I Want To Be True - Jason Molina's Pyramid Electric Company at 20

And this is a story that I have told before—many times, honestly. There is a good chance that, in all of the times over the last decade, when I have written about Jason Molina, that I have at least mentioned this instance, if not gone into further detail about it. Because it is still something I think about now, some 12 years later. 

It is still a moment that I regularly return to, for better or for worse.

But this is a story that I have told before, and if you have heard it before, or at least heard parts of it before, then I understand completely if you do not wish to hear it again. 

I don’t fault you at all for, perhaps, skimming this introductory portion of what, I presume, will be something rather long and ultimately quite personal, and skipping ahead to where I, eventually, will begin talking about something else.

And the story that I have told before is about the moment when I just fell apart in the parking lot of a Caribou Coffee. The driver’s seat of my old car. Cold. October. The sky is gray. It’s raining—not a torrential downpour, but something more than a drizzle. The sound of the raindrops hitting the roof of the car. The windshield. The wet, squeaking sound of the windshield wiper blades stretching themselves across the span of the glass. The dull roar of the engine idling. 

The sound, coming from the stereo, of Jason Molina’s voice—fragile, spectral, singing on top of a mournful progression of piano chords, in the song “Red Comet Dust,” the second song out of seven, from one of two albums he released, under his own name, during his lifetime, Pyramid Electric Company, from 2004—less than a calendar year after the release of The Magnolia Electric Company.

Molina was prolific—certainly in the years before his declining health and well-being and even during his slow, difficult-to-watch descent. He was prolific until he was simply unable to be. 

This was five months before Molina died in March of 2013—his organs failing after roughly a decade of unprecedented alcohol abuse, and failed attempts at sobriety and recovery.

And this is a story that I have told before, and for as often as I think about this moment, the thing is, is that I cannot remember if I fell apart in the Caribou Coffee parking lot before I got out of the car to get my coffee, or once I got back in. I just remember the rain. The cold. The month of the year. The color of the sky. And the sound of Molina’s voice echoing through the car, singing the opening lines to the song.

The endless blue shadow inside you

The rain. The cold. October. Gray sky. The dull sound of the rain hitting the roof of the car. The endless blue shadow that I was just simply unable to outrun, no matter how hard I tried, or had been trying, for, at that point, the last year and a half. 

I sat in the car and cried—long, terrible, ugly sobs where you cannot help but close your eyes and tighten up every muscle in your face as you release.

The endless blue shadow inside you.

I want to be true…like the solid earth.

I think about this moment a lot, actually. Sometimes, when I am pulling into the parking lot of the Caribou Coffee. I think about the parking space, near the door, where I sat and cried and did not care at all who, if anyone, saw me, just absolutely losing my shit. 

I think about this moment a lot, actually. Certainly it is one that comes to mind when I think about Jason Molina, and his music, and the way that his ghost is still, to some extent, haunting me and will, probably, always be haunting me. 

The endless blue shadow inside.

I think about this moment when I pull the Pyramid Electric Company record off of the shelf—the bright yellow sleeve with large black and white letters across the top, spelling the name of the album. I think about it when the record gets to the second track, and I hear the cavernous, melancholic sounds of the piano ringing out. 

The cold. The rain. The gray. My grief. The grief that was actually killing me.

The endless blue shadow. 

*

And there is, like, certainly a specific lore, or mythology, around the life and death of Jason Molina—his prolificacy, yes, but also his mercurial and difficult nature. His oddball and often misunderstood sense of humor. His troubling treatment of women. It is difficult to know how much of it, if any, was a persona—an act. A caricature.

And how much of it, if any, was the person. Or where the line of distinction between the two blurred.

And there is, like, certainly a specific lore, or mythology, surrounding the back-to-back “important,” or acclaimed albums he released—Didn’t it Rain?, in the spring of 2002, allegedly and arguably the final album he recorded under the Songs: Ohia moniker, before retiring it, then reemerging less than a year later with, and though this element is debated¹, the self-titled debut of a new project, The Magnolia Electric Company. 

