It’ll Get So Quiet When This Record Ends - On The 20th Anniversary of The Magnolia Electric Company, and A Decade Without Jason Molina

Once, a few years back, I told a friend of mine that I felt like I was haunted by the ghost of Jason Molina.

Jason Molina never made it to 40. He had, if my math is correct, just recently turned 39 when he died of organ failure in March of 2013—organ failure brought on by almost a decade’s worth of unprecedented, and quite surprising to some, alcohol abuse.

Alcohol abuse that became so debilitating and all-consuming it caused him to withdraw from the public —at the time, without explanation—in 2009. 

Trying—both the word, and the very idea, or act of, appears throughout Molina’s songwriting. 

It is something from his lyricism that I regularly return to when I think about his music. Molina, himself, tried. He spent the latter half of his 30s in and out of myriad treatment programs for alcoholism—throughout the United States and even a stint at a facility in London. 

He continued to try but ultimately failed to find sobriety.

Jason Molina never made it to 40. His 39th birthday had been at the tail end of 2012.

And it was the tail end of 2012 when I, somehow, found my way to his music.

The news of Molina’s death was slow to spread, or at least to be confirmed by his longtime label, Secretly Canadian, and the initial reports of his passing are attributed to Henry Owings—at one time, a friend of Molina’s—via his music site Chunklet. 

“He cashed out on a Saturday night in Indianapolis with nothing but a cellphone in his pocket,” a now infamous quote pulled from Owings’ statement on Molina’s death said, giving just a small glimpse into the severity of the rock bottom he’d perhaps hit, and how, even in death, there was an air of frustration, even resentment or anger, at how the last few years of Molina’s life had been spent.

Some might go so far as to call it a waste. 

Molina had been at odds with almost everyone who had tried to offer help, or support, during his declining years. He was estranged from his wife; he had alienated the musicians he recorded with; and in an attempt to financially support himself at some point during his real decline, he had been hired, and, shortly thereafter, fired from a warehouse job with Secretly Canadian after showing up for his shift while intoxicated.

And I am uncertain if this part is even true, or if it is something I have simply fabricated over time, because I do not remember where I would have even read it, or heard it, but I am convinced that at some point, a detail about the scene of Molina’s death included the discovery of vodka bottles found in his freezer, and that his grandmother’s was the only number stored in the phone he was found with.

Molina never made it to 40. He has been dead for a decade, and once, a few years back, I told a friend of mine that I felt like I was haunted by his ghost.

I had committed to regularly writing about music roughly two months before he died, and in the last ten years, I have written about Jason Molina at least eight times, probably more—twice, specifically, about his death.

I will be 40 in a matter of months.

*

And there is, of course, a mythology of sorts that surrounds The Magnolia Electric Company, the album that Molina released in March of 2003—but there is also, of course, the mythology that surrounds Jason Molina himself as an artist, the years he was actively writing and recording, arguably prolific throughout his career; and there is the mythology surrounding his final, private years of receding health leading up to his demise. 

And it is a source of contention, perhaps, and one that I have most certainly written about before, and will be unable to prevent myself from writing about again, but there has been, and maybe there always will be, some confusion and division over where The Magnolia Electric Company falls within Molina’s canonical works.

From his murky, often lo-fi beginnings in the mid to late 1990s, up through 2002’s sweeping and sparse Didn’t it Rain?, Molina released music under the band name Songs: Ohia. His label had, and still does, promote Magnolia Electric as the “final” Songs: Ohia album, even down to the hype sticker placed on the cellophane the album was sealed in.

Molina himself would, at some point, go on to attest that Didn’t it Rain? was, in fact, the final Songs: Ohia release, and that Magnolia Electric was intended to be the self-titled debut of his new project—the band he would go on to release two additional studio albums with, as well as a live album, two EPs, and a sprawling boxed set containing three full-length albums all recorded from very different and specific sessions. 

And it is, perhaps, not an argument worth having at this point, or perhaps it is a detail of little, if any, importance for some listeners. I agree with Molina—mostly because I can hear, but more importantly, I can feel the end of something, and the beginning of another, in the way the two albums complement and contrast one another.

