Indie-Rock darlings Wilco and Radiohead, besides having overlapping fan bases generally, also overlap in two other strangely specific ways:

1) They both helped pioneer free internet-only releases in the Bush years (Radiohead with 2007’s In Rainbows, their industry-thumbing victory-lap after they had completed their six-record contract with Capitol; and Wilco with 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, released online of necessity after they were dropped by Reprise for recording such an uncommercial record—the irony being that Yankee was their one album to go Gold);

And 2) both released critically-acclaimed, fan-favorite albums that were recorded just before 9/11, only to be immediately re-read as being about 9/11.

I had previously cataloged the kooky old fan theory that Radiohead’s 2000 game-changer Kid A anticipated September 11. In both mood and structure, went the theory, the album foreshadowed our own reactions to that terrorist attack (e.g. the way the ominous dread of “Everything In Its Right Place” segues into the ambient noise of another dull work day in the city on “Kid A,” then the planes hit the towers on the heart-beating panic attack of “The National Anthem,” then everyone is enveloped in the dust cloud from the collapsing towers on “How to Disappear Completely,” and etc.).

This of course was total nonsense: all that really indicated, I argued, was that our individual responses to collective catastrophes are oddly predictable (certainly the album resonated as much for me during the COVID lockdowns, for example, as it did when the twin towers fell). Yet though Wilco fans as a whole tend to be more grounded than Radiohead fans (or at least, fans of both tend not to get as feverish while listening to Wilco), nevertheless Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has received just as obsessive of 9/11 readings, despite being recorded in late-2000 as well.

Partly that is the band’s own fault, since: a) they released Yankee on their website literally one week after 9/11; but also b) lyrically the Wilco album, even more so than the Radiohead, is almost too on the nose! I mean, there’s a track called “Ashes of American Flags,” for Pete’s sake. The mournful “Jesus Etc.” repeatedly states “Tall buildings shake,” “Our love is all we have,” and “Everyone is a burning sun”–as though we were grieving in the wreckage of the burning buildings themselves. “War on War” seemed to already anticipate all those anti-war protests we’d soon have. “Radio Cure” asks the listener to “cheer up, honey, I hope you can,” while remaining mired in a perpetually unresolved and unresolvable minor cord (the same feeling we all shared on September 12); and even the warm & summery “Heavy Metal Drummer” only seemed to express nostalgia for an America that will now never be recovered. And of course there are two towers on the album cover (Chicago ones, not New York, but still two towers nonetheless).

Of course again, as with Kid A, this is all total nonsense. The rest of the tracks, even if you squint hard, have no obvious resonance with 9/11 (the cheeky “I’m the Man Who Loves You” isn’t even slightly about terrorist attacks); and as for the few tracks that do, all they really seem to indicate is that, even before the first plane hit, even before the first bombs fell, even before the first stock crash of the new millennium—when wages were high and the economy strong and America was still the world’s sole undisputed hyper-power—we all already intuited that we were living on borrowed time. Even in our most prosperous moments, we sensed this was all unsustainable and couldn’t possibly last—and what’s more didn’t deserve to—that our inevitable reckoning was nigh and the other shoe was going to fall soon (we just didn’t realize how hard it would fall when it finally did). Albums like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Kid A were merely ahead of the curve, and even then only slightly.

But then, don’t we purportedly believe the same? That we’re all living on borrowed time, I mean. For the millionth time, are we not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Do we not only believe that the Last Day is nigh, but that every day is the Last Day for someone—and hence we are to live each day like it’s our last?

I’ve been meditating of late on Christ’s parable of the foolish rich man, found only in Luke 12, which reads:

¹⁶ And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:

¹⁷ And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?

¹⁸ And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.

¹⁹ And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.

²⁰ But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?

²¹ So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

I wonder sometimes if the fact that this parable only appears in the one Gospel is what gives us all psychological permission to ignore it (certainly all of our secular financial advisors and Church leaders alike admonish us continually on the importance of saving up providently for the future), even though the parable is thoroughly consistent with everything else the Savior taught about considering the lilies and the birds of the air and selling all that thou hast and giving it to the poor and so forth.

But as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Kid A and 9/11 and COVID and a million other things besides perpetually remind us, we never know on what night our souls will be required of us, and so we must always live as though it were already required of us—because it is. Every sun that sets is always The Last Day for someone. To quote again “Jesus Etc.”, every star is indeed a setting sun, and everyone is a burning sun.