Magnolia Electric Co. changes ‘lost’ demos into new songs - Molina keeps busy in studio (by Matthew Grayson)
For a songwriter seemingly obsessed with ghosts, the notion of a long-lost album resurrected from the dead makes perfect sense.
Jason Molina, frontman for Magnolia Electric Co., calls it business as usual.
“A lot of songs just don’t make it to the recording stage, and they sort of live in demo form forever,” he said. “If there are some stray cats out there that are good songs, then they’re great for the live world, and who knows, maybe I’ll revisit them someday.”
Molina does exactly that on “Fading Trails,” Magnolia Electric Co.’s latest full-length. Two of its nine songs are recently unearthed home demos from a “lost” album called “Shohola,” which harkens back to Molina’s earlier, more intimate solo recordings under the name Songs: Ohia.
Selections from three more recent sessions round out “Fading Trails,” including three tracks recorded at Steve Albini’s Electric Audio in Chicago and two at the famous Sun Studios in Memphis, Tenn.
Molina’s new material by no means stops with “Fading Trails,” however. He released a vinyl-only solo record titled “Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go” last month and has four more albums written, recorded and ready to release.
As an amalgam of those four records, “Fading Trails” may sound like a “best of” compilation and in a way, it is.
It’s not, however, the product of a money-hungry label simply squeezing a band’s 20 greatest hits onto one disc and calling it an album.
Magnolia Electric Co., rather than an anonymous group of executives, handpicked these songs, and while some of this material may be years old, it’s certainly never been heard by the public before.
“The label thought it was a good idea to sort of assemble those songs into what we thought was a good representation of all those sessions and put that on a record instead of putting all these records out at once,” Molina explained.
While “The Nashville Moon,” “The Sun Studio Sessions” and “The Black Ram” all feature the full band, “Shohola” will remain a solo record, a sort of dispatch from Molina’s haunted and lonely past as Songs: Ohia.
Though better known for such solo efforts, Molina by no means keeps all the good songs for himself.
“Pretty much every song I write I intend to have Magnolia Electric Co. playing behind me,” he said. “There are times when I’ll get a whole group of songs that are strong enough on their own or they’re cohesive enough on their own that I don’t feel like I need to do an arrangement with the band, but it really comes down to after I have most of the songs recorded, at least in demo form, whether they should be with the band or solo. It’s not like I write two separate kinds of songs.”
Even with two albums released in the past month and four more on the way, Molina refuses to rest. Such a prolific streak, in fact, is nothing new for him.
“I write all the time. It’s not like I just suddenly wrote more songs than usual,” he said. “We just had three major opportunities to get into studios in one year.”
For Molina, a break from the studio only means more time on the road. Magnolia Electric Co. will travel from coast to coast, hitting 17 American cities in the next 17 nights, Athens among them.
The band’s sizeable increase in new material will be the primary difference between the show at the 40 Watt last October and the show on Saturday night.
“We definitely have a lot more new material versus that tour,” he said. “I just think that we have a stronger approach to putting together a show this time around.”
Dedicated fans of Songs: Ohia who’ve yet to latch on to the full-band sound of Magnolia Electric Co. may still hear some of their old favorites, though.
“We’re really trying to put together a set of music that’s as inclusive of the new material as possible but also has room for older stuff,” he said. “We always leave in the set a few old tricks.”
Molina is no one-trick pony, either. As an accomplished visual artist, his drawings and paintings have been shown at the Brooklyn Fireproof Gallery in New York City alongside works by the Silver Jews’ David Berman and the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.
“(Visual art) comes from the same exact places in your brain as songwriting,” Molina said. “There are some days when I’m drawn to painting and not writing a song, but I have the same feeling at the end of completing a song as when I finish a painting.”
With the sheer number of songs he’s been finishing lately, one has to wonder if that feeling ever goes away, or if it lingers around in the back of Molina’s mind, like the ghosts that haunt his songs.