Magnolia Electric Co. (by Noah Pais)
Not to say the guy’s art is a sham, but this much at least is certain: Over the phone Jason Molina is one chipper fella. It’s a far cry from the forlorn soul-barer of his Songs: Ohia days, or even from the protagonist of his Magnolia Electric Co. records, wherein Molina orchestrates the most painfully real country-rock this side of Townes Van Zandt’s perpetual hangover. Throughout the course of an hour-long conversation with Junkmedia, the chatty singer provided knowledge - often without provocation - on New York boroughs, music writers, the North versus the South, and the wonderful wizard of Albini. (But we’re sure five minutes after hanging up he was back to howling at the moon.)
I should start by apologizing: This is your fourth interview in the last two hours, right?
Yeah, but the last guy stood me up. This last couple of days of just interviews, the reason we’re doing it is because we’re going out on another leg of the tour, so it’s a lot of regional stuff, and we’re gonna have a new EP out. So this will be the only time I can really talk about it. But when the records come out, that’s when you get this, y’know, two weeks of nothing but interviews.
Talking to like 40 writers in 14 days.
Right. But you’re the last one, so you can go over. One of my first guys today calls and he’s like, “I actually have never heard of you, your music.” [Laughs] And I’m like, “And you got this assignment by…?”
Well, I’m starting off well then. [Laughs] Is there anything you haven’t been asked that you were expecting?
I don’t know…where are you located?
[Laughs] I’m in New York right now, but I live in New Orleans. So it looks like I’ll catch the tour right in the middle of, what, 18 shows in 18 days? Sounds like a pretty sadistic schedule.
Oh, that’s nothing for us. You should see what was before this. In Europe we play ten days, take a break. We don’t need that in the U.S. at all. You know, “Oh, it’s only two hours to Houston, we can stop in the middle.” It’s not like you’re crossing a border.
Yeah, nine of those 18 shows will be in Texas.
We try to tour consistently wherever people want us to come. We’ve noticed a trend the last few years where a lot more people are coming up to me and saying, “I drove six hours to come and see you.” So I’ve been doing tours the last couple years that really focus on regions. Because the East Coast is just so easy, you know; every day you can be in a major city, playing a cool show, for a whole week.
Everything is two hours apart.
Right, Boston, D.C., Philly, New York. Plus, then bands like us can do like three shows just in Boston. Or, we don’t play the Manhattan versus Brooklyn game. We don’t care. If we can get a show the next night, we’re gonna do it. Some of the bigger clubs don’t like that. But the Knitting Factory, we’ve had a standing relationship with them for 10 years. They’re like, whatever. “If you want to do three shows in art galleries the day before, it doesn’t matter. You can always come and play here.”
You’re going out to a lot of remote places as well.
We started to hit these forgotten corridors-I think it was last year. We were like, nobody in the wintertime goes to Fargo or Minneapolis. But we’re used to driving through blizzards and stuff. So we booked this whole, nothing but “Duluth, Iowa City-type places in the Winter” kind of tour, and it went over amazing. We got to play to a lot of new people who had never really heard of us, but they’d come up and go, “You’re the only out-of-town band in a month of Fridays that came to our place.” It reminded me of the reason why I started touring so much - I was from places that bands never came, I was the kid who had to drive six hours to see a band. So we think we would do that again for sure. We haven’t been able to do the Northwest, other than like Portland and Seattle. We’re trying to do something like Wyoming, Idaho, Montana. But before we tried that we wanted to do the middle south, in the middle of the summer.
You’re like, “We’re going to Fargo in the winter, and we’re going to Texas in the summer, dammit.”
Exactly. We want to play where the people want to see us. Nine or 10 shows in a row in Texas, it’s gonna be hot. We’re playing in places that don’t usually see bands, let alone this kind of band.
Right, most tours stop in Austin or Houston - Marfa or Odessa, not so much.
I’m gonna do it. As long as the guys want to come along, then God bless ‘em. Y’know, if they strand me I’m still gonna go do it. I think they’ll stick it out.
Are you in Austin during the Austin City Limits Music Festival? September 17th, I know it’s sometime right around then.
