercept and process communications like the coded emails, the internet-age version of the “Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.” shortwave radio broadcast.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was finally officially released on April 23, 2002 on Nonesuch Records. The album cover featured a different pair of twin towers, the Marina Towers in the band’s hometown of Chicago. Whether that was yet another coincidence, or an intentional tribute to 9/11, it only strengthened the album’s status as the unofficial soundtrack of the attacks and their aftermath. Ten years ago, it was comforting hearing music that seemed tailored to the uncharted territory we were facing; listening to it now, the album sounds like an postmodern “Ashokan Farewell,” a fractured, but poignant, elegy to a conflict with a stateless, invisible enemy.
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