Jason Molina’s morbid Americana still survives
Ben Sixsmith
Ten years after his death, Jason Molina’s voice seems as alive as ever. Molina, who performed as Songs: Ohia, died on March 16, 2013. He “cashed out,” a friend wrote, “On Saturday night in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in his pocket.” His body “had been drowned in alcohol for years on end.” Rarely have anxiety and sadness sounded so affirmative, expressed as they are with such palpable conviction. “I’m getting weaker,” Molina howls on “The Black Crow,” and his voice swells with strength.
Molina’s death at 39 was tragic, above all, for friends and family who were denied his company. But it was also tragic for admirers, who were denied his voice — or, at least, who were denied the future of his voice. At 39, Leonard Cohen had yet to release New Skin for the Old Ceremony and Nick Cave had yet to release The Boatman’s Call. It’s sad to think of the void that other albums would have filled.
But we still have Molina’s voice, immortalized in a bulging discography — and what could be a mournful event feels like a good occasion to spread that voice and allow Molina to endure.
He has various artistic admirers. Academy Award-winning songwriter Glen Hansard mourned his death, saying, “Jason Molina gave me so much. Hope, a song, protection spells.” Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers said that playing with Molina was “mesmerizing, completely flattering, and unbelievable” (Molina was their opener). Kevin Morby and Katie Crutchfield, acclaimed singer-songwriters of a younger generation, recorded covers of his songs “Farewell Transmission” and “Dark Don’t Hide It” on a 2018 tribute album. Morby described his love for Molina’s music as an “obsession.”
Yet while Molina’s music is by no means so obscure that a hipster would take conceited pride in listening to it, it should be better known. He was quite simply the finest songwriter in the USA.
Molina’s music was very American. Born in Oberlin, Ohio, and raised in a trailer on Lake Erie, a young Molina forged a path in music not only with his talent but with a keen sense of creative industry. Molina “was relentless in his pursuit of music,” writes Erin Osman in Riding With the Ghost. When he had a day job, he woke up at 5 a.m. to compose songs. When he was a full-time musician, he wrote music for eight hours a day.
“I ask myself,” he said, “‘Why am I not the guy emptying the trash? Why am I the guy who is watching the guy empty the trash?’” Such a work ethic allowed him to dip his bucket into a deep well of inspiration and extract more than an album a year between 1997 and 2009, under his own name and as Songs: Ohia and under the band name Magnolia Electric Co.
Americana — unlike, say, the classically English or the classically French — evokes the rural and the urban, or, for precision’s sake, the natural and the industrial. The opening guitar notes of a Molina song could be the hoot of a bird or the hoot of a train. He can be “alone with the owl” or listening as “a calling bird calls our name out loud.” Or he can be singing:
“Watch with me from the shore
Ghostly steel and iron ore
Ships coming home”
There is no clear divide between the natural and the industrial. All of it hums with spiritual meaning and menace.
In this morbid Americana, landscapes and cityscapes speak of nightmares as much as dreams. “Still no guides,” Molina sings on “Lightning Risked It All.” “It’s not a generous world.” Sparse melodies are as spacious as the country of his birth, yet haunted by the ghostly shuffling of drums, the chinkling of piano keys, and the piercing beauty of Molina’s voice.
“If the blues are your hunter,” he warns on “Blue Chicago Moon,” “then you will come face to face / With that darkness and desolation / And the endless depression.” There was nothing explicitly political about Molina’s music, but listening to him, it is difficult not to be reminded of Midwest industrial and demographic decline. “Put my bones in an empty street / To remind me how it used to be.”
Yet Molina was no mere doomer. He had the spark of American optimism — a spark amid the gloom, yes, but a spark still. “You are not helpless,” he sings on “Blue Chicago Moon.” “Try to beat it … You are not helpless / I’ll help you try to beat it.” “The real truth about it,” he croons on the gorgeous “Farewell Transmission,” “is no one gets it right. The real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try.” “If you do see that golden light,” he sings on “Didn’t It Rain,” “go and catch it if you can / And let it burn through you / If it’s the light of truth.”
Molina’s artistic life ended after 2009. Tours were canceled with ambiguous references to health problems. Rumors circulated about alcoholism. At one time, he was said to be working on a farm. Behind the scenes, Molina was drifting in and out of treatment programs, sometimes making a valiant effort to escape the booze and sometimes sinking back into its grasp. Friendships, marriage, and his career couldn’t take the strain.
In 2012, he released a statement, saying that it had been a “long hospital year” and thanking his supporters for monetary donations. “I have not given up,” he said, “because you, my friends, have not given up on me.”
Heartbreakingly, Molina was trying right up to the end. According to a 2014 piece in the Chicago Readers, weeks before his death, he had bought a new guitar, set up a recording space in his apartment, and jotted down a few scraps of songs. “His penmanship appeared smooth and fluid — an indication of at least a brief period of sobriety.” Treatment was too expensive, and the siren song of alcohol was too sweet. Trying is not always enough. But it is still something.
“It won’t be easy,” Molina cries repeatedly on a song that bears that name on the 2000 live album Mi Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasma. A jangling guitar melody fades into nothingness, flitting between mournful and cheerful notes. Applause comes like rain.
My favorite of Molina’s songs is “Being In Love.” “Being in love,” he sings, “Means you are completely broken / Then put back together.” There’s no watery romanticism here, no implication that the pieces will be returned in an appropriate order. But there is a strikingly clear evocation of that intensity of feeling that makes life worthwhile. It’s sad that he couldn’t hold on to it himself, but I’m thankful that he passed a little of it on to us.
Ben Sixsmith is contributing editor at The Critic.