Didn’t it Rain? is a haunting, skeletal, gorgeous album—smoldering and deliberate in how it is paced, Molina’s lyricism throughout its seven songs depicts, among the other recurring imagery and metaphors from his songwriting, the isolation and bleakness of the midwest. 

It is an album that sounds like an intentional conclusion to something that had, perhaps, run its course—Molina was, famously, restless and mercurial, both as an artist or bandmate, and in his personal life. 

While its predecessor was primarily rooted firmly in moody, spectral folk and bluegrass-inspired arrangements, there is a very apparent and unapologetic country and western influence from the moment The Magnolia Electric Company opens—a steady, but slow kick drum and tap of the hi-hat cymbal set the rhythm, but it is the electrified twang of the opening guitar notes ringing out that truly set the tone for its audacious and iconic opening track, “Farewell Transmission,” and it’s that electrified twang that sets the stage for the seven songs that follow.

It is an album that sounds like an intentional beginning to something that could barely hold itself back from bursting at the seams. 

Magnolia Electric is not a perfect album—but neither was Didn’t it Rain?—but like Didn’t it Rain?, which was recorded live in the studio with little, if any, overdubs, Magnolia Electric is an album that captures a moment in time—its arrangements so layered and full of life that they often sound absolutely feral or unhinged in how all of the elements come tumbling together. 

You can, at least I can, anyway, hear the ramshackle nature within the songs—specifically, the more raucous they grow and the longer they sprawl out—which creates this sense of tension.

There is a feeling that the album might just, at any moment, buckle under the weight of its own inherently loose, but extremely ambitious, nature.

It never does.

*

And I find myself again, as I often do, especially under circumstances like this, thinking about time, and distance.

This most often occurs when I begin immersing myself in an album that is celebrating a milestone anniversary which I feel compelled to commemorate through a reflection such as the one you are reading right now—and more often than not, I am writing about an album I would have discovered, or eventually came around to appreciate, many years after it was initially released.

In these scenarios, I find myself recalling where I was, and importantly, who I was, when I first heard it, or when it first really resonated with me, but I also find myself thinking about where I was, and who I was when it was first issued—occasionally wondering if it would have been the kind of thing that, if I had known about it at that time, would I have been drawn to it.

Would I love it as much under those different circumstances.

Didn’t it Rain? and The Magnolia Electric Company were released a year apart—the former on March 5th, 2002, the latter on March 3rd, 2003. I can only presume that this was intentional on Molina’s part. The sessions for Magnolia Electric took place over the days leading up to the Fourth of July in 2002, recorded at the famed Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, with Steve Albini.

Albini, known for his work in the late 1980s and early 1990s with PJ Harvey and The Pixies, famously worked with Nirvana on their final studio album, In Utero, at Pachyderm Studios, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota—roughly an hour south of the Twin Cities, and a 15-minute drive from where I live. He would go on to record the additional Magnolia Electric albums with Molina—What Comes After The Blues and Josephine, as well as one of the discs included in the Sojourner boxed set.

Quite outspoken about the “industry” side to music, Albini refuses to be credited as a “producer” of an album—he is on earlier albums he had a hand in, but after a certain point, he wanted his byline to read “Recorded by,” because he has long believed that putting a producer in charge of a recording session often destroys the album.

His role as the recording engineer is to solve problems in capturing the sound of the musicians, and not threaten to take over control of the artistic process.

You can hear that kind of ethos in a lot of the work that he has recorded, and you can really hear it, and feel it, throughout The Magnolia Electric Company. Molina, even though he “fronted” or was the principal singer and songwriter in Songs: Ohia, was perhaps a reluctant bandleader as Songs transitioned into Magnolia Electric. 

The songs included here were demoed before he and the group headed into the studio—home-recorded, acoustic versions of all of them appear as a bonus disc and second vinyl LP on the 2013 reissue of Magnolia Electric—but he, if I remember this part of the mythology correctly, gave the members of the band little direction or guidance outside of perhaps keys to stay in when it came to how he wanted the songs to be played once the tape was rolling. 

