Last month, the acclaimed singer-songwriters Julien Baker and Torres performed a show together at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge, presumably ahead of a still-unannounced collaborative album. They played mostly originals, though they also introduced a few covers, including a modern indie-rock standard: Songs: Ohia’s “Farewell Transmission.”
Baker and Torres are far from alone in performing this song and honoring the man who wrote it — the late, great Jason Molina. Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee have also covered “Farewell Transmission” on record, as have Glen Hansard and My Morning Jacket, and countless more have played it live. But beyond just that one song, Molina’s career has had a fruitful renaissance more than a decade after his death.
As the leader of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., he was respected but hardly a commercial juggernaut. (His sizable catalog has sold about 200,000 copies worldwide.) Since his passing in 2013 from organ failure brought on alcoholism, however, Molina has taken on the stature of sainted “bygone bard” for a new generation that never knew his music when he was alive, similar to what Townes Van Zandt signified for Gen-X singer-songwriters. Particularly in the indie-Americana space, everyone from Big Thief to Wednesday to Wild Pink to the promising Vermont rocker Greg Freeman seems in some way influenced by him, a debt that more often than not has been directly acknowledged. “Learning about Jason Molina was a big deal,” MJ Lenderman told me in 2022 when he reflected on his beginnings as a songwriter in high school, which occurred in the shadow of Molina’s death.
For an artist like Lenderman, whose songs are frequently compared to Neil Young, it’s probably more accurate to suggest that he (and many others) are influenced by Neil via the filter of Jason Molina, a passionate acolyte who instructed his band to study After The Gold Rush before recording one of Songs: Ohia’s greatest albums, 2001’s Didn’t It Rain. The Zoomers that have followed Molina’s lead don’t emulate the sunny Laurel Canyon folkiness of Gold Rush; rather, like Molina, they take Neil’s guitar sound and apply a layer of depressed Middle American grime.
Molina’s vocals are similarly region-specific. An untrained yelper, he made up for his technical limitations by conveying pure feeling the way a glacier presents ice. When Jason Molina sings, you immediately discern the peak of his emotions. But there’s also a vast body of hurt and longing that exists below the surface, only hinted at but always palpable. Like so many Midwestern men, Molina was a master at holding back and letting you know he was holding back, until the weight finally crushed him.
In life, Molina was a complicated, somewhat unknowable character. He was, on one hand, a small-town kid from Ohio who his peers likely viewed as pretentious, the kind of guy who wore a cowboy hat around town at the height of the grunge era. On the other hand, he prided himself for having a work ethic that can be credibly classified as “blue collar.” He woke early in the morning, and applied himself to songwriting like it was a job, which helps to explain his extraordinary creative output.
In the nineties and aughts, Jason Molina was a man out of time. His brushes with mainstream attention seem to have been purely accidental and ran contrary to his anti-trendy nature. In retrospect, he seems even less modern — he died around the time the social media era really took hold, and indie rock became a lot less indie and almost wholly disconnected from rock. Of course, these are the very things that help to explain his contemporary appeal.
MOLINA 101
Jason Molina’s life was cut short, but his catalog is vast beyond his years. Across his various bands, collaborations and solo projects, he put out well over two dozen releases over the course of a 15-year recording career, a testament to his “punch in, punch out” daily songwriting work ethic. But in the public consciousness his output tends to be reduced to just one track, “Farewell Transmission,” from his most popular album, 2003’s The Magnolia Electric Co.
That’s the song that modern-day Molina acolytes are most likely to cover in concert, and it’s not hard to figure out why: “Farewell Transmission” derives from the classic-rock playbook of rousing concert anthems. It’s the “Free Bird” of the DIY basement-show world, an all-time fist-pumper with tragic undertones, a natural encore favorite. But as good of a song that it is, the original recording is an even better performance. In the studio, Molina functioned like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, favoring live takes and no-fuss spontaneity and shunning overdubs and mistake-free perfection. For much of his career, he preferred to rotate musicians in and out of his orbit, resulting in combinations of players that might back him just once and never again. Such was the case with “Farewell Transmission,” which is played with such freewheeling intensity that one might assume it was recorded in the cockpit of a crashing airplane.
The miracle of The Magnolia Electric Co. is that the rest of the record doesn’t feel like a letdown after opening with that deathless classic. At the time, the album represented the most straight-forward “rock” music that Molina had yet made. Though it also felt slightly behind the times, given the strides that Jeff Tweedy — among Molina’s more successful Midwestern peers — had recently made with Wilco beyond the sort of chunky alt-country The Magnolia Electric Co. traffics in. No matter: Even when Molina cranked the amps, he still made the music sound intimate and lonely. On the second track, he offers up his defining lyric: “I’ve been riding with the ghost / I’ve been doing whatever he told me.” Molina actually claimed to see ghosts in real life, and he had a life-long fascination with American history, folklore and nature. But “I’ve Been Riding With The Ghost” also has obvious resonance in light of Molina’s ultimate fate, which was already set in motion around the time that The Magnolia Electric Co. was released.
