On September 10, 2001, I had two things to do the next day.  I failed on both counts.  The first thing I was supposed to do was turn in a paper about a Hawthorne short story ("My Kinsman Major Molineux", for those keeping score at home), and my failure to go to class and hand in the paper had everything to do with procrastination and oversleeping.  My other task that day was to hit Schoolkids Records and buy the new Bob Dylan album, "Love and Theft".  I didn't accomplish this because after my roommate woke me up that afternoon I wound up watching CNN for the rest of the day.  

I actually don't remember when I wound up finally buying the Dylan album.  I think it was that same week, because I remember agreeing with David Menconi's piece about the album from the Sunday News & Observer. 

But that's not what I've been thinking about over the last day or so, even when I think about music and 9/11.  What I've been fascinated with is that Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's original release date was also September 11th, 2001, but the Reprise label's refusal to release the album (this is a whole other story) wound up pushing it's official release back to 2002, although the band, in an effort to stop piracy of the MP3s, began streaming the album online on 9/18/2001.  

If Reprise hadn't been such dicks about an "unreleasable album" (that went on to sell about half a million copies, despite Wilco generally being absent from radio that isn't prefixed by the word "college"), and the album had come out on 9/11, I can't help but wonder if Menconi's piece from that first Sunday paper after the attacks wouldn't have been about this album.  Despite being finished before the attacks, the album seems to have echoes of 9/11 throughout- from the cover picture of two towers in Marina City, Chicago, which bear a passing resemblance to the Trade Centers, to songs with titles like "War on War" and "Ashes of American Flags", to the lines in "Jesus Etc" about "Tall buildings shake/voices escape singing sad sad songs" and "Voices whine/Skyscrapers are scraping together/Your voice is smoking/Last cigarettes are all you can get/Turning your orbit around".