And you can hear that kind of loose, freewheeling feeling the more time you spend with The Magnolia Electric Company—a group of players seemingly taking cues from one another while they tear through the songs, at times with a ferocity, at times with a tenderness, encouraging them to really develop and grow to their full potential, regardless of it that potential is concise, like three or four minutes, or if it sprawls out to nearly eight.

In July of 2002, as Jason Molina and his stable of musicians headed into the studio to record Magnolia Electric, I would have been on the cusp of turning 19—the summer between my first and second year in college, and by the time it was released the following March, I would have been well into the second semester of that second year. 

I think about where I was, in both instances, and who I was, at that time. I think about how I dressed, what my priorities were, who I was close friends with, and who I was in a romantic relationship with. 

I think about how if, in March of 2003, at a trip to the record store in Dubuque, Iowa—Moondog Music, the odor of patchouli would never truly come out of the packaging of things I purchased there—I would have picked up a copy of The Magnolia Electric Company on CD or even on LP, and looked at it, or heard it playing in the store, if I would have been drawn to it. 

I think about if, in the spring of 2003, I was an avid reader of a site like Pitchfork, or any other place that gave coverage to independent music, if I would have read a review of the album, and thought, “This is something I need to check out.”

Or, if I found it at the right time, nearly a decade later. 

Nearly a decade late.

*

There is a slight shift that occurs roughly around the halfway point of Didn’t it Rain?, where the tone, and pacing of the album begin to slow down—a deliberate shift that the album does find its way out of eventually when the instrumentation becomes noticeably less rootsy, or folksy, and the introduction of a steady drum kit that keeps extremely measured and restrained time, almost playing the silence like it is a part of the rhythm, along with a Blues-inspired, distended, electric guitar, take over for the second side of the record.

Before this transition, though, the album doesn’t so much lose momentum (it is an album that is not exactly boiling over with exuberance, to begin with), but when the first side creeps slower to its conclusion, the tunes become a little slower, and a little less compelling, especially when compared to just how strong its opening and closing moments are.

And I mostly mention this in relation to The Magnolia Electric Company because this album, too, finds itself with songs, also within the center of the record, that brings the pacing down, and are much less compelling to the blistering way it opens, and the juxtaposition of fury and tenderness it closes with.

And perhaps it is because as the first side of Magnolia Electric winds down, Molina temporarily steps away from his role as the band’s vocalist, and offers up two songs to featured performers, but these are the moments for me—and they always have been, really, even when I began listening to this record a decade ago with far less critical ears—that are the least successful. Maybe it’s the slower tempo of both “The Old Black Hen” and “Peoria Lunch Box Blues,” the latter of which is accurately described as a dirge, or maybe it is just that with even the country and western tinge that courses through the album, these two tracks just lean a little too heavily into it—“Black Hen” featuring a sleepy, rustic twang of singer Lawrence Peters, and “Peoria” steeped in a hazy dissonance from English singer and songwriter Emma “Scout” Niblett. 

*

Once, a few years back, I told a friend of mine that I felt like I was haunted by the ghost of Jason Molina, and often, I think about why the biography of Molina’s life and death aptly pulled its title from The Magnolia Electric Company’s second track, “Riding With The Ghost.”

There are two distinct feelings present as Magnolia Electric unfolds—an urgency or an immediacy, and a kind of pleading desperation. And there are moments where those feelings, or the kind of shadow they cast onto a song, converge, which is when the album creates its moments that are the most unforgettable.

And what I am understanding now, listening to The Magnolia Electric Company more analytically than I have in the past, is that there is a give and take in how Molina and his assemblage of musicians balance the tone of the album, especially once it truly gets underway with the second track, “Riding With The Ghost,” which I realized is probably one of the quickest, most urgent-sounding tunes Molina has written—a far cry from the murky reserve and rough, or low fidelity aesthetics found within Songs: Ohia albums like The Lioness and Ghost Tropic, or the grand, glistening, and folksy Didn’t it Rain?.