And there is, like, certainly a specific lore, or mythology, surrounding the latter years of his continued prolificacy, yes, but also of his decline—stumbling further and deeper into debilitating alcoholism. And then, his disappearance from the public eye for four years. The sporadic and intentionally ambiguous updates about him, and his health. 

The condition he was in and out of treatment center for was only implied. Never specified. 

The end. “Cashed out on a Saturday night in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in his pocket.”² 

In the last update that Molina had offered about his health, in May of 2012, he said, “I have not given up, because you, my friends, have not given up on me.”

He died less than a year later.

I think about this a lot, actually. His death, yes. Of course. But also those words. 

The gentleness and sincerity with which you wish to read those words, or hear them spoken.

And I mean, they are deceitful, in a way. Not done maliciously, I don’t think. Or, rather, I do not wish to think that. Perhaps written in a moment when things were better. And there was, within that moment, truth within them.

He had not given up. Not yet.

But there is, of course, the truth. And the endless blue shadow. 

And perhaps it is, because, I have a dark, yet personal, attachment to Pyramid Electric Company, but, I don’t view it as one of the more minor works within Molina’s canon, regardless of what name he was recording under. Though, I think that I might be in the minority—within the prolificacy, it was, during the 2000s, maybe easy for things to get lost, or to be eclipsed by more beloved or revered works.

Pyramid Electric Company is now two decades old—originally arriving in January of 2004, and for as much as has been written about them and for as often as both Didn’t It Rain?, and Magnolia Electric have been lauded and mythologized over the last two decades—certainly within the last ten years, since Molina’s death—there is something mysterious, or at the very least, rather unknown about Pyramid Electric Company. 

The record itself, allegedly recorded in 2001, per its Wikipedia entry, was initially mentioned in the liner notes to Magnolia Electric—first under the handwritten personnel credits, simply as “Pyramid Elec. Co,” with a faint line connecting the space between it and where Molina has also written “Magnolia Elec. Co.”

It’s mentioned again, in a little more detail, within the handwritten message from Molina on the record sleeve. “…I started to feel like two records were going to come out of what I was seeing and thinking. The two have ended up being one I did alone with a piano and a guitar. The Pyramid Electric Co. And one where I called some friends together! The Magnolia Electric Co. I think they mean something. I don’t know what, but trust me. I am working on it.”

Trust me.

I am working on it.

*

The thing about Pyramid Electric Company is that it does, in a sense, begin without a warning. 

It’s startling—it still is very startling for me, though I know that I should be anticipating the first, chaotic notes of the overblown, distorted electric guitar, and often, I find I am bracing myself for its impact and its dissonance, and the way it all just hangs heavily, churning and writhing around in a spiral of tension and release, while Molina, for all of 80 seconds, plays with the tonality of the guitar—how loud and cacophonic certain notes are, or how rich, low, and deeply resonant others are, before delivering the opening line, in his fragile voice.

The opening and titular track, also its longest (nearly nine minutes) and perhaps most self-indulgent and ominous sounding, doesn’t exactly set a tone for the six songs that’ll follow, but it does certainly set a tone. It’s stark. And, perhaps, bleaker in the overall feeling it conjures, than anything Molina had recorded up to that point.

It does give the impression, and you’re not wrong for thinking this, and in some ways, it is correct, that Pyramid Electric Company is going to be a dark album. Though nothing is just flat-out oppressive and unnerving, sonically, as this opening track.

Molina, even in life, certainly did “spectral” or “ghostly” well within his songs—even when it was more than just him, like the rootsy elements to Didn’t It Rain?, or the robust, electrified twang of Magnolia Electric—there was something otherworldly about the way he conducted himself within the arrangement. 

And with Pyramid Electric being his first solo outing—he is the only performer listed within the album’s credits, so from beginning to end, regardless of if it is the sharp, blown-out echoes from his guitar on “Pyramid Electric Company,” or the warm, mournful, glacially placed piano chords of “Red Comet Dust,” or when he favors the acoustic guitar within the album’s latter portion, the album itself is meticulous in just how raw, and in the moment it sounds, in terms of its production, really capturing the honest, ghostly essence of Jason Molina.

