#3 on Rolling Stone’s list of Albums of the 2000s

Double Vinyl Pressing

Originally released in 2002, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was widely acclaimed as one of that year’s best albums. Among Yankee’s inspirations was a recording Tweedy bought at Tower Records in the late ‘90s, The Conet Project: Recordings Of Shortwave Numbers Stations. Tweedy said in his 2017 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “It was as fascinating to me as anything being made by actual musicians using actual instruments … I wanted to know why it was so hypnotic to me. Why could I listen to hours of this stuff, even though I had no clue what any of them were saying. That question became the foundation for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot … the way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate.”

The album takes its title from a haunting recording of a woman repeating those words that is included in The Conet Project; that recording is sampled in the penultimate song on the album, “Poor Places.” Describing the uncanny, strangely prescient feeling of the album, which Wilco began offering as a free stream on its website in 2001, Bob Mehr says in the liner notes: “In the wake of 9/11, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot would be burdened with unintended meaning. The disc had originally been scheduled for a September 11 release. Its cover — a Sam Jones-shot image of Chicago’s twin Marina Towers angled in looming fashion — bore an eerie resemblance to the felled World Trade Center towers. And the songs — with titles like “Ashes Of American Flags” and “War On War,” and lyrics about how “tall buildings shake, sad voices escape” — took on a terrible new resonance.”

Reissued: 9/30/22