I don’t know when that is. I’ll have to look it up. Because that would be great. I mean, I’ve sort of given up on thinking that we’re…
A festival band?
Well, not just that. We’ve done some festivals. We just did…
Yeah, the [Pitchfork Media] Intonation Festival. I was gonna ask you, how was that?
It was fantastic. The best-organized festival I’ve ever been to. I don’t know how many people they had, but it was in the high, high thousands on the day we played. And we played early in the day.
Some friends told me the same thing. That’s impressive, because it was Pitchfork’s first time doing it and all. I don’t know if you ever read that site, but they have something of a cult following-like 80,000 daily readers.
I knew about what it was, but basically people told me it’s kinda snobby. Some friends had forwarded me reviews of my stuff, and it was like, how much of this is this guy just showing off his writing, and how much is giving information about the band?
They’re definitely into you, though, for what it’s worth.
In the end, I sort of veer away from things like that. Because at a certain point - this has happened a lot over the years - you have a writer who works for like a paper in Boston, who is a huge fan of yours. And they’re not the person in charge, the music editor or whatever. The minute that person is gone, you start to see your records getting totally slammed. And nothing has really changed from that record that came out nine months ago, nothing in the approach to the music, nothing in the sincerity or the necessity with which we felt the record needed to be recorded, and it makes it look like we’ve lost all quality control and we’re just cranking it out. This may be your only, or most-frequented, music source, like the Onion-you know, I don’t read a lot of music reviews at all, but since I get the Onion for free in Chicago, I’ll flip through there and I’m like, “Oh, there’s a record review, I guess I’ll read it.”
Their A.V. Club is one of the best music sections out there.
If every other part of the Onion went under, I’m sure that that could go on. I don’t know how they get some of those interviews. Like, they’re getting people that just do not do interviews.
Yeah, I just read that Dinosaur Jr. piece.
Yeah, Dinosaur, Mission of Burma. They must know two months in advance…
You also recently did a western swing with the Court and Spark, one of my favorite bands that not a lot of people know about.
We’ve gotten to know them really well over the last couple of years. I think the best way to tour with a band, always, is to do a stretch with them. If you can do a stretch of seven days or more, you really find out more about the inner workings of that band. And it’s so strange, after that third or fourth day of hanging out with these people, you realize how many people they know that you have in common.
Six degrees.
Exactly.
You based a lot of the song cycle of What Comes After the Blues on a Hank Williams song, right?
Yeah. It definitely wasn’t intended to be a theme record or anything, but I found myself referencing that song a lot on the last tour. I was singing a lot of little snippets of that song, and a few other Hank songs, in the middle of our other songs, in the more improvised parts. Then I sat down and started to look a little more closely at these songs I was working on. These are songs I wasn’t really intending to keep, for the record. I thought it was gonna be more songs like “The Dark Don’t Hide It,” or something like that. But I had these other songs just sitting there, and played ‘em for a few of the guys, and they were really excited about trying to add something to them. And then I realized that the weight of those songs kind of really carried the record more than the straight-up, easier-to-take songs, the ones with more of a straight-up beat, or a standard rock arrangement.
There’s definitely more of a sedated feel, compared to the first Magnolia record. After you get past “The Dark Don’t Hide It,” it’s much more somber and nuanced. Was that intentional going in?
Well, there was a worry because I want each record to sound different from the last one. And moving around from studio to studio, 50 percent of the struggle is sort of taken care of. I choose carefully the people I record with. I want to work with people because I think they’re gonna be a good match with a band that wants to record all live. It’s a difficult thing for a lot of engineers, younger engineers, to be able to do. Or maybe they can do it, but their studio is not a place that can accommodate that kind of playing. We found ourselves with the great opportunity to work with [Steve] Albini. I think this is our fourth record with him. The third full-release one, and I did a solo record there that I haven’t released. That was because I had a really bad cold, mostly. It wasn’t I had a cold, I was over the cold, but my voice was a little shredded. It sounds great, actually, as a weird effect, so I think there’s a value to it because I never actually went back and remade those songs, but I wasn’t interested in putting it out.
I love it. When you do end up releasing it, some writer will surely wax on about you up all night with a carton of Marlboros and a bottle of Jack.
[Laughs] Yeah, exactly.