Born on December 30, 1973 in Oberlin, Ohio, Molina was raised in a trailer park situated in a de-industrialized former steel town a half-hour outside of Cleveland. His father, a middle-school teacher, turned him onto music, and Molina started playing guitar at age 10. His relationship with his mother was more fraught due to her debilitating drinking problem. Molina himself was a teetotaler as a young man, though that started to change in the early aughts when he moved with his wife to Indianapolis. Feeling isolated, he started drinking heavily, usually in private to hide the extent of his intake, a stock “problematic Midwestern drinker” move.
The Magnolia Electric Co. is commonly regarded as Molina’s artistic breakthrough, but it’s the album that precedes it, 2001’s Didn’t It Rain, that represents his first “mature” work. A bridge between his spare early albums from the nineties and the “band” records he made in the aughts, Didn’t It Rain also put Molina in a broader context than his usual Middle American indie-rock milieu. The album title nods to gospel and blues traditions — not exactly common reference points at the time — and Molina follows through with a record engulfed in timeless, spacious darkness, no matter the timely references to Steve Albini or even himself in “Cross The Road, Molina.” What also sets the album apart, then and now, is Molina’s interest in writing about downbeat, small-town life, which he elevates with poetic language that somehow reads as romantic in spite of the desperate trappings. Like in “Blue Factory Flame,” when he sings:
“When I die, put my bones in an empty street
to remind me of how it used to be
Don’t write my name on a stone
bring a Coleman lantern and a radio
Cleveland game and two fishing poles
and watch with me from the shore.”
The Magnolia Electric Co. might have done even better commercially if it had been presented in a less confusing manner. It is credited as a Songs: Ohia record, even though it is named after his post-Songs: Ohia band. And the lineup on the record isn’t the band that would play those songs with Molina in concert. Perhaps this professional perversity can be regarded as an unfortunate byproduct of his Dylanesque compulsion to follow his gut in lieu of a safer, steadier approach. Or it might just reflect Molina’s ambivalence about mainstream notoriety in general. In retrospect, it’s tempting to theorize that Molina was trying to will himself (successfully, it turns out) to cult hero status.
Another perverse move was making the first Magnolia Electric Co. release a live record. Trials & Errors was captured at a gig in Brussels relatively early on in the tour, before the group had truly gelled. In time, this lineup — anchored by ace guitarist Jason Groth and the innovative steel guitar player Mike Brenner — would evolve into a fierce unit capable of both Crazy Horse-style rampages and delicate country-soul reveries. On Trials & Errors, they mostly just rampage, and sometimes the fluffed notes are plainly audible. But, again, Molina is willing to sacrifice polish for passion, and this ranks with his most visceral music.
Much of Trials & Errors is repeated on the 2005 studio effort What Comes After The Blues, including one of his finest and most definitive songs, “The Dark Don’t Hide It.” (Molina also gives space to bandmate Jennie Bedford’s fine ballad “The Night Shift Lullaby,” a sign of his generous and instinctively collaborative nature.) But one song that only exists in live form is among my personal favorites, “Such Pretty Eyes For A Snake.” Molina describes what is presumably a soul-crushing encounter with a groupie (“I guess if I do come upstairs with you / It wouldn’t be the first time / That I made a mistake in my life”). But what he’s really describing is another hellhound on his trail. Near the end, there’s an extraordinary moment when he suddenly snaps, “You got still something to say about it?” I can never tell if this is part of the song or if Molina is talking to the band or someone in the front row. Sometimes I imagine he is once again addressing a specter only he can see.
By the time Molina readied to make the final Magnolia Electric Co. record, 2009’s Josephine, his alcoholism had advanced considerably. He was also shaken by the recent death of one-time bandmate Evan Farrell, and he would dedicate the record to his memory. In the studio, Molina’s compatriots tried to curb his drinking by taking larger-than-usual pulls from the communal bottle of Wild Turkey, a method that yielded predictably mixed results. Regardless: Josephine contains some of the most beautiful music of his career, even though the relatively mellower sound has caused some partisans to overlook it. Vocally, Molina never sounded more soulful than he does here, and his band plays with corresponding sensitivity and grace. It’s hard to top the reckless energy of “Farewell Transmission” for pure kick-ass power, but to me the single greatest recording of Molina’s career is “Shenandoah,” a gorgeous tear-in-your-beer ballad of heartbreak and regret that Molina sings with sweetly pained restraint. If you can hear him softly hit that high note at the end without getting a lump in your throat, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.
MOLINA ADVANCED STUDIES
If you have gotten this far into your Molina listening, there is no excuse not to read Erin Osmon’s excellent 2017 biography Jason Molina: Riding With The Ghost. Osmon writes with the care of a journalist, the eye of a critic, and the love of a fan, depicting Molina as a contradictory figure — a sad-sack visionary on stage and a hyperactive joker in the tour van, a secretive loner who craved communal artistic experiences from a wide circle of friends and fellow travelers, a man who prided himself on being an “authentic” everyman while also constantly self-mythologizing (or flat out lied lying about) himself. The resulting portrait humanizes a man too often reduced to the sad circumstances of his death.