And I honestly cannot take credit for this³, because it is something that I have borrowed, but a number of years ago, I read a description of Emma Ruth Rundle’s music that accurately and subtly surmised that everything she sang “sounded like a warning.” I think about this a lot, actually, and the idea of a “warning,” or some kind of foreboding pontification was not something that I had, actually, considered when it came to Jason Molina—specifically the way he delivers his lyricism, until I found myself immersed in writing about both the 20th anniversary of Didn’t it Rain? in 2022, and, the following spring, the decade that had passed since his death, coupling with the 20th anniversary of the Magnolia Electric Company album. 

There are moments, specifically on the latter, where he has a kind of preacher’s conviction, and almost a preacher’s fury. The intensity is there, but it is cloaked by the midwestern twang of Molina’s upbringing and where he spent a bulk of his short, adult life—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

That kind of unnerving, wiry, conviction comes through, and really does surge throughout “Pyramid Electric”—structurally, it is incredibly, and intentionally loose. The kind of free-flowing nature of it that gives it the feeling like it was improvised, or that there was little, if any direction, while Molina strummed and plucked away, however—with the amount of control he is showing, in how the tone bends and shifts, and the intensity and dissonance waxes and wanes, often used as a means of punctuating his ambiguous, skeletal writing, there is clearly some foresight into what he is doing, and where he intends on taking the song. 

Molina’s singing, or how he chose to often sing, relied on an often folksy kind of talk/singing—carrying the notes as he could, or as he was willing, which is how he delivers the fragmented, dreamlike imagery of “Pyramid Electric”—it is held, extended, tumbles, and then falls into the places where it is supposed to. “When the great pyramids dragged themselves out to this spot,” he muses in the opening line, which he bent and pulled across the rumble of low guitar string reverberations. “A sickness sank into the little one’s heart. Mama said, ‘Son, that’s just the cold. That’s just the emptiness. It’s being alone in the dark. You’ll get used to it.’”

And in its looseness, “Pyramid” also foregoes a traditional verse/chorus/verse structure in its lyrics—with Molina’s words, with nothing guiding them back to a chorus, or something central, and no real clear melody, become much bleaker, and more shadowy, the further along he gets in the song. “You’ll have friends who won’t come home,” he barks at the beginning of what is more or less the second verse of the song. “You’ll see their bones not separate yet from death,” he continues, before resigning himself to one of the more haunting lines within these fragments.

“You’ll get used to it. We all get used to it.”

What the “it,” is, exactly, though, Molina never elaborates, which does leave a kind of impending sense of uncertainty, and dread, that courses through the rest of the song.

Molina, as an artist, during his truly brief but extraordinarily prolific career, was not one to really dabble into experimentalism within his music—there are flashes of it, certainly, most notably on The Lioness, and Ghost Tropic, but overall, he stayed relatively close, in terms of textures and arrangements, to what could be referred to as more traditional instrumentation.

Pyramid Electric was produced by Mike Mogis, with whom he had previously collaborated with on Ghost Tropic, and while Pyramid, as a whole, is rather earnest, lo-fi, and inherently “folk” or acoustic album, just in what instruments are used and just how skeletal all the songs are, there is a place where, within the opening track, Molina and Mogis do become surprisingly daring in their experimentalism.

“Pyramid Electric” is, like, nearly nine minutes in length, and well after the six-minute mark, the quivering, rich tones of Molina’s electric guitar continue to skitter through the atmosphere, but underneath, quietly at first and then growing just a little bit louder (but still intentionally distant within the mix) is an epilogue, of sorts, for the song—arriving like another song altogether. 

Strummed chaotically on an acoustic guitar, with Molina howling—not even directly into a microphone, but just like his voice blending in and fighting for its place alongside the guitar, yelling, “See the bloody arrow above us. See the blood that underlines it. Dark repetition.”

*

The idea of a full-length album, to Jason Molina, doesn’t necessarily mean the number of songs on it breaks into double digits—Magnolia Electric included eight songs, and, like Pyramid Electric, Didn’t it Rain? also features seven. But, even with such a lean amount of material housed within the album, the songs themselves are often sprawling in length. That isn’t exactly the case here. Yes, the title track runs very, very long, as does two songs on the album’s second side, but I guess what I am getting at, here, is that even within seven songs, Molina covers a lot of ground in terms of tone, or aesthetic, which is extremely impressive. 

