Magnolia Electric Co.’s Jason Molina Spills About New Album, Josephine (by Tom Breihan)

It’s been nearly three years since Fading Trails, the last proper album from rootsy Midwesterners Magnolia Electric Co. In the time since that album’s release, frontman Jason Molina moved to London, and touring bassist Even Farrell died tragically in an Oakland apartment fire. But the band still soldiers on. On July 21, Secretly Canadian will release Josephine, Magnolia’s spare song-cycle of a new album, which they recorded with engineer Steve Albini. (The cover and tracklist for Josephine, along with the band’s summer tour itinerary, can be found at the end of this story.)

Pitchfork spoke with Molina about the process of recording Josephine and about the tidal wave of new material he’s already recorded.

Pitchfork: You’re on tour right now, playing songs from Josephine for the first time in front of an audience. How does that feel?

JM: I guess it’s been… you would call it harrowing. The writing of that record was extremely difficult for me. In typical fashion, when I finish a record, I walk out of the studio and want to start on the very next record, which is what I did. I started writing, and now I’m revisiting things that are only a few months old. It seems like ancient history but something we needed to play live. It does feel good; it’s a challenge.

Pitchfork: The press material describes Josephine as sort of a concept album about the death of Evan Farrell.

JM: That’s how we loosely have been describing it, mostly because people need a reference point. It’s not really a tribute record. A lot of the ideas in that record were things that I had worked with Evan on a lot, and he was going to be of course a major part of the new record. I really wanted to gravitate away from the sort of Crazy Horse references because none of that was really intentional; it was just a product of being from the Midwest. I don’t listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure. I just wanted to try something sonically more on the minimalist side, and I think that we succeeded. And lyrically it’s definitely a song cycle where I revisit over and over and over again certain themes much more than I have in other records.

Pitchfork: So it’s not just about Evan? What else went into it?

JM: It’s a big record about dislocation. I’ve moved in the last dozen years or so at least 30-some times. Now I live overseas, and the band is still in Indiana. All of this sort of happened within a few months, with Evan, with me moving from Indiana back to Chicago again for the third time, and then from there moving to London. From a guy that still doesn’t have his foot in the world, I feel pretty grounded as long as I have music.

Pitchfork: This will be your first album in three years. Have you ever taken this long between records before?

JM: Actually, I recorded about six records since I finished the box set. It’s just that we have to stagger the releases, or else you’ll have a Bob Pollard situation where I can’t even afford to keep up with the guy. So there’s a complete solo record I have finished. There’s an eight-song 10′’ that I did that’s going to be in a coffee table book of the art of Will Schaff, and I have finished another record of just me and acoustic guitar. On the one solo record that’s finished, there’s side musicians on it; it’s not the Magnolia crew. And so I’ve finished dozens and dozens of songs and several projects. It’s just that they have to sit on the shelf because Josephine takes precedence, and then all this other stuff can come out. I also just finished a collaboration with Will Johnson [of Centro-Matic], and that’s also a full-length record. I haven’t taken any time off; it’s just that you don’t see the stuff for sale yet.

Pitchfork: So Josephine didn’t take a long time to write?

JM: No, it didn’t. Regardless of what’s happening in my life or recording situations or events surrounding recording, I know when to just call it quits. If it’s taking me a couple months to get a solid idea of what I want the song cycles to really be about, then rather than go and fix what I think is the weakness in it, I just scrap the whole thing and start again. I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Pitchfork: I just heard Josephine for the first time this morning, and musically it’s a gorgeous record. It’s almost a traditional country record in a lot of ways, especially the way your voice works with the arrangements. Was that something you were interested in going for?

