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Fact #148417

When:

Short story:

Wilco release their fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as a webstream.

Full article:

YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT by WILCO
by Johnny Black

The fourth Wilco album was much more than just a triumph over the difficult circumstances surrounding its creation and release. It was the metamorphosis of the rootsy Americana alt.country genre from caterpillar into butterfly.

Wilco’s lynchpin, Jeff Tweedy, first attracted attention as a member of Uncle Tupelo, a Belleville, Illinois, high-school band dedicated to the notion of blending their love of punk rock with their equal affection for traditional American roots music.

After four acclaimed but financially unrewarding albums, Uncle Tupelo splintered, with various other members going on to become guiding lights in such bands as Son Volt, Bottle Rockets and The Gourds, while Tweedy formed Wilco.

Their 1995 debut, AM, was unimpressive but, by the time of 1999’s Summer Teeth, they had quantum-leaped to an album that skilfully combined elements of classic country with the worlds of avant garde, ambient and psychedelic music.

Work on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot started optimistically in Chicago, on a Reprise Records budget of $85,000, but Tweedy’s ongoing search for new avenues of musical expression led to conflicts with multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennet and drummer Ken Coomer, both of whom quit during recording.

The kind of ideas that disturbed the more traditionally-inclined Bennet would probably have been the decision, during the recording of Poor Places, to set up instruments that could play themselves - including a drum machine, a keyboard with several keys taped down and a guitar strummed by an electric fan - then just let them roll.

Tweedy has revealed that another technique involved recording songs with standard band arrangements and then, "just to see how sturdy the melody was”, breaking them down and rebuilding them, sometimes adding totally random noises. "We worked along film-editing lines,” he explains, “trying to think about pacing and the overall shape, trying to make something that started one place and ended in another.”

The album was scheduled for release by Reprise during September of 2001, and an excited media buzz was already building, when suddenly everything changed. “Initially there seemed to be some excitement about the songs we were sending in," remembers Tweedy, "but once we got serious about making the record and shaping it into what it became, one of the comments from them was, `It keeps getting worse and worse.'”

Essentially, Reprise couldn’t hear any hits and demanded changes. Instead, the band stuck to its guns and negotiated a release from the Reprise contract, which included buying the rights to the album. Shortly afterwards, it became available on Wilco’s website, and rapidly notched up 30,000 hits.

Several companies, Reprise among them, were now clamouring to sign the band. The eventual winners were Nonesuch, and on release the album drew rave reviews and debuted at No13, with an immediate sale of 56,000 copies.

Since then, it has earned two Grammies, much to the chagrin of Reprise which is, like Nonesuch, a division of the Time-Warner group. Tweedy takes understandable delight in pointing out to interviewers that this means Time-Warner has paid for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot twice.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2005)