Pyramid Electric, the further along it pulls you, continues to shift, and honestly, within the final three songs, really turns into a much more insular, and hushed album than one might be led to believe it would be, based on the dark cloud that hangs heavy within the opening track.

The album’s second track, “Red Comet Dust,” is really the beginning of that much more inward turn, though the progression of notes that Molina carefully plunks out on the piano keys does have a bit of an unnerving, if not somber feeling to them—but the further turn, and far less foreboding and much more insular and isolating, begins at the end of the album’s first side, with the quivering, swaying “Division Street Girl.”

Both it, and the song that opens up the album’s second half, “Honey, Watch Your Ass,” are structured around Molina’s work on the electric guitar. Far less imposing and dissonant than it is in the notes he pounded out of the strings on the title track, in both cases here, the noise is dialed back, and his work on the guitar is very delicate and more or less clean sounding in tone—recorded in such a way that the microphones in the room picked up the hiss coming from his amplified. 

“Division Street Girl” is inherently the much more interesting of the two, in terms of its narrative, or at least how Molina delivers the narrative, letting his gentle voice coast along the strums of the guitar, sometimes singing, delicately, other times, speaking his lyrics with that very homespun, Midwestern twang coming through in his voice.

And, I mean, there was certainly a feeling of sadness that courses through the first two songs on Pyramid Electric—and if we are being honest, there is certainly a kind of sadness that really runs throughout the entirety of the album, but the sadness is something that is much more on the surface within “Division Street Girl.” 

Molina describes the titular girl as being “painted up,” and then, just a line later, draws a comparison to her eyes by using the description of the tropical flower, the Bird of Paradise; then, in a sharp contrast, utters, “Bird of paradise dying eyes.” 

There is a strong implication that the “Division Street Girl” that is detailed within the song is a sex worker—mainly from the lines that follow. “I could sight read those slangy lips,” he drawls, with a little sorrow and a little lust in his voice. “I could sightread those hips. And anyway, out loud, she says, ‘Hey sucker—are you lonely?’”

The answer, never truly stated, though very apparent from the moments leading up to it, and everything that follows, is yes.

Nearly two years ago, when I was writing about Angel Olsen’s most recent album, Big Time—an album steeped heavily in an older style of what I often refer to as “country and western” music, I figured out a descriptor that had, for well over a decade, been ultimately evading me. I had, of course, wished that I had figured it out much, much earlier—certainly earlier on in writing about music, but regardless, I have been grateful never the less that I did find a way to articulate a very specific image, or visual, that is often conjured by a very specific feeling within a song.

It is the idea of the “neon moon.”

It is the image, or the idea, of a very dark, perhaps sparsely populated barroom floor—a honky tonk, almost always, with a band playing something slow, beautiful, and sad from the stage, and those on the dance floor—those brave enough to venture out into the darkness, are all just trying to make some kind of fleeting connection before the night is over, and last call is announced. 

The loneliness within the room, and all of the silhouettes bathed in the glow of the neon signs on the wall, or behind the bar—the “neon moon,” if you will.

Molina had, and would continue, to perform within a style or aesthetic that I read recently described as more or less an impression of the Neil Young-fronted outfit Crazy Horse—there is a twang, yes, but there is also an electric, unpredictable, and ramshackle nature to the music he continued to release with the band the Magnolia Electric Company. Here, though, on Pyramid Electric, there are two songs that sound like they would not sound out of place within the context of the idea of the “neon moon.”

“Division Street Girl” is one of those songs, mostly because of the terrible loneliness Molina manages to conjure with just the strums of the electric guitar, and the delicacy of his voice, as well as the narrative he continues to slowly craft while the song itself is unfolding around him.

“You don’t have to say anything,” the exchange between the titular girl, and Molina’s protagonist, continues. “I can always tell when you lost something big—something real big. Well, we all did.”

And it is the next few lines that do, really, bring to mind, literally and figuratively, the idea of this “neon moon.” “A jukebox in an empty room conjures up the blues,” Molina sings, before returning to his quietly, coyly delivered speak/singing—“They got my song it—wanna dance?”

