Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#1 Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#128 Slipknot, IOWA

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, and it’s from @asleepykisser.bsky.social! Take it away, asleepykisser!

Cheer up, honey, I hope you can


There is something wrong with me



In general, it’s a little hard for me to write about my middle/high school life. Much of my memory of that time is filtered through intense dissociation, depression and gender dysphoria. So I can’t really say exactly what it felt like to listen to YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT for the first time anymore. What I can do is attempt to describe what’s it has become for me.

My first Wilco album was A GHOST IS BORN. I was always a library kid, and I spent many days scouring through the shelves picking up books, DVDs and CDs for whatever I thought I remembered the gen-xers I followed online said was good. I was immediately taken in by the plaintive singing and jam-band-y passages. I watched many live version of “At Least That’s What You Said” on the library internet computers. I found one of “my” bands.

When I finally got around to YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, I had already listened to, burned, and memorized all the words to a few different Wilco albums. This one slot right in. I’ve cried many teenage tears listening to Jeff Tweedy sing “I shake like a toothache / when I hear myself sing”. And I felt a little less lonely when I did.


My Mind is filled with radio cures


Electronic surgical words

Thank you, asleepykisser!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Thanks,

Kent