Here, there is a nervy sense of tension that propels the song forward at a breakneck pace.

Over just the strum of an electric guitar, Molina already can barely get the words out fast enough of “Riding”’s first verse—sung with a quiet, breathless kind of caustic pleading. “While you’ve been busy crying about my past mistakes, I’ve been busy trying to make a change,” he assures us as listeners, though I am uncertain who the off-stage “you” is within the song’s narrative. “And now I’ve made a change.”

The rest of the Magnolia Electric Company come slamming down with a twangy ferocity when Molina sings the titular phrase, tearing through the lyrics as quickly as the rhythm will allow him to, as he continues to wrestle with the aforementioned change he claims to have made. “I’ve been looking door-to-door to see if there was someone who’d hold me,” he confesses. “Never met a single one who didn’t see through me. None of them would love me it they thought they might lose me—unless I made a change.”

Molina’s frenetic narrative shifts, though, as “Riding” heads into its final two verses, with the song’s protagonist both running toward, as well as running away from something, perhaps torn over which direction to take as the lyrics become more desperate, with the band’s unrelenting playing tumbling around quickly underneath. “I ain’t gettin better—I’m only getting behind,” he confesses in the third verse; then, near the song’s conclusion, “I’m running out of things I didn’t even know I was losing.”

If “Riding With The Ghost” is one of the album’s explosive moments where a simmering sense of tension is released, “Just Be Simple,” Magnolia Electric’s third track, pulls that kind of energy inward and holds onto it tight. Within that restraint, Molina and the band effortlessly conjure something much more somber in nature—the song has a melancholic, swaying sensation to it, kind of gently swirling around you. Slower in tempo, the mournful twang from Mike Brenner’s lap steel guitar that punctuates the dejected and vague lyricism present in the song. 

A lot of songwriters could arguably be described, or seen, as storytellers if their writing is that good, or that vivid, and one could, perhaps, make the argument that Molina, at times, could be seen as a storyteller, though he is rarely direct in the story he wants to tell. Even when he is not steeping his lyricism in the recurring imagery of the moon, or of birds (things that regularly appear throughout his body of work), he can manage to turn a phrase with a poetic nature, yes, but there is still a long shadow of fragmented ambiguity covering it—a grey area between the literal and the metaphorical.

Molina, certainly as demonstrated on some of the songs within the latter half of Didn’t it Rain?, never tried to disguise his sorrow, and it’s something that he certainly wore on his sleeve the further along into his career he got, with the reliance on alcohol becoming heavier and heavier. And there are certainly bleak, or desolate depictions found on Magnolia Electric, but they are executed in such a way that they are never overbearing—often subtle, and just slightly dressed up over the snarl of the electrified country-rock that he leads the band into, or lets the kind of grand, sweeping, twangy nature of the songs’ feeling as a whole distract the listener from the conceit at its core.

“Just Be Simple” is one of those places, where Molina begins in a despondent, pensive voice, and quickly introduces a metaphor that takes a little effort on our part, as listeners, to unpack. “You’ll never hear me talk about, one day, getting out,” he begins, then resigning himself already in the next line. “Why put a new address on the same old loneliness? Everybody knows where that is.”

And there is an antagonist, a “he”—again, an off-stage but omnipresent character mentioned in “Just Be Simple,” and at the time when Magnolia Electric was released, we were in the internet age, sure, but there was not as much of a clamor from fans, or listeners, for artists to reveal the intent or meaning behind a song in an interview, or to annotate it on a site like Genius, so Molina’s use of metaphor here, “We built that house of his, and when he’s not home, someone else we know always is,” the “he” and the “house” are both open to interpretation in terms of how literal, or how figurative we may want them to be—the same can be said for a hint of duality that Molina mentions later on in the song. “How there’s really no difference in who he was once, and who he’s become,” he quietly sings against the still, very twangy backdrop. “I think he’s been letting me win, and I think he’s doing it again.”

The song ends with lines that have only grown harder to hear over the last decade, given both Molina’s death, learning more about his life, and my connection to his writing—“I ain’t looking for that easy way out. This whole life, it’s been about try, and try, and try…to be simple again.”

