This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
One of my favorite Wilco songs happens to reside on an album full of outstanding tracks. On Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, “Ashes Of American Flags” falls on the more languid side of the spectrum, a change of pace from the “I’m The Man Who Loves You”, “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “War On War” type-fare. The song’s identity is steeped in that unique Wilco maneuver of pairing super simple melodies with unexpected, experimental musings, which is why I love it so much.
The words on this song feel like a stream of consciousness. I can’t quite follow or make sense of Tweedy’s lyrics. But it seems to work despite that fact. The lyrical ambiguity matches the instrumental approach of starting with simple guitar strums and drumbeats before these elements are taken over briefly and unexpectedly by an alien-like arrangement at the 2:26 mark. Wilco has become so good at this that whenever another band tries to do something similar it just feels fabricated and fake. “Ashes Of American Flags” is the real thing.
“I could spend three dollars and sixty-three cents On Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes.”