JM: Honestly, no. Sonically, like I said, I wanted it to be minimal and I guess that’s maybe one version of what I would define as minimalism: Taking out guitar solos and, if the song is only going to be 45 seconds long and it’s a good song, I leave it at that. If it’s going to be six-and-a-half minutes long and that’s what it takes, I leave it at that. But I structured the record. We cut 22 songs for the record, and they just don’t all fit. None of the tracks that didn’t made it to Josephine are outtakes; it’s all one big piece. But since our last release was a box set, I wanted to pare it down to what I thought was a fantastic side A and side B, and then I can figure out what to do with the rest of the tunes.

As long as you’re on the topic of what it sounds like, we recorded it with [Steve] Albini again at Electrical [Audio, Albini’s studio]. We’ve worked many times with him. We were in a big studio, and we planned a lot of days to be in there to get it right. On the first night, we finished our last show in Chicago and we went to the studio. We were just itching to play music. We weren’t supposed to record until the next day, and into the wee, wee hours of our first night there we had already set up the studio and were ready to go by probably eight in the morning the next day. We recorded it all live as much as humanly possible. We all played live in the same room. The drums were there, no separation, and the vocals are all live. I’m just singing into a guitar amp, sort of 1950s-style, and I’m really proud of the way it turned out. We’re so comfortable working with Steve now that we know exactly how to articulate what we want it to sound like. Although we’ve been making records for years, my job is just to write the songs, and sometimes it’s like getting on board a ship and telling the captain what to do when you don’t know jack shit about how to steer a ship. This way, I think we succeeded because the songs took reign.

I actually think sonically it’s a heavier record. Where there’s not more instrumentation, I just think there was a gravity in the playing. There are some extremely rocky and even what I consider sad lyrical passes in there, and I think they’re fortified by the arrangements. I wouldn’t call it simply your acoustic-guitar-and-voice record, which I’ve done dozens of, but I do think that there’s something so naked about this record. It’s one that I don’t know if I’ll ever listen to it. When I walked out of the studio, I knew that we had done something important.

Pitchfork: Was it tough cutting out all those songs?

JM: I believe in doing vinyl. As long as vinyl can still be made into a high-quality standard, I’m going to still make all my records as a side A and a side B because that’s how I grew up listening to music. It came down to the fact that if you want it to sound great, you can’t throw everything on there. I didn’t want to belittle any of the material, since it’s a solid song cycle, by saying that we have all these outtakes so let’s throw them on a bonus CD; I don’t want to make them orphans. I’m really excited, and I think the fans are going to be able to get ahold of that stuff.

Right now, we have so many irons in the fire with getting Josephine out and making sure that the press doesn’t turn it into this maudlin thing. It’s hard. The laziest writers in the world just read other people’s articles, and then the lazier writers just crimp from the one-sheet. We threw things in there sometimes in the past just to prove people aren’t listening to the record. You say, “This record sounds a lot like Lou Reed,” when it doesn’t sound anything like Lou Reed. The first week of the reviews: “This sounds a lot like Lou Reed.” So what we did with this is keep all that press as honest and straightforward as I believe Magnolia is.

Tracklist:
O! Grace
The Rock Of Ages
Josephine
Shenandoah
Whip-poor-will
Song For Willie
Hope Dies Last
The Handing Down
Map Of The Falling Sky
Little Sad Eyes
Heartbreak At Ten Paces
Little Knoxville Girl
Shiloh
An Arrow In The Gale

The saddest white boy alive - Despite missing his thousand-songs-per-year quota, Magnolia Electric Co.’s Jason Molina keeps on smiling (by Bill Forman)

Does Jason Molina find it at all strange that he’s constantly compared to Neil Young, but never to Richard Thompson?

“Well, why don’t you be the first?” suggests the Magnolia Electric Co. frontman. “Yeah, people should have noticed the Richard Thompson thing a long time ago. I had a thing for Fairport Convention, and I’ve seen Richard Thompson a bunch of times in the last 10 years. He’s been really inspiring, and he’s just a hard, hard worker. And man, that’s what I want to be.”

So much so, in fact, that Molina says he writes a thousand songs a year, which has a lot to do with why Magnolia Electric Co. is one of the best indie bands in the country.