*

I had never really thought about it like this, before, until I sat down with The Magnolia Electric Company to listen with a more analytical ear, but there is something inherently unsettling—and I would go so far as to say even menacing, about the way Molina sings the line, “Almost no one makes it out.”

Something between a warning and a threat.

Still rooted in the electrified country and western style, there are moments on Magnolia Electric that take an almost sinister, and musically much heavier, turn, the first of which arrives at the end of the album’s first side.

"Almost Was Good Enough” smolders—and yes, there are slow and gradual burns across the album, but there’s a different feeling to this song. Perhaps it is because it just simply starts—there’s no intro, or build-up, but rather, all the elements just crashing down at once, quickly finding their way into a rhythm. Perhaps it is the low, eerie drone of the organ buried low within the way the instruments are layered. Perhaps it’s the snarl and clang of the electric guitars and how pointed their strums are. Or, perhaps it is because within this song, as he does elsewhere throughout the record, Molina seems to pontificate, almost, as opposed to singing with the kind of wounded or fragile quality his voice usually holds.

The hard and unwavering edge to “Almost Was Good Enough” doesn’t exactly distract the listener from the darkness of the lyrics, but in the torrent of guitar chords, Molina’s anguish and desperation are urgent, but not completely simmering up to the top. “It’s been hard doing anything,” he explains in the opening line. “Winter stuck around so long. I kept trying anyhow, and I’m still trying now. Just to keep working—I remember when it didn’t use to be so hard.”

This aesthetic returns on the album’s second side, as well as in a song that did not make the cut for the sequencing of Magnolia Electric proper, but is tacked on at the end of the album’s Japanese edition, as well as turning up on the bonus 10” record included in the 2013 reissue of the album.

“John Henry Split My Heart” is an enormous jolt arriving near the end of the album’s second half—really, a ferocious closing track if you look at the gorgeous and solemn final song as more of an epilogue to the album’s sequencing. Arriving after the two least successfully executed, or less interesting tunes at the top of this side, it shocks the album back to life, with truly thundering percussion from the band’s drummer Jeff Panall, and the snarling crunch of the electric guitars chugging along. Lyrically, outside of calling back to a key element from the first song on Magnolia Electric, with Molina howling the expression “Long, dark moon,” like a mantra in both instances, here his voice is practically drowned out by the cacophony of the band. 

Before reaching that point in the song, though, outside of the kind of desperate pleading Molina asks of the folk hero John Henry—“Split this heart—split this full moon heart,” he begs, he also makes a self-aware aside that, given what we know of Molina’s life in the decade that followed the release of this album, is both surprising and unsettling to hear. 

When asked, within the context of the song, what he’s going to do with a heart in two, Molina replies, “Half I’m going to use to pay this band; half I’m saying ‘cause I’m gonna owe them.”

And one can speculate, of course, as to why the sprawling, ominous “The Big Game is Every Night” was recorded during these sessions but ultimately cut from the final eight songs that wound up on the record—perhaps too sprawling (nearly 10 minutes in length, and a slow, plodding 10 minutes at that), or perhaps too ominous (there is an unnerving, tense shadow that looms over the entirety of the song that never lets you get too comfortable with it), but regardless, it is still an impressive, fascinating song to listen to within the context of the creation of the album.

Lyrically perhaps the most abstract and esoteric in Molina’s catalog, he loosely connects politicians and humorists, like Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson, with a handful of notable musicians from the past, like Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and George Jones, and puts them in a baseball game—then, later on, referencing football players from the 1950s, crafting a truly bizarre, but incredibly vivid slice of Americana. 

Unfolding like a stream of conscious, spoken word piece, while the music simmers, Molina foregoes, as he often did, the verse/chorus/verse structure of songwriting, though does return to repeated ideas, like the rising moon, or phrasing, like one more plea to someone—perhaps himself—to become better, or a changed version of himself: “Let it be me working on being a better me,” he asks throughout, though is ultimately uncertain that even if he is able to change, or better himself, it will be believed, musing as the song concludes, “If they look up here, do they just see my black tail swaying?,” he asks, pushing himself further into a stark metaphor. “If I’m all fangs, and all lies, and all poison—if I’m really what they’re saying, I don’t want to disappoint them.”

