I Lived Low Enough So The Moon Wouldn't Waste Its Light on Me (or, Some Thoughts on Jason Molina)
The idea of ‘trying’ turns up an awful lot in the lyrics of
Jason Molina—I mean, so does imagery of the Midwest, the moon, a palpable darkness,
and various birds, but ‘trying’ is a concept that he returned to regularly—on
his final ‘solo’ album, 2006’s stark Let
Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, it appears in song titles: “Everything Should
Try Again,” and “Some Thing Never Try”; and famously, it appears in what
amounts to a refrain in “Farewell Transmission”—“I will try, and know whatever I try. I will be gone—but not forever.”
Everybody handles celebrity deaths, or at least, the deaths
of figures you felt were important, differently. Bowie, Prince, Chris Cornell,
Mark Linkous—it’s upsetting, sure, and some to a greater extent than others. It
lingers slightly when you revisit their recorded works, but for me, it’s
something that, for the most part, I’ve been able to move beyond.
Five years later, after reading the headline on the morning of March 18th, I am still shook. It’s not surprising, I guess, that
for somebody who was capable of making such spectral music, that he still
haunting me.
* * *
I had been aware of Jason Molina, and all his various
outlets—Songs: Ohia and The Magnolia Electric Company—for a number of years,
but I guess you could say I found him, and started listening, when I needed his
music the most. It was toward the end of 2012, after a particularly rough year.
And the more I listened, really listened,
the more it spoke to me, and the more I found myself in it.
I still do.
Found underneath all those fragmented and ambiguous images
of the moon and birds and the Midwest, there is that very visceral and
completely terrifying darkness to a bulk of his canon—he references it very
bluntly in the handwritten liner notes to The
Magnolia Electric Company album: “I
am mostly in these songs, saying things I already feel before it got so much
darker...”
With that darkness comes an urgency, a desperation, and
truth. It’s a hard to pick just one lyric that resonates when so many of them
do—hitting too close to home, cutting too deep, or simply just knocking the
wind right out of you.
You hear it in the way his fragile voice delivers the line,
“It’s easier now; I just say I got better,”
on the opening track to Let Me Go;
you hear it in the disdain that courses just underneath the iconic first few
lines of “Didn’t It Rain?”—“No matter how
dark the storm gets over head, they say someone’s watching from the calm at the
edge. What about us who are down here in it? We gotta watch our own backs.”
You hear it in the way he uses the word ‘endless’ eight
times when describing ‘depression’ on “Blue Chicago Moon”—something that will
stick with me for the rest of my life.
You hear it in the unhealthy and obsessive way he describes
love in early Songs: Ohia material, like on The
Lioness—“It is that look of the
lioness to her man across the Nile; I want to feel my heart break, if it must
break, in your jaw. I want you to lick my blood off your paws. If you can’t get
here fast enough—I will swim to you,” he belts on the album’s titular
track. Then, just before that on “Being in Love,” possibly one of his most profound
phrases—“We are proof that the heart is a
risky fuel to burn.”
You hear it in how self-deprecating and effacing his lyrics
became after his struggle with alcoholism started to claim more and more of
him, specifically on Let Me Go, which
is, I think, his most brutal and personal album—perhaps that is why it is only
one of two records he released under his own name.
* * *
I’m not the only one who is still haunted by the ghost of
Jason Molina; feeling his presence and pain when listening to his work.
My internet friend, singer-songwriter Joe Goodkin, is also
among the haunted; but he is also one of many that was inspired by Molina as an
artist.
“’Farewell Transmission’ is a song you never forget hearing
for the first time,” Goodkin told me. “Especially the ‘listen’s at the end of it. That is one of the scariest songs I’ve
heard to this day…you feel like you’re listening to human experience laid bare
before you in its most vulnerable form.”
Goodkin was also taken by Molina’s work ethic and
productivity—up to his full descent into crippling alcoholism, he was
incredibly prolific. “His work ethic led me to get more serious and disciplined
about my own songwriting craft,” he said.
Rarely a drinker until the early 2000s when, according to Riding With The Ghost, a biography about
Molina, a combination of boredom, loneliness, and depression got to him, and
his reliance and abuse of alcohol became a decade long form of slow, painful suicide.