Similar in tone, and in pacing, is the song that immediately follows, and begins the second side of Pyramid Electric, “Honey, Watch Your Ass.” Lyrically, “Honey” is slightly less compelling in terms of its narrative—it is a story song, and it, like a bulk of Molina’s storytelling on Pyramid Electric, does happen at a glacial pace, and some of the lines within the narrative have, truthfully, always been a little troubling to me. The title phrase, when delivered near the end, arrives sounding a little like a threat, and a little like a warning; the way he also lets his drawl hang, with a slight amount of menace and sneer, on the line, “I’m finally showing her the switch—how I learned to hold it in my teeth.”

But, regardless of the success, or lack thereof, in the narrative to “Honey,” where it does work is in Molina’s guitar playing—specifically the melody he casually, yet meticulously strums out. There is just a small, quick little riff that gets played out on the instrument’s higher strings before he brings his fingers back down onto the more resonant, lower notes. There’s both this effortlessness to how it sounds as it is happening, but it also seems like the kind of thing that does, in fact, require a little dexterity. 

It creates something both beautiful and haunting—a kind of melancholy that lasts well after he’s played the final notes of the song.

*

In going back, and revisiting, and both critically thinking as well as exploring whatever personal attachment I have to an album, it’s the amount of time and effort that is ultimately dedicated to something like this, one would thing I would take the time, and put in that effort, if it was about an album I saw a “perfect,” or “flawless.”

That is rarely the case. Even my favorite albums, by my favorite artists, are flawed. Molina, himself, as an individual—the balance between the person and the persona, was extremely flawed, even before his descent into alcoholism and isolation.

The music he made at a breakneck pace, throughout his active years, is also far from perfect.

There are moments on both Magnolia Electric and Didn’t it Rain?, that I do not, like, strongly dislike, but that I find to be less successfully executed and far less interesting to listen to than other portions of those record. And the same can be said for two songs within the second half of Pyramid Electric Company—both “Song of The Road,” and “Spectral Alphabet”—the two briefest songs within this set, are fine, sure, but within such a short album, they do ultimately become far less interesting when compared to the songs found within the first half, as well as the stunning and stark closing track, “Long Desert Train.”

Sonically, “Song of The Road” and “Spectral Alphabet” are important because, within the album’s slow slide to a further inward sound, they are songs that both feature the acoustic guitar, taking Molina’s sparse sound to a place that is, if you can believe it, even more skeletal in how it hangs in the atmosphere.

But skeletal, or sparse, doesn’t always make for a song that is compelling, or stays with you, for better or for worse, after the album’s stopped rotating on the turntable. 

“Long Desert Train,” much like “Honey, Watch Your Ass,” is based around a kind of gentle yet meticulous guitar playing—this time, on a rich and resonant acoustic guitar. And as he places his fingers on the neck of the guitar, down on the strings, and carefully crafts the chords, there is a terrible, beautiful sense of sadness, and loneliness that comes through immediately—and, not so much a sense of menace, or something ominous, but there is something dark that is just at the edge, casting a shadow that grows longer the further we walk out into the song.

The timeline of Molina’s abuse of alcohol is tough to follow—in the biography about his life, and death, Riding With The Ghost, it implies that Molina rarely drank, if at all, before 2003 or 2004; others who knew him, or were around him in the early 2000s, claim that he was a “problem drinker” before things had slid into the stage of a “drinking problem,” and that he had always had a complicated relationship with alcohol.

With the songs on Pyramid Electric Company having been recorded a number of years prior, it is tough to know how complicated, in 2001, his relationship was—and you do wish to believe, or maybe it is simply just easier to read into, “Long Desert Train” being, at least in part, about his substance use disorder. 

But there is a terrible desolation, and sorrow, that he captures within this stark meditation that is also very obviously about the depression that he, I get the feeling, downplayed often in terms of its severity, which also, like the dark edge and shadow that is cast in the chord progression and how the guitar rings out here, could often appear on the outskirts of the worlds he created within his lyrics.

