Spinning Plates #1

Once a week, Spinning Plates examines an essential “long player,” an album worth listening through from the first note to the last.

The truth of the matter is, I was a Son Volt fan before I was a Wilco fan. Back in 2002, Jay Farrar’s post Uncle Tupelo project was far more aligned with my own musical sensibilities than anything that Jeff Tweedy had produced. I chalk this fact up to my own late-collegiate narrow-mindedness, but the fact remains. More alarmingly? The first time I heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I didn’t really get it. Sure, “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “I’m the Man Who Loves You” were catchy pop songs, but tracks like “Kamera” and “Pot Kettle Black” seemed to be painfully typical AOR fodder upon first listen.

This was not the first time I had such a, shall we say, ignorant reaction to an album. To this day, I vividly recall my first impressions of Automatic for the People. Working backwards through R.E.M.’s catalog after the release of 1994’s Monster, I was baffled by Automatic for the People’s understated charm, emotional maturity and general lack rock ‘n roll swagger. The best albums, though, are the ones that you grow into. It took me at least two years to get to a point where I could properly absorb Automatic for the People. Luckily, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sank in much faster. I am now at a point in my relationship with the work that I can, in all seriousness, suggest that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of the finest albums ever recorded. It is, I dare say, the single most powerful record released in my lifetime.

The remarkable thing about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is that every single track plays a completely essential role within the album (and not in a heavy-handed, conceptual/rock opera sort of way). From Glenn Kotche’s drum fills on album opener “I am Trying to Break Your Heart,” through the post-cataclysmic conclusion of “Reservations,” the album offers one masterstroke of human experience after another. “War on War’s” waves of harmony prefigure the gentle lament of “Jesus, Etc.’s” bass line and strings, while the segue from “Ashes of American Flags” to “Heavy Metal Drummer” provides a near-perfect axis from which the mood of the entire album turns. When “Poor Places” finally crescendos and crashes and “Reservations” claws its way out from underneath the ambient wreckage, I am reassured that there are still some things worth believing in.

In the midst of great personal and professional strife, the band put together one of the quintessential albums of this or any other time. Who knew Wilco had it in them? I’m just glad that I gave the album a second listen all those years ago.

— Curt Whitacre