As a teenager, Molina was drawn to typical small-town hesher fare like Metallica and Motorhead. But as a student at Oberlin College in the mid-nineties, he remade himself as a guitar- and ukulele-playing eccentric nicknamed “Sparky” who claimed that Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina was his uncle. (He wasn’t.) He wrote scores of songs and recorded them on cassettes labeled with the prefix “Songs:” along with some allusion that described what they sounded like, such as Songs: George Jones or Songs: Goth. When some friends went to Cleveland to see Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers, Molina asked them to slip the singer-songwriter his Songs: Ohia tape, named after a phonetic-accent pronunciation of his home state. Oldham subsequently suggested that Molina use the name for his project, and it stuck.
For the first three Songs: Ohia albums — 1997’s Songs: Ohia (a.k.a. “The Black Album”), 1998’s Impala, and 1999’s Axxes & Ace — Molina was plagued by constant comparisons to Oldham, proof that even future icons still start off as fodder for cynical record reviewers. The charges were not completely unwarranted: These albums do sound indebted to Oldham, from their spare and raw production to the untrained plainness of Molina’s voice to the occasional flashes of goofy humor. (“Captain Badass,” a touching love song from Axxess & Ace dedicated to his future wife, is hardly a typical Jason Molina song title.)
The best album from this period is 2000’s The Lioness, in which Molina is joined by members of the Scottish slowcore band The Arab Strap. Given the personnel, it’s not surprising that The Lioness sounds unlike any other Molina album. While the early records have more than their share of mid-tempo dirges, the glacial pace of The Lioness is undergirded by flinty post-punk energy, like Joy Division re-imagined as a Rust Belt bar band. (Another Songs: Ohia album from 2000, Ghost Tropic, has a similar feel but conveys it less effectively.) On “The Black Crow,” Molina memorably sings from the perspective of a dying bird, a thoroughly Molina-esque scenario. “And I look down and see the whole world / and it’s fading.”
When Molina wasn’t putting out proper albums, he was releasing EPs, live records, singles and tour-only collections like 2000’s well-regarded Protection Spells. (Frankly, it’s more than I have space to cover here.) Molina saved his most ambitious project for 2007’s Sojourner, a box set composed of three full-length albums, one EP, and a DVD documentary. It resembles one of the sprawling, multi-disc archival releases that Neil Young periodically puts out to clear his vaults of unreleased work. Only Molina did it in real time, not 40 years after the fact. (Perhaps he could already sense that his time was limited.) The packaging was extravagant, particularly for an indie release — the albums were housed in a wooden box along with a star map and a medallion, an allusion to Molina’s own pack-rat habits and fetishization of objects exotic and mundane.
Given the heft of the enterprise, one might expect Sojourner to be padded or plodding. But Molina’s quality-control is impressively on point, and the digressing approaches of producers Steve Albini and David Lowery makes for a sonically dynamic experience. But still: This was a lot of music to present at once. To the chagrin of Molina and his band, their label Secretly Canadian preceded the box set with a 28-minute album, Fading Trails, that cherry-picked nine songs from the Sojourner sessions. But no matter Molina’s dissatisfaction, the bright and approachable country rock of Fading Trails might be an even more accessible entry point for newbies than The Magnolia Electric Co.
PH.D-LEVEL MOLINA
A common complaint leveled against Molina in his lifetime was that his songs cycled through the same set of chords and thematic motifs, making them hard for the casual listener to discern from one another. That’s not an entirely unfair critique, though it doesn’t necessarily apply to 2004’s Pyramid Electric Co. One of four Molina albums issued under his own name, it’s a bleak record even by Molina’s standards, with little in the way of melodies or exhilarating guitar solos. Some of the tracks sound like informal, glacially paced solo jams in which Molina searches for ideas while banging out clanging chords and minor-key guitar lines. Certainly not an easy listen, but anyone looking for a “dark night of the soul” vibe could hardly get any darker than this.
On his records, Molina always insisted that his backing musicians take ownership of their parts and contribute their own unique flavors to the overall stew. That spirit carried over to projects officially billed as collaborations, like Amalgamated Sons Of Rest, whose lone self-titled EP from 2002 amounts to a sort-of indie-rock Traveling Wilburys also featuring Oldham and Scottish folk singer Alasdair Roberts. A more fruitful partnership was forged with the Texas singer-songwriter Will Johnson, whose hybrid of indie rock and hard-luck alt-country influences naturally fit with Molina on 2009’s Molina And Johnson.
A planned support tour for Molina And Johnson was canceled so that he could enter rehab. Sadly, the treatment didn’t take, and Molina’s drinking and health problems worsened. The once prolific artist stopped writing and releasing music. In 2012, he put out a statement on Magnolia Electric Co.’s website, expressing optimism about his treatment and saying that he was working on new music. Five months later, he released a 22-minute EP, Autumn Bird Songs, composed of song sketches he laid down shortly before canceling the Molina And Johnson tour.
Five months after that, Jason Molina was found dead in his Indianapolis apartment. A modest recording space was set up in the corner. A half-empty bottle of discount vodka was in the freezer. He was 39 years old.