Lyrically, “Long Desert Train” is the album’s most personal (probably) but also the bleakest in terms of what it’s depicting, and the kind of near stoicism that Molina delivers this narrative with, and it is written through a kind of reflection off of another, if that makes sense—he is, presumably, writing from the perspective of someone who is, presumably, addressing him.

“You used to love a lot of things,” he begins, his voice quiet, and fragile. “You used to love talking. This—you never told me about,” he continues. “If it’s what your eyes were saying, I already figured it out.”

The portrait being painted, then, growing much, much darker, and more serious. “I could just tell it was bad,” Molina sings. “I couldn’t tell just how bad. You never took off your shades, and you stayed like that for days. I guess your pain never weakened.”

And there are things throughout Molina’s songwriting—specifically during this time period, when Songs: Ohia came to an end and the Magnolia Electric Company began, that reoccur. There are images, or ideas that he regularly referenced, like the moon, and birds, certainly, but there are also just phrases, or words, or specific emotions, that he regularly returned to. The notion of “trying” is, perhaps, the one that is most noticeable and becomes much more desperate in the way it is used the further into his canonical works you go, towards the end of his active years.

“Long Desert Train” does, and it cannot be coincidental, use two concepts that he does also ruminate on within the songs on the Magnolia Electric album—changing and “making it.”

“But there are things you can’t change,” Molina continues, leading us up to where the song makes a subtle but impactful shift in direction. “There are things you can’t change. You called that the curse of a human’s life—that you couldn’t change.” That line, itself, serving as a dark mirror of sorts to Molina’s yelped plea from Magnolia Electric’s “Riding With The Ghost”—that he has been trying to “make a change.”

There is a loose thread of a melody, or structure, that Molina uses within this first part of the song—the words, not so much delivered casually, do arrive on their own time, and own terms, with many of them being spoken quietly, or stretched out and held over the rhythm of the guitar, until he gets to the next line. The shift, or rather, kind of tightening of the song’s structure, comes both unexpectedly, though Molina makes it all feel very natural.

“You said you’d never be old enough, or young enough,” Molina gently says, his drawl pulling the word “enough” so that it extends into the breath he takes before delivering the next line. “Tall enough, or thin enough, or smart enough, or brave enough.”

And I am remiss to say that Molina grows more manic, or desperate sounding, the further he gets into this list, but there is a growing intensity, albeit a restrained one, that you can hear in his voice. “Rich enough. Pretty enough. Strong enough. Good enough—well, you were to us. You wanted silence by itself. Just the word. You wanted peace by itself. Just to learn.”

The ending of the song, then, comes not as an acceptance or an understanding, but of perhaps a reluctant consolation. “There were things you couldn’t change,” Monlina observes, before delivering the final two lines which, similar to the recurring theme of “change,” seem to reference “Almost Was Good Enough,” also from Magnolia Electric.

“You almost made it. You almost made it again.”

*

The endless blue shadow inside you.

People worry about me. Or, at the very least, are often concerned. And rightfully so, I suppose. My mental health, overall, for a number of years now, has been poor at best, and I have been as open as I can be, for as uncomfortable or difficult as it both can be for someone to hear, and for me to try and articulate, about chronic passive suicidal ideation.

And this is the third consecutive year that I have found myself, at the beginning of the year, writing about Jason Molina, and the 20th anniversary of one of his records. Writing about Didn’t it Rain? wasn’t easy—at the beginning of 2022, I was in a relatively low place personally, and had thrown myself into writing about the album shortly after I had completed writing something else extremely difficult, and emotionally draining—the 50th anniversary of Pink Moon, and the life and death of Nick Drake.

Writing about the Magnolia Electric Company album was easier, comparatively, last year, but in reflecting on a decade since Jason Molina’s death, the thing I kept coming back to was that he didn’t make it to 40—he was 39 when he died. 

Somehow, and I am often uncertain how, exactly, I made it to 40.

It looks like I will make it to 41. 

People worry about me. Or, at the very least, are often concerned. And rightfully so, I suppose.

