Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wilco handed Reprise Records the finished album in the summer of 2001. The label told them it was all wrong, no singles, not radio-friendly, and asked them to make wholesale changes. Wilco said the record was done and refused. Reprise dropped them. The band bought back their masters, posted the entire album for free streaming on their website on September 18, 2001, one week after the towers fell in New York, and over 50,000 people visited in a single day. Fans were singing along at shows before the album had a physical release. Wilco eventually signed with Nonesuch Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., who had also owned Reprise. Warner paid for the same album twice.

The album was recorded at the band's rehearsal space in Chicago, a loft they called simply The Loft, and the title came from a broadcast on a numbers station, one of those shortwave radio channels historically used for espionage, where a robotic voice reads out words from NATO's phonetic alphabet. That broadcast was sampled in the closing minutes of "Poor Places." The record sounds like a band that had stripped everything comfortable away and was trying to reassemble music from first principles, loops and electronic noise and feedback sitting inside what should have been straightforward folk rock songs but no longer quite was.

Tweedy later said he had been trying to make a record that sounded the way he felt, which was uncertain and fragmented and searching. The result became the definitive American indie rock album of its era. "Jesus, Etc.," "Heavy Metal Drummer," and "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" are among the finest songs of the 2000s, and they all live here.