Pages tagged “yankee hotel foxtrot”

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Album Names and Cold War Games: A History of the Numbers Station

Just about anyone who's heard Wilco's magnum opus Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can remember the song “Poor Places,” but not necessarily for the melody, lyrics or Jeff Tweedy's inimitable crooning. No, what sticks out most is the the bone-chilling final 45 seconds of the song, where a woman’s voice robotically repeats the words “Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.” The true nature of those three words is far more eerie and mysterious than a mere disembodied voice repeating a sequence of the NATO alphabet. It's a recording of a numbers station: a broadcast of indeterminate location that transmits coded shortwave radio messages for top-secret purposes....  read more

Five of Our Favorite Nonsensical Wilco Lyrics

Upon close examination of choice Wilco songs, Jeff Tweedy's sanity comes into question. Or maybe the man's just deeper than the rest of us. Regardless, he has a tendency of throwing around random phrases pretty haphazardly, and as a result, Wilco songs don't exactly have a reputation of being crystal clear. As it turns out, the members of Wilco have written many of their songs collaboratively, using an old surrealist word game that allows each member to type a line on the typewriter while only being able to read the previous line. This explains a lot. At any rate, Tweedy...  read more