Prolific Molina has a gift for understatement (by Jennifer Van Evra)
Jason Molina can be justly accused of many things. Not doing his share of the driving on tour? Guilty. Disliking interviews? Throw the book at him. Not helping out at the merch table? Take him away. But one thing is certain: Molina—the main force behind Magnolia Electric Co. (formerly Songs: Ohia)—will never be charged with failure to write enough music.
Last year, Magnolia Electric Co. released not one, not two, but three albums (a live record, a studio album, and an EP). As if that weren’t enough to satisfy his fans’ appetites, Molina released a solo album, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go this past August. A few weeks later, he released yet another Magnolia Electric Co. full-length, Fading Trails—an album of songs taken from four different recording sessions (one with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago, another produced by David Lowery at Sound of Music Studios in Virginia, one at the legendary Sun Studio in Memphis, and another at home), each of which was meant to be a full release.
“So there would have been five complete records. That may have been overkill,” says Molina, who can now add understatement to his list of charges, talking on his cellphone while standing in a rail yard behind a music venue in Denton, Texas. “But I really do write hours and hours and hours a day. I approach it like a 9-to-5 job. And when I finish something, I don’t want to look at it again. I just want to start on something new.”
Part folk, part indie rock, part dust-bowl country, and increasingly reminiscent of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Magnolia Electric Co.’s songs are salted with repeated symbols—lonesome valleys, crescent moons, lost horizons, ghosts, and wolves—that provide the set pieces for stories of loss, heartbreak, death, and occasionally hope. Molina openly admits that the songs are purely autobiographical.
“I can’t even conceive of a song that is not from the perspective of the person who writes it,” he says. “So you’re really getting an accurate look at the way I see the world around me. It’s not like I’m harping on something that I think is particularly depressing, and I’m not trying to write really morbid manifestos or anything. I’m drawing on what I know.”
But if Molina is prone to darkness and depression—he says that being on-stage in front of a thousand people can be one of the loneliest places in the world—it certainly isn’t affecting his work ethic. Magnolia Electric Co. is midway through a 50-date tour, and what with driving huge distances, writing, and playing nearly every day, he isn’t getting more than a few hours’ sleep at night. Still, he always makes time for his cultishly devoted fans.
“We’re not staying up all night and partying. But after the show, we try to stick around and meet the fans and talk, because that’s really important to us,” Molina says. “I mean, when some woman comes up to you with a tattoo of your record cover on her arm, you can’t really walk away.”
Magnolia Electric Co. plays Richard’s on Richards on Wednesday (October 11).