Let’s Try It The Old Way: Magnolia Electric Co.’s Jason Molina Talks About Sun Studios, Driving Music, And Bootlegging (by The Bridge)
If you are trying, as I am, to come up with an idea of who Jason Molina, frontman for Magnolia Electric Company (formerly Songs:Ohia) is based solely on his musical catalog, you might assume that the dude is pretty freakin’ strange. I mean, anyone who writes as much as Molina (he has hundreds upon hundreds of songs) must be sort of high strung, right? But most of his more recent material - or, at least, the five or six albums I spent the past week listening to - are full of drowsy, sadsack songs that sound like a cat getting drunk on sunshine, or a long-distance trucker’s soliloquy. Beautiful, ponderous stuff, but hardly what you would expect from the high-gear personality that must be required for this kind of immense output. (Then again, look at Will Oldham. I guess it ain’t that odd.)
Of course, when I finally get the chance to talk with Molina on the phone, he turns out to be just about as down-to-earth and cheery as a guy could be. Molina spends a good hour or more on the phone discussing Magnolia Electric Company’s upcoming release, Fading Trails, which is an impressive collection of songs that reverberate with lonely ruminations on the blues, love lost, and dying hope, culled from four separate recording sessions. There are tracks produced by David Lowery (of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven) and Steve Albini, the prolific engineer who is perhaps best know for his work with louder bands like the Pixies and Nirvana.
“Yeah, but he’s also recorded hundreds of bands that don’t play at ear-splitting levels,” Molina points out. “He’s recorded Cheap Trick, he’s done Smog. I mean, if you’re a fan of his approach, there should be no reason not to go in there just because you’re not as loud as, say, Nirvana… There’s people that naively go into a recording situation thinking that they’re gonna sound the way their favorite drums sound on that Pixies record, just because of who’s recording them,” he adds. “Really, the strength of an engineer is to translate what you’re playing. So if you don’t play that way, you’re not gonna sound that way. There’s not a magic spell that he casts to make you play like your heroes.”
Speaking of heroes, however, it bears mentioning that amongst the various recording locales (Richmond and Chicago were among them), the band booked a session at the famous Sun Studios in Memphis. “I listened to a lot of that early, mid-fifties Memphis music,” says Molina. “So I was really excited to see the place. It’s just one room, one really small room that’s made all of those famous Cash recordings, and Elvis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison… I can’t even describe how small it is. But it seemed like a great place for us to record, because we keep everything as live as possible when we’re recording, which is really similar to how you would have made a record in the fifties.” Molina’s first studio experience, with a band in the late eighties, was extremely time-restricted: “We had four hours to make a whole record. So before we went in there we practiced probably every day for a month. I just sort of ingrained it into my working methodology. I think it’s the best way to deliver a song.”
Despite all the criss-crossing and multiple cooks in the kitchen, Fading Trails has a singular, ghost-of-a-tumbleweed sound, with each song hooking, both lyrically and melodically, to the next. Which is kind of the point, according to Molina. However, my insistence that the album’s tone is remarkably dark - suicidal, even, with lines like “The world does have to end in pain” - elicits laughter. “Well, I wouldn’t read suicidal into it,” he chuckles. “That’s stretching. When I write, I try to come up with a cohesive cycle of songs, lyrics that seem to hold each song together. I don’t sit down and plan to write these twelve songs about some theme that I pull out of a hat. I don’t write like that. I just constantly write songs until I see some relation in them. It might be a melodic relation, or something kind of subtle, but once I start to see something come to the surface, that’s what holds the songs together. This album isn’t ground I haven’t covered before,” he acknowledges. “But the songs are a bit more - pronounced. That’s all I would say about it.”
So is this pronounced emotion his own, I wonder, or a sort of character study?
“I definitely don’t write songs from the perspective of other people,” he replies, slowly. “I think every song is personal, though. Whether you’re Tom Waits, taking on the persona of one of these gutterbugs that he manifests in his songs, or Nick Cave - I think all those songs are personal for them, even if you’re selecting traditional material that’s hundreds of years old. It becomes personal when the singer sinks into it. I don’t feel like I’m giving a narrative history of myself in a three minute song. But everything I’ve ever written has been from my perspective.”