*

And I have, of course, written about this in the recent past—my experience with trying to articulate a specific, evocative image, and how it relates to a specific sound. Over a decade ago, I didn’t have the phrasing for it—just the image itself, clunky but hopefully vivid enough, but it was last year when I was finally able to piece it all together through the expression “the neon moon.”

And that is, of course, a direct reference to the popular country song from the early 1990s from the duo Brooks and Dunn—a swooning, mid-tempo ballad about the loneliness one might feel within the darkness of a honky tonk bar, the glow of the neon signs on the wall illuminating everyone around them. 

There are songs that lend themselves to this kind of image—something warm in sound, western-tinged, slow, and melancholic. The kind of song you can imagine a crowd of lonely people, all swaying to the music, hoping to make some kind of a connection, bathed in the lights of the neon moon above them.

And what I realized now, in sitting with The Magnolia Electric Company, is that its closing track—a gentle kind of epilogue to the highs and lows of the seven songs that came before it, has this kind of feeling, or evokes this kind of image. 

A final chance for a slow dance before the overhead lights come on, and everyone is sent out into the night, perhaps alone.

“Hold On Magnolia” is the longest song on the album, arriving at nearly eight minutes in length, but it, like the audacious opening track, “Farewell Transmission,” never feels that long, and never runs the risk of overstaying its welcome as it winds the record down.

There are not too many moments of objective beauty on Magnolia Electric—it, by design, is a lot rougher around the edges than its predecessor, but the sweeping, somber rises and falls in the arrangement of “Hold On Magnolia” are stunning, but even in this beauty, and even in the way Molina carries his voice on the song—it is where he sounds the most tender, with his voice having the most depth—there is still a darkness that is implied the further along into the song you get.

“Hold on, Magnolia,” he asks at the start of every verse (there is no chorus to be spoken of.). “I hear that station bell ring. You might be holding the last light I see before the dark finally gets a hold of me.” Then, a few lines later, he asks again, “Hold on, Magnolia, to the thunder and the rain. To the lightning that has just signed my name to the bottom line.”

*

And when I think about the song “Farewell Transmission,” the ambitious and rolling opening track from Magnolia Electric, there are, of course, a number of things that I must consider.

I consider the length of the song itself—nearly seven and a half minutes long, relentless from nearly beginning to end, and I think about how even at that length, “Farewell Transmission: moves at such a pace, and is ultimately so fascinating to hear, that it never feels like it is that long—whereas other songs on this album just might test the patience occasionally with their running times, this is not one of those moments.

I think about how absolutely ostentatious it is to open the album with a song that is seven minutes and change; similarly, how precocious it is to use the word “farewell” in the title of the first song on the album.

I think about how, over the last 25 to 30 years, the “best” track one/side ones that I could rattle off to make a list of my top five, and how this would, without a doubt, be on it—the tone it effortlessly sets with the hi-hat tap and thump of the bass drum, with the distended twang of the pedal steel pulling out the motif that the band circles around as the song unfurls itself.

The perfect opening line—again, setting a tone, and grabbing your attention. “The whole place is dark,” Molina barks, pontificating a majority of the song’s lyrics, rather than singing them.

The perfect conclusion—the band members layering their voices around the phrase “Long dark moon,” as the instrumentation winds itself down to just the drum kit, with Molina interjecting a quiet command in the spaces formed in between: “Listen.”

But is it a command? A demand? A plea? Is it a question?

Listen.

I think about how much weight, over the last decade, I have put into one of the lines from “Farewell Transmission”—“I will be gone, but not forever.”

Trying—both the word, and the very idea, or act of, appear throughout Molina’s songwriting. It wasn’t a detail that I noticed right away when I began listening to Jason Molina’s output in the autumn of 2012, but it was something that I would come to realize, and something that I would, then, regularly think about.

“The real truth about it is,” he explains. “We’re all supposed to try.”

