“I’ll be around/You were right about the stars/Each one is a setting sun”
My strongest memories of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are of hot summer afternoons, drinking iced tea, and playing poker with my sons, my wife, and my nephew. It is not an upbeat album, but it is fitting that it was the soundtrack for a lazy, domestic summer.
I have little to say about the album itself. It is beautiful and brilliant. Too much has been said already about this third and final album that Jay Bennett did with Wilco. It ends the work started with Being There. And the compassion that work was centered around sees the narrator through the “dark night of the soul” in Summerteeth. He emerges here wounded but stronger and wiser. Capable of loving the other. You can hear the resolution in the final track as it fades out into a quiet, wistful dirge-like lullaby . “I have reservations about so many things, but not about you.” You can also hear it in Jesus etc. My favorite Wilco song. Here is a live version of that song from a 2004 show at the Fillmore West.
Listen to: Jesus etc.
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