Writing about Pyramid Electric Company has neither been any harder, nor any easier than I was anticipating. It is an album that, in truth, for as important as it was during a specific moment in my life, and representative of a certain time, it is an album that I do not find myself returning to as often as I do with other albums within Molina’s canon—and maybe it is because it does take me back to that moment, in October of 2012. In the rain. In the car. In the parking lot of a Caribou Coffee. 

The grief that I was simply not able to stay ahead of. The crying. The sound of Jason Molina’s delicate voice reverberating through my old car as it sat idling, the rain hitting the roof in erratic, dull thuds.

The endless blue shadow.

People worry about me. Or, at the very least, are often concerned. And rightfully so, I suppose.

I have misgivings, of course, about David Foster Wallace, at this point. Specifically, his abusive nature toward women early in his literary career. It’s difficult, now, to reconcile that. Regardless, his work—pretentious, yes, certainly, but his blistering, difficult, sprawling essays and fiction did, and still do, influence me.

Wallace died by suicide in September of 2008. His final days, as detailed in the biography written about him over a decade ago, are bleak.

My, one time, favorite author; and musicians that I, for lack of a better descriptor, “admire,” or at least find myself drawn to, and see reflections of myself within their writing—all depressed. All deceased.

Nick Drake. Elliott Smith. 

Jason Molina. 

The endless blue shadow inside you.

I want to be true. Like the solid earth.

I have misgivings, of course, about Jason Molina, at this point. His mercurial temperament towards bandmates and friends. His behavior towards women. It is difficult, no, to reconcile that. Regardless, his work is something that I continue to find myself returning to and maybe it is because his ghost is still, to some extent, haunting me, and always will be.

People worry about me. Or, at the very least, are often concerned. And rightfully so, I suppose.

The problem drinking. 

The weight loss.

The confessions of moments when I am simply unable to stop crying and the stark realization that something is really wrong with me.

The endless blue shadow.

*

And this is a story that I’ve told before. Certainly. Certainly, the first time I wrote about Jason Molina, all of two months into writing about music—a reflection on his passing, because I had, just five or six months prior to that, started listening to his music and slowly immersing myself in his discography.

I had a friend in college who was a few years younger than I was. There was overlap in our musical taste, sure, but he was the youngest of his family, and had an older brother who had discovered Pitchfork much earlier than I did, and was much more aware of what was happening in independent music than I could have hoped to be in the fall of 2004.

He was really into Jason Molina, and for about two years, I think tried (but not very hard) to point me in the direction of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company. And I remember he told me a story about Molina. And this a story that I have told before. About how, in more or less back-to-back shows in Iowa—the first in Dubuque, the second in Iowa City, he ended both performances much earlier than expected. The former because he seemed entirely too sad to continue to perform; the latter because he had become confrontational with the audience, and deemed that they were, apparently, not deceiving of his music that night.

In a time before Pitchfork took itself entirely too seriously, and the album reviews were often biting, or smirking, or written without any real objectivity—the way that they are now, more or less—William Bowers wrote a piece about Pyramid Electric Company. The score, a 6.9 out of 10—not great, not terrible, but the review itself focuses more Molina’s penchant for sadness and pretentiousness in how he and the record respectively present themselves, and his mercurial temperament towards his audience.

It opens with a quote from Molina, addressing his audience, at a show in Athens, Georgia, two years before the release of Pyramid Electric—“If I wanted to play to fucking assholes, I would have played in New York City.” He continued to heckle the crowd that he deemed, like he would so many other audiences, it seems, undeserving of his performance. “Why did you ask me to come here?,” he is quoted as saying. Or, “I’m not doing anything until you shut up.”

Bowers, in his review of the album, refers to Molina’s “hero and guitar” material, like what you hear on Pyramid Electric, as self-directed and standoffish; the songs keep their distance from the listener and keeping the album is living, saving some shed space for a “cool-looking but dead lawnmower.”

“If you get ‘get’ it,” Bowers closes with a sneer and a punchline. “Congratulations. You’re impenetrable.”

Tiny Mix Tapes, in an uncredited review, stated it is an album that becomes painful for the listener, and that it is “so self-centered, such as old album, that if almost feels intrusive to listen.”

