Poor Places

“Poor Places” is the song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot where the whole record finally tips over — a domestic, near-whispered verse about a man who won’t leave his house, gradually overtaken by a slowly mounting static storm that swallows the song whole by the four-minute mark.

Jim O’Rourke’s production makes the noise sound like weather. Jeff Tweedy’s delivery in the verses is exhausted, specific, matter-of-fact. By the end the song has become a shortwave radio broadcast, and the sentence that keeps repeating through the static is the sentence the whole album has been working toward. Put it on the morning you remember you haven’t opened the curtains in a week.