Jason Molina, himself, tried.

He spent the latter half of his 30s in and out of treatment programs for alcoholism. He continued to try, but failed to find sobriety.

“I will try,” he assures us in “Farewell Transmission.” “Know whatever, I’ll try. I will be gone, but not forever.”

Listen.

*

Something that I really took notice of, or at least it resonated a lot deeper with me five years ago, when I was reflecting on Jason Molina’s death, was a line in the short, handwritten essay that appears on one of the LP sleeves for The Magnolia Electric Company. 

“I am mostly in these songs,” he wrote. “Saying things I already feel before it got so much darker.”

And maybe it isn’t that I had not noticed how he began this essay—maybe it did not register with me until now, but I was surprised by how blunt, and how true the sentiment of it is today, 20 years after it was scribbled out onto a piece of paper.

“This is not a good time, and everybody knows it.”

Jason Molina never made it to 40—I will be 40 in a matter of months. And it would have been a couple of years ago, in a book I was reading on an airplane, when I learned that the word “essay” formally means “an attempt.”

To try.

Trying—both the word, and the very idea, or act of, appear throughout Molina’s songwriting. It is something from his lyricism that I regularly return to when I think about his music, and Molina, himself, tried.

He continued to try but ultimately failed to find sobriety.

“I’ll try,” he howls in “Farewell Transmission.” “Know whatever—I’ll try. I will be gone, but not forever.”

Out of all of the poignant lyrics Molina penned, that, specifically, was the one that used to linger, or haunt me the most—especially right after his death, but there have been so many others that have come to mean so much more to me over the last ten years. 

Once, a few years back, I told a friend of mine that I felt like I was haunted by the ghost of Jason Molina. 

In thinking about Molina, the decade that has come and gone since his death, and the 20th anniversary of The Magnolia Electric Company, I am thinking about how songwriters who often find themselves synonymous with depression, or sadness, tend to push back against the idea of that being what defines them.

I think of this response in an interview with Elliott Smith, who famously downplayed his own mental health issues, where he says, “I don’t think I’m sadder than anyone else I know. I’m happy some of the time—and some of the time, I’m not.”

Molina, himself, per the depiction from Riding With The Ghost, slid into feeling isolated and depressed the more he relocated in the early 2000s—moving between Chicago, Bloomington, Indiana, and then Indianapolis. It was then that he, for perhaps lack of any other way to process how he was feeling, began drinking.

He never really stopped, then, did he.

Molina, famously temperamental with his audience the further he slid into alcoholism, often grew tired of his listeners talking about how depressing they thought his music was. Not speaking on his own behalf, though, he believed the music itself was apparently hopeful. 

I have found brief, beautiful, bright flashes of hope in his words, and his music, but they always fade so quickly.

Once, a few years back, I told a friend of mine that I felt like I was haunted by the ghost of Jason Molina.

Up until now, I had never truly thought about the way Didn’t it Rain? and The Magnolia Electric Company both contrast and complement one another. Musically and lyrically, Didn’t it Rain? is extraordinarily bleak in its depictions. It is sonically gorgeous at times, yes, and also sparse, playing with the silences that just seem to hang in the air a little longer than they should—and Molina’s lyricism is fraught with a midwestern, working-class tension that boils over into a meditation on a soul-numbing depression. 

The contrasting and complementary nature, though, is that a bulk of Molina’s writing here is still coming from a dark place—it is just perhaps less direct, or a little more spread out, or cloaked in the use of fragments or metaphors. It’s all there—just not right on the surface, and it really takes time to understand that. The dressing up of these songs in often frenetic, country-rock trappings isn’t a complete distraction from the conceit—no, not exactly, but it does dress the sentiment of these songs up just enough that the despair and sadness written into many of them—in some cases, even just a fleeting or passing line or two—is not the very first thing you notice.

*

Before the reissued tenth anniversary edition of The Magnolia Electric Company was available at the end of 2013—still debatable on if this was already in the works before Molina’s death or if this was his label’s decision to profit off of the renewed interest in his catalog because of his passing, a lot of the Jason Molina catalog was either out of print or difficult to come by.