It destroyed nearly all of his relationships—his bands and friends, terms with his
label, and his wife—and then, it eventually destroyed his body, succumbing to
multiple organ failure, found dead in his sparse Indianapolis apartment.
The idea of ‘trying’ turns up an awful lot in the lyrics of
Jason Molina, and he spent the last four years of his life trying, but
ultimately failing every time. He disappeared from the public eye, with very
few updates provided for his cult-like fanbase. When updates were provided,
they were purposefully vague, citing Molina’s ‘ongoing health issues,’ as the
reason that tours had ben canceled or that he was no longer recording.
Shuffled in and out of hospitals and rehab facilities across
the Midwest, the East Coast, and abroad, in 2012 he resurfaced and updated fans
with a note, written in an optimistic tone regarding the future—less than a
year later, he was dead.
* * *
Certainly, there is a vault somewhere in Bloomington,
Indiana, at the Secretly Canadian offices, where unreleased material that
Molina recorded during his final years is housed—it’s alluded to in Riding With The Ghost. But is this
material that we want to hear? Are these songs that need to be heard?
Or should we just be thankful for his abundant output during
his lifetime, and not hope for anything more, or anything ‘final’?
For awhile, it seemed like his label was content with
putting together deluxe reissues of his back catalog; certainly the lavish 10th anniversary edition of The MagnoliaElectric Company was already in the works before Molina died, arriving near
the end of 2013. A slightly less lavish reissue of the equally as important Didn’t It Rain? arrived the following
year.
However, since then, Secretly Canadian has really offered
repressings of less popular Molina efforts, like 2009’s Josephine, as well as a few t-shirts, and some ephemeral 7” singles
of covers.
Should we just be thankful for what we have, the way we had
it, and not hope for anything more? Where is the line between honoring, remembering,
and possibly introducing his music to new audiences—and sheer exploitation and
financial gain? When does that line get crossed?
* * *
Included in the deluxe reissue of Didn’t It Rain? was a large poster that combined the stark album
artwork, Molina’s handwritten lyrics to the first few lines of the titular
track, and album credits. I bought an inexpensive frame from Target, and the
poster hangs on ‘my side’ of our bedroom—large, dark, it casts a bit of an
ominous shadow above where I place my clothes for the next day.
It’s a reminder, I guess. Molina’s music—some of it more
than others—they aren’t songs you want to hear all the time. The thing about him as a songwriter is that he didn’t
dress anything up. Elliott Smith wrote some devastating songs; some of them
were arranged to break your heart, but some of them weren’t. Some of them have
pretty bleak lyrics, but are delivered under the guise of a pop song, like
“Miss Misery” and “Waltz #2.”
Molina didn’t do that; he couldn’t do that. Whether it was
the ramshackle, sloppy, idiosyncratic lo-fi folk of the Songs: Ohia early
years, his few flirtations with the experimental, the sparse and haunting, or
the Crazy Horse-esque twangy, unhinged rock—everything was laid out, and there
was nothing to hide.
My internet friend Joe Goodkin is right—the way Molina says
the word ‘listen’ at the end of “Farewell Transmission” is chilling—the silence
in between each time he says it is like an instrument in and of itself. Even
more unsettling and tense is the acoustic demo recording of the song that is
included on the Magnolia Electric
reissue. Despite how haunting that moment is—the song itself is exhilarating to
hear. Sprawling across seven minutes, the whole things seems on the verge of
falling apart, but Molina and his stable of players manage to keep it together
somehow until the very end.
It’s like life, in a sense—exhilarating and on the verge of
falling apart. Or, at the very least, it’s a small portion of life. Life, my
life, anyway, maybe yours to—you can find it reflected in some of these songs.
Molina wrote songs about the human condition: about love, about an awful
emptiness, about trying.
He never prophesized his own demise, really, in his lyrics,
the way some other tragic singer-songwriter figures had, though I get the
impression that he was aware of his own mortality even before the slow and
painful end. Molina was right, though, in the words to “Farewell Transmission,”
and I keep that in mind whenever I listen to him—
I will be gone, but
not forever.
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