Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

From Freepedia

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Image:WilcoYankeeHotelFoxtrot.jpg
Album by Wilco
Released	April 23 2002
Recorded	Autumn 2000 Chicago (The Loft)
Genre	Indie rock
Length	51 min 51 sec
Label	Nonesuch
Producer(s)	Jim O'Rourke, Wilco
Professional reviews
All Music Guide Image:4 out of 5.png link BBC (Positive) April 2002 The Onion (Positive) link Pitchfork 10/10 April 2002 PopMatters (Positive) 04/26/2004 Robert Christgau (*) link
Wilco chronology
Summerteeth (2000)	Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)	A Ghost Is Born (2004)

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a critically-acclaimed album by Wilco. It was rejected by the band's record label at the time, Reprise Records, to which the band reacted by making the album's tracks available on the Internet. The album was finally commercially released by Nonesuch Records on April 23, 2002 (ironically, Reprise and Nonesuch are both Time Warner companies.) The album hit the charts at an all-time high for Wilco at #13 (topped by A Ghost is Born two years later.) It was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll.

Some of the making of the album was chronicled in Sam Jones's documentary film, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.

Though "Jesus, Etc." and elements of other songs (in addition to the album cover itself) are sometimes thought to have been created in memory of the September 11th attacks, the entire album was completed before the attacks; September 11, 2001 was in fact the original intended release date for the album.

The More Like the Moon EP (also called Bridge and Australian EP) was originally released a bonus disc to the Australian version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The band ended up releasing the EP to all their fans via the band's website in late 2004, but not before they had released it for about two years exclusively to all buyers of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The building on the cover is Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City (a condominium built in 1964, currently hosting the House of Blues at the ground level) in Chicago near the Loop.

The album features recordings from numbers stations, and is named after one of them: a looped recording at the end of the song "Poor Places" of a mysterious female voice reciting "yankee hotel foxtrot" over and over. The woman recorded in the clip is alleged to be a Mossad agent.

These samples put the band in some legal hot water: they were taken from the Conet Project, a 4-CD set of numbers station recordings. The album's label, Irdial, sued Wilco for copyright infringement; the lawsuit was eventually settled with Irdial receiving some undisclosed royalties for the song [1].