Sometime in the space between 2012 turning into 2013, I had bought a used CD copy of Magnolia Electric, and I can remember the way the first notes of “Farewell Transmission” sounded coming through the speakers in our old, frigid car as my wife and I drove down Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis. 

There is something absolutely thrilling, or electrifying about the way the opening melody of the song rings out—an excitement that I have still felt every time I have listened over the last ten years, even though that excitement, eventually, as the song continues to unfold, is replaced with a sense of sadness.

A phrase that I often use to describe an album is the work in question is a “statement of beauty.” I hesitate, slightly, to describe The Magnolia Electric Company as that because it is so rough around the edges and seemingly volatile at times—perhaps it is a rough, or unpolished beauty, as opposed to the objective and quiet beauty of its predecessor. 

Of all the albums Molina and his eventual revolving door of players churned out under the Magnolia Electric Company moniker between 2003 and 2009, this is—even with its loosely constructed nature in the studio—the most focused in scope, and the one that offers the most up to the listener in terms of an emotional return. In these songs, Molina’s heart is not unabashedly on his sleeve the way it had been on previous outings—either sentimental or melancholic—but the heart is there, waiting to be heard, growing louder and understood more with each year that passes and each closer listen.

There is a beautiful ferocity to this album that has not diminished over the two decades since it was initially released. 

It can be easy—perhaps too easy, and perhaps it is ill-advised to do, but it can and often is entirely too easy to read into the lyrics from artists, specifically individuals who were troubled, or lived turbulent and ultimately short lives, after they have passed and want to believe that they knew their time was short.

Is it a stretch to listen to Nick Drake or Jeff Buckley and hear things that could, and perhaps were, veiled and prophetic references to their own deaths?

And I find myself again, as I often do, especially under circumstances like this, thinking about time, and distance.

This most often occurs when I have immersed myself in an artist, and their album that is celebrating a milestone anniversary which I feel compelled to commemorate through a reflection like the one you have been reading. 

More often than not, I am writing about an album I would have discovered, or eventually came around to appreciate, many years after it was initially released. 

In these scenarios, I recall where I was, but more importantly, who I was, when I first heard the album, or when it really resonated with me, but in doing that, I find myself considering where I was and who I was when it was first released, and I wonder if it would have been the kind of thing that, if I had been aware of it at the time, would I have been drawn to it?

Would I love it that much under different circumstances.

I wonder if, upon the release of The Magnolia Electric Company in March of 2003, if Jason Molina knew he had exactly a decade left, and that a bulk of the decade would be spent trying—the word, and idea, he so often wrote about—trying and ultimately being unable to remain sober and stay healthy.

Jason Molina never made it to 40. 

There was a mythology around Molina that I was well aware of—his at one-time prolific output, his sudden disappearance from recording and performing, and the sparse details about his health and whereabouts—when I slowly began wading out into his canon in the fall of 2012. I, however, did not expect that within a few months, I would be sitting on the floor of my living room in disbelief at reading the news of his passing, struggling to find the words to articulate what his music had come to mean to me in a short amount of time.

I wonder if, after writing my first reflection on Jason Molina, five days after his death, and posting it online to the fledgling music blog I had launched two months prior, I knew how many times I would end up writing about him, or his death, or the impact his music continued to have on me in years that followed.

I wonder if I knew then that I would be haunted.

There are moments when I am extremely surprised that I have been able, at times against my better judgment, kept writing this last decade. 

There are moments when I am extremely surprised that I will be 40 in a matter of months. Not simply because of how time passes, but because this is not a good time, and everyone knows it.

Perhaps more than any of his actual songwriting, something I think about a lot is the way Molina wrote, in the liner notes for Magnolia Electric, “I am mostly in these songs, saying things I already feel before it got so much darker.”

It does always get so much darker.

I am trying. We all are, I think. I hope, anyway. As much as and as best as we are able.

Jason Molina said, either as an assurance, or even perhaps a warning to someone, that he would be gone, but not forever. 

He was right.

Listen.