It was MinnPost’s Daily Glean that first alerted me to the tragic news of musician Jay Bennett’s passing on Sunday.

Although an autopsy is being performed, it is rumored that cause of death is linked to medical complications from a stage dive Bennett took at the 7th Street Entry back in 1990s while playing with his band, Titanic Love Affair. Bennett, who did not have health insurance, left the injury to his leg untreated and supposedly badly needed a hip replacement at the time of death.

As a former member of Wilco, Bennett’s musicality is all over the band’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. In my mind, it’s a perfect album: a twisting postmodern narrative arc to the eleven tracks; Woodsworthian lyrics like: “Disposable Dixie cup drinking, I assassin down the avenue;” and a cacophony of rich-layered sounds that both meander and rock.

It’s also an album that was a soundtrack to my formative LA years. Released in ’02, around the time I started to grow roots in LA, the 11 tracks wafted through that summer as tunes at friends’ BBQs, the music at coffee shops, and the “crappy music” in my car as the junior high kids I nannied for that summer called it.

The 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film about Wilco followed the band’s tumultuous experience of making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and further immortalized the album in my mind. Beautifully shot in black and white, the film makes Chicago look like the perfect place for a brooding artist to find fertile ground and just enough frigid cold to stay honest to his or her work. “I want a good life with a nose for things. A fresh wind and bright sky to enjoy my suffering…” It made me yearn for that Midwestern creative chill that both Chicago and Minneapolis share.

Sadly, it was the process of making the album that caused Bennett to come in conflict with band frontman Jeff Tweedy (all of which is incredibly captured in the doc). Shortly after the album’s release, Bennett was gone from Wilco, and in my mind, the group has never sounded as good again.

Here’s a link to the Rolling Stone review of the album.