(Weird Tales) were released in 1998, Summerteeth was released in early 1999, and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II was released in 2000. Tweedy received his first Grammy nomination when Mermaid Avenue was nominated for Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1999. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Jeff Tweedy was invited to play at Chicago's Noise Pop festival, and was told that he could collaborate with a musician of his choosing. Tweedy chose Jim O'Rourke based on his fascination with O'Rourke's Bad Timing album. O'Rourke offered to bring drummer Glenn Kotche to the festival, and the trio formed a side project named Loose Fur. The other band members of Wilco had written a number of songs for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but Tweedy was unsatisfied with them because he believed that the songs did not sound like the ones he played with Loose Fur. Tweedy became such a fan of Kotche's playing style that he decided to dismiss Ken Coomer from the band in favor of Kotche. Tweedy had strong feelings about how songs should be sequenced, which clashed with Jay Bennett's focus on the songs themselves. Because Bennett was mixing the album, this led to a series of arguments between songs about how the album should sound. Tweedy asked O'Rourke to remix several songs on the album that had been mixed by Bennett, which caused tensions within the band to escalate. The album was completed in June 2001, and Tweedy was insistent that it was in its final form. Tweedy also fired Bennett around this time, believing (according to Bennett) that Wilco should only have one core member. The band maintains that the firing of Bennett was a collective decision. Reprise Records' parent company Time Warner merged with America Online in 2001, and the recording company was asked to cut costs. Howie Klein, the CEO of Reprise Records, considered Wilco to be one of the label's core bands, but was offered a lucrative buy-out by AOL Time Warner. Reprise did not consider the album commercially viable and was not interested in releasing the album. David Kahne (Head of A&R) agreed to release Wilco from Reprise under the condition that Wilco got to keep all legal entitlements to the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. After an article in the Chicago Tribune publicly described these managerial practices, CEO Gary Briggs quit. Shortly after leaving the label, Briggs remarked: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was originally scheduled to