Well. If I’m hoping for a confession of intense inner turmoil (and, let’s face it, I am), then too bad. Molina treats all questions about his music with an almost doctorly professionalism - there may be emotion involved in the process, but it’s academically unimportant. His studious approach to recording pervades the discussion. Next I try to get a religious statement from him, quoting various references to Christianity on the new album. There’s a song called “Lonesome Valley,” which I knew as a schoolgirl in hymnal form. “There’s probably a hundred religious songs that either reference that or have it in the title,” he tells me. “But it wasn’t a specific reference.”
Oh. Well, what about mentioning Christ in the devastating opening track? “I used the name Christ as a historical name. But the songs don’t have a delineated religious or philosophical angle to them… The line is ‘Even Christ stayed until he had run out of doubt,’ and that line says all that I had intended, I think.” So much for my crafty interpretive skills. “All of my lyrics are like that. The harder you read into it… well, it’s just up to the individual listener, really.”
But he doesn’t mind the strange guesses. “That’s the great thing about music. There’s as many different interpretations as there are people listening. All of them could be very different from what I intended, and that’s fine. Imagine if every time you picked up an Ernest Hemingway novel, Hemingway was standing right there guiding you through all the different layers of meaning. Go to the library and look at all the books written about other books. There’s just an endless supply of interpretations.”
Molina is used to being interpreted, apparently. For the most part, he appreciates the way his fans play with his music, creating videos for his songs and trading bootlegs. He describes his audience as being “very closely connected” to the band: “We go to the same shows, listen to the same kind of music - we’re really on the same playing field as our audience.” His two cents on the bootleg debate is a pretty relaxed approach, mindful of where his fans come from. “For a band like us, [bootlegging] really helps. For plenty of people, they’ve only heard of us because of some friend with rare bootlegs. And if they really dig a bootleg, they may go hunt down particular songs.”
Molina is equally affirmative in response to a statement about how good females singers work with his songs (he frequently has female singers guest on his albums, although the latest one is short on girls). “It’s my favorite thing, really, collaborating with a really good female artist. My record collection has always been full of females - I got into Patti Smith when I was just a kid. I never thought of it as separate - you know, ‘chick rock,’ or whatever. If it’s good, it’s good. So now I’m really careful about incorporating female singers. I think some people approach it like they’re just decorating the songs [with female voices]. And it couldn’t be further from the case with me - they are integral parts of the songs.” His latest find along these lines is a woman named Molly Blackbird. “She does this insanely strong performance on one of the Lowery tracks. It’s just fantastic. I don’t think she’s actually on the new album; that track didn’t get put in there. So we’ll have to wait until next year.”
Molina is not, by the way, putting out six albums in the next year, as one Internet rumor asserted, although “It’s based entirely in fact. There are five albums ready to go, top to bottom - art work, everything. But if I threw out five or six albums all at once, the level of work that would have to be devoted to promoting them would be too much. I like the speed that Secretly Canadian puts out stuff. It would just take attention away from other bands that deserve their fair share if I did that.”
So Molina is staying in high-output gear for the foreseeable future. He doesn’t worry much about losing steam. “I’m always sort of writing something in my head. I also paint and draw, so it isn’t like I wouldn’t be able to be creative without the songs. But I am glad that I’m able to do music, and that people dig it,” he adds quickly. When asked for a collaboration wish list, he is predictably already working on it. He has talked to the fabulous Sally Timms (of the Mekons) about possible future projects, and mentions sometimes stage partner Howe Geld (Giant Sands). “Jeff Tweedy would be interesting, too,” he says.
I can’t do an interview without asking at least one way-gay, Barbara Walters-style question. I warn Molina I’m about to goof up on him, and he laughs. “Sure, shoot.”
His music, I tell him, seems the perfect soundtrack for one of two things: long highway drives, or drinking hard liquor. Which does he recommend?
He snickers. “Definitely driving music, man. That’s my favorite kind; good driving music. I don’t even take mix tapes on long trips; I like to hear specific albums. With a lot of records, that’s the only experience I ever have of them, touring all the time, you know. Like the new Oneida album [Happy New Year], which I’m in love with. So if people like to throw our album on for a road trip, then I definitely think we’ve succeeded.”
Word. I’m even listening to the thing on my bicycle.