I Am An American Aquarium Drinker
What was I thinking when I wasn't listening to Wilco in 2002 and missed the release of this album?
“What was a thinking when I said hello?”
Tonight in Chicago, the Auditorium Theatre will be full of Wilco fans for the second night in a row. Just like New York City fans for five nights last week, they’ll sit quietly as the band, a string quartet, and a horns ensemble play the band’s masterpiece album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in its entirety. The album was officially released twenty years ago today.
I’m not going to tell you the tale of the album. It’s been done.* I do is write about how things affect me. While it took some time, this album affected me more than any other.
“Tell them I’m lost”
I have been a Wilco fan since they formed in 1994, and I was a fan of Uncle Tupelo, Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy’s first band. I loved the first few Wilco albums, but then life intervened. I moved to St. Louis, got married, went back to college, and upended my life in a way where it looked like I was headed into suburban bliss instead of perpetual fangirldom. As the release date of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot neared, I read news stories about problems within the band and problems with their record label. As my music-listening time was becoming more limited, it seemed like too much to deal with for just an album. I’d moved on by April 23, 2002.
“Picking apples for the king and queen of things I’ve never seen”
What was I doing in April, 2002? I did my first catering job that month, which birthed an unexpected career. I was learning how to teach cooking classes. I was six months shy of turning 30, and about to learn that I had a chronic illness that would probably leave me infertile. I was busy, and my listening habits showed it. The Sheryl Crow album that came out around the same time was happy distracting candy, and seemed to fit in with where my life was going as I made friends with suburban moms and sheltered grad students. It was going to be a good, perhaps slightly dull, life.
And if sometimes I happened to be at the closing night of my favorite bar, where I’d consume the better part of a bottle of gin before throwing myself across the bar to kiss the bartender, well, that probably wasn’t a sign of anything, was it?
“Be my demon”
I was not fine. Marriage was ill-fitting on me, as were the friends I’d made in the new chapter of my life. The depression that had always dozed in my gut started waking more and more often, whispering to me that screaming and yelling might help. Then the anxiety that had always been in the forefront of my brain would blind me, leaving me wondering where I was and how I got there. Maybe having a baby would help.
That’s not how I approached pregnancy. It was far more of a surprise than that. I was supposed to be infertile, remember? Being 30 and married we opted to try to get pregnant since it was probably our only chance.
“Turning your orbit around”:
And when I did get pregnant at a sound barrier-breaking speed, the depression and anxiety ran to keep pace. For years, this was my life, where I cooked meals for 25 people with one hand, holding my baby in my free arm. I had no hands left for me. And if I did? Well, nothing good would have happened, I can promise you that.
“I shake like a toothache”
I never set out to find Wilco again, but damn if they didn’t find me. They released the album A Ghost is Born when my baby was four months old, and its sonic nightmare landscape of aluminum and ice was nothing like the band I remembered but sounded so much like the noise in my head. I worked my way backward, back to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. In Tweedy’s lyrics I found the instructions I needed to work my way through the static and chaos. He articulated in real words what I felt. I shook like a toothache. On my hands and knees every time the doorbell rings. These weren’t just poetic images to me. They were my reality.
I wasn’t alone in the static.
“I miss the innocence I’ve known”
While I was pregnant, I only attended two concerts: White Stripes shows during my first trimester, where I stood at the stage in front of the speaker stacks, letting my belly get bathed in holy waves. But it was too much and I didn’t go to another show for over a year. When the baby was seven months old I broke my streak with Wilco at the Fox Theater. While playing a song that had originally been intended for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I wept in the balcony, feeling like a part of my soul had been slipped back into place.
“Just hold your hand and understand that I’m the man who loves you”
Not only did the songs on and intended for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot help me put back the pieces of my broken self, they made me see what I wanted in my life. I wanted to write like Tweedy. We were both products of small south-midwest working class childhoods with similar educations. If he could have this gift with words, maybe I had been wrong in thinking I was just a podunk hack anytime I wrote. If he could do it, maybe I could create something worthwhile. I wanted someone who’d write love letters to me. I wanted to be remembered. I wanted to play KISS covers, beautiful and stoned. But who doesn’t?
“You are so oblivious to yourself”
Through going to shows and participating on the Via Chicago message board, I made friends. Better friends than the social-climbing moms I was meeting on other message boards and in my neighborhood. Like-minded people who didn’t necessarily want to sit around and talk about the band all day. But because we liked these songs full of loneliness and wrung-out pain, we knew our experiences, somewhere, overlapped in the ugly places that don’t get discussed over glasses of wine after the kids have gone to sleep.
One of my old friendships ended with someone overnighting my housekey and her ticket to an upcoming Wilco show to me with a post-it note that read, “Take someone who’ll enjoy the show.” This, because I had told her I needed a break for a few days, then was sick with the flu the day I was supposed to contact her. And yes, I did take a new friend who did have a good time. So did I. This band was helping me figure out who I was with every song.
Not that all my Wilco meetings were great. One of them was so bad I opted to spend a few extra hours sitting in the Philadelphia airport instead of in their company. So many of my Wilco friends, spread around the world, are among the pillars that uphold me. They’re the people who send me a single rose in the hospital with lyrics on the card.
“I’m not going outside”
When the three shows celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot were announced in February, it seemed like a sign. I was recovering from my first knee replacement and had scheduled my second one. The first night of shows—April 22nd—would mark six weeks post-op, and was six months to the day before my 50th birthday. Then my insurance pulled some stunts that caused my surgery to get postponed by almost a week. I needed that extra week for recovery and physical therapy so I could make the four-hour drive to Chicago, navigate my AirBnB with my luggage, and go to all three shows. Currently, I’m doing good if I can stand up from my couch without a hand to hold. I’m okay with missing the shows. I’ll watch tonight’s livestream, and I followed the posts of the New York City concert-goers who got to see these shows last week. Even though I can’t be there, I’m glad they’re happening, and that people I love are having the experience of seeing them. I’m glad I was able to sell my tickets to people who will hopefully have evenings that pry open the deepest reaches of their souls. Because that’s what great music does.
“I’ve got reservations about so many things but not about you”
This afternoon, during a rare hour alone, I put on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and turned it up loud. I didn’t get to the second verse of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” before the tears started. Some for Jay Bennett, the brilliant musician and producer who helped make the album what it is, then died far too young from a faulty painkiller patch while he was waiting for funding to pay for a hip replacement when he was only 45. He’s been heavy on my mind in recent months as I’ve considered how his story could have been my story, and how my story should have been his. He should be here to celebrate tonight.
Others were in gratitude that this album tracked me down. Like a good friend, sometimes time passes and things happen but the train gets back on the tracks when the time’s right. I might have missed the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I got it when I absolutely needed these particular songs. And even though they’re very much of a particular time and place in my life, listening to them isn’t a nostalgic experience. Nor is it a sad one. I haven’t listened to much music during my recovery because I don’t want to mar any songs with memories of pain and boredom. Despite these songs getting me through the darkest time in my life, mostly they still feel new and universal when I hear them.
Today, though, with no sentimentality, they brought back the woman I was almost 20 years ago. Scared and alone, mentally broken. Shaking like a toothache. I cried for her because she was there, and she is here, tucked away deep in memory and muscle, a part of everything I do. She wouldn’t be without this album.
*Here’s where to learn more:
Learning How to Die by Greg Kot
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (A very unbalanced documentary with some excellent studio performances)
“Revisiting Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with Wilco”—Sound Opinions