Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Boxset | Bootlegs | Alpha Mike Foxtrot

With the release of (and my coverage of on the group blog of) the Super Deluxe, eight-CD boxset reissue of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it became a lot harder trying to keep all the working material for this album straight. This album had a notoriously labored recording history, enough to fill three full-length albums and spill over into a fourth outtakes disc. This would be a lot on its own, but this was not the first time some of this was released!

For one thing, there were actually two bootlegs circulated circa the album's official release, the YHF Demos and the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Engineer Demos, each with unique mixes of their respective songs, and both overlap a bunch with this boxset. Further, there's Alpha Mike Foxtrot, another Wilco rarities boxset which also features some of these songs.

In the interests of keeping everything straight and finding the best quality versions of each take, I've gone through the three drafts from the boxset, the outtakes disc, the bootlegs, and Alpha Mike Foxtrot and written a full guide as to their contents. This page is effectively the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot version of LiveNirvana's coverage of With the Lights Out, but that page is supremely useful, so I don't think they'd mind.

I'd also like to direct you to this fantastic blog post covering all the versions of each YHF song. There's enough differences in approach that I'm still bothering with my page; mine's an at-a-glance quick reference for overlap between each set, while he focuses on listing all the unique versions of each song, which is good if you have favorites.

(Note: The "Exclusive?" field of each table is for if you can find this version on other releases. An asterisk (Yes*) denotes when a track isn't totally exclusive, but the version is unique enough or enough of a quality upgrade to make it one you should seek out. For example, several of the bootlegs' songs are sourced from lossy (possibly MiniDisc, possibly early MP3, I'm not sure), while the boxset features them in much better quality.)

Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014

Released November 17, 2014 as a four CD set covering live recordings, demos, and outtakes from Wilco's inception (their first recorded track from 1994 is featured) to then-current day. For relevance and brevity, I'm only including the tracks overlapping the other Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sets, none of the YHF live recordings or stuff exclusive to More Like the Moon.

Song/"Listed as"	Exclusive?	Notes
The Good Part	Yes	Exclusive! The demo versions have a lot more ruffles to them, this is more straightforward and in a higher key.
Cars Can't Escape	Yes	Here Comes Everybody has the same take with mixing differences (this one has an ambient outro and sounds clearer, but is missing the backing vocals).
Kamera "Camera"	Yes	A unique heavy take on the song! This one chugs more than it riffs, though it keeps the demos' early lyrics.
A Magazine Called Sunset	Yes	The same take as YHF Demos, but lots of additional percussion and piano flourishes on this one!
Let Me Come Home	No	Engineer Demos has this version with better dynamic range.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Boxset | Bootlegs | Alpha Mike Foxtrot