I mean, to an extent, I agree. It is a difficult record. That isn’t to say that Didn’t it Rain? or Magnolia Electric Company are any easier, but in some regard, they really are. This is much more inaccessible, which is funny, I guess, or strange, or fitting, maybe, that this was my access point. The skeletal nature. The sorrow. The long blue shadow. The first Molina adjacent album that I purchased. 

It is a difficult record. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moment of harrowing beauty or poignancy within.

The endless blue shadow inside you.

I want to be true, like the solid earth.

As moody and dark as the piano chords of “Red Comet Dust” are, from the moment you first hear them, they do almost come as a reprieve following the lengthy, dissonant, and unnerving titular track. The notes from the cavernous piano ringing out, with Molina’s fragile voice drifting in quietly over the top, holding the notes and stretching the words out, so that they fall right where they need to within the melody he’s playing.

“The endless blue shadow inside you,” Molina sings. The first line. “Gathered in you. Disappeared in you,” he continues, before arriving at the line that he does ultimately repeat throughout, though it, like all of the songs on Pyramid Electric, there is no real defined chorus or traditional structure followed. “Into the solid earth….I want to be true, like the solid earth.”

“The constant old witness to accept what I see in it,” he explains later. “What I think I see, looking out at me, from the primal dust.”

Lyrically, “Red Comet Dust” unfolds as so many of Molina’s songs do, with a very shadowy, poetic ambiguity. And out of all the Molina songs that I have come to form an attachment to, or see reflections of myself in—unflattering or otherwise—in the last decade-plus (“Blue Chicago Moon” comes to mind immediately), it does seem strange or at least difficult, for me to have made such a connection, or see so much of myself, at least in part, in these words.

But that is the thing, isn’t it. About pop music. And interpretation. There is, of course, the artist’s intention, however easy or challenging it might be to parse that out; but then there is what we, as listeners, searching for some bit of ourselves, take away from it, or how it makes us feel.

I want to be true. Not like a declaration. More like a plea. Not desperate. Not yet. But exhausted. 

The cold. The rain. The gray. My grief. The grief that was actually killing me.

The endless blue shadow inside me. Inside you.

The description of Pyramid Electric Company written by Molina’s label is full of clever hyperbole—calling it a “record of lullabies for adults.”

“An album to lull them to a place they remember only at the quietest of moments. The guitar is a slow dance here melody and rhythm take each other by the hand,” it continues, and then refers to it as “Gimme Shelter” slowed down to 16 r.p.m., with Molina capturing the same “epic struggle in tone and weight.”

The process for recording the album, allegedly, involved Molina sleeping in the studio, writing late into the night, with his producer, Mike Mogis, arriving the next morning, and the two recording what had been written mere hours ago.

A kind of method acting within songwriting that someone like Molina wouldn’t bat an eyelash at throwing himself into. A kind of method acting within songwriting that some may find fascinating and compelling and convince themselves they can really hear that energy and commitment in the recording; a kind of method acting others might roll their eyes at, and scoff at the absurdity of it.

Pyramid Electric Company, within all of his canonical works, is not my favorite Jason Molina album, and some may argue that it is a minor entry in his catalog, and is perhaps overshadowed by the two records that came before it, and the mythology surrounding his decline and his passing that would come in the years after.

It is a difficult record and for as spectral as it is, it is dense. There is so much heft in the isolation captured within the second song. 

It is a difficult record, but it is one that does, despite the fact that I might not wish it to, take me back to a very specific moment, within a very specific and unprecedented low point.

The cold. The rain. The gray. My grief. 

The grief that was actually killing me.

The endless blue shadow inside me. 

I want to be true. 

^{1- There is an argument (and it can be confusing) about where and when Songs: Ohia ended, and where, and when, The Magnolia Electric Company began. Molina himself was inconsistent when he would talk about it, but I like to consider, and I don’t think I’m alone, Didn’t it Rain? as the final Songs: Ohia album.}

^{2- I absolutely hate this description, but this was the brutal honesty of Molina’s end, and the way it was described by music writer and, at one time, a friend of Molina’s, Henry Owings.}  

^{3- This is from a piece where Hanif Abdurraqib talks about a friend’s reaction to hearing Emma Ruth Rundle for the first time.}