“But last year, I didn’t make my thousand,” he admits. “I was on tour a lot and our bassist died. It was a harrowing year, so I ended up a little bit short, but somehow still smiling.”

In a futile attempt to keep pace with his muse, Magnolia’s last release was an ambitious box set of all-new tracks.

“We sort of shot ourselves in the foot with the Sojourner box set, because most people believed that it was old material,” says Molina of a project that included three albums, one EP, a DVD and a medallion (!), all enclosed in an attractive wooden box. “As a music fan, I hate buying those things where it’s like, you know, the T. Rex record with 17 outtakes or, like, that [expanded] Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. I believe that if the artist says this is what the record is, that really is what the record is.”

Currently, Molina has four more albums in the can, and is already anxious to do more. Among them is the forthcoming fifth Magnolia Electric Co. release, Josephine, a Steve Albini-produced album that boasts a horn section and a lot of country elements while retaining what he describes as a “minimalist” feel: “Basically, I think subtracting the cliché is the best way to approach songwriting. When you find you’ve run into a flat tire, you just change the tire.”

Sabbath and shortwaves

A northeastern Ohio native, Molina had moved to Chicago by the time his first band, Songs: Ohia, changed its name to Magnolia Electric Co. And while he now lives in London, Molina insists he’s still “Midwestern down to the core.”

“I grew up as a sort of punk rocker/tape trader. I didn’t live in an area where we had a real music scene, or access to music magazines and articles about bands. Even commercial radio was pretty much absent. So we sort of invented our own ideas. You know, whatever sounded best for the song was important, rather than making sure you sound like the Ramones.”

As a guitarist, Molina had an even more primal influence: “The very first stuff I ever learned was Black Sabbath. I was obsessed with them since I was a tiny kid. I wish I could say it was something romantic like I started out playing Hank Williams but, you know, I could play that stuff without trying. I could sing you Carter Family songs until the sun went down, because there’d always be somebody on a front porch actually playing that music. It wasn’t from records. And no one sat down and said,” — Molina adopts a patronizing schoolteacher voice — “‘Now, this is the Carter Family, and they were legendary country musicians and so you should listen to this.’”

In fact, Molina says he barely listens to music at all these days, apart from the old 78s he buys for next to nothing and whatever he tunes into on his shortwave radio.

“I’m not a Luddite,” he insists, “I just haven’t grasped the new way to buy music. I’m definitely a shortwave freak. I tune to West African radio and stuff from Russia — I love it. Get yourself an old thrift store shortwave and tune it to the world! Sure, you can get everything online, but it’s kind of, like, manicured; you don’t have to work with it.”

Plus, it doesn’t come with all that static and wow and flutter.

“Right, it doesn’t have all those screaming sci-fi Theremin sounds,” Molina evangelizes. “You’ll be listening to something for 20 minutes, and you’ll be just engaged beyond belief, and then you’ll lose the signal! And you’re never gonna catch who the artist is because, even if they do announce it, it’s in a different language.”

Bleak like me

Molina’s taste for the erratic extends to his own guitar playing, which he likens to early country and blues traditions where “you’re not stuck playing a strictly metronomic style of music.”

“Some nights, it’s terrible — I’m mystified that what I play sounds terrible. Or I’m really excited that it sounds great. For me, it’s a very organic part of the song. It’s literally an extension of the lyrics.”

Of course, those same lyrics have earned Molina a reputation for being a bit morose.

“People say, ‘Man, your stuff is so depressing.’ We got this great one: ‘You must be the saddest white boy alive.’”

Actually, Molina seems cheerful enough in real life, and he’s enormously thankful that he’s come of age at a time when independent labels allow artists more freedom (if less money) than their predecessors.

“Someone like Richard Thompson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young — these guys never had that. It was major label or nothing, and then they had all the stuff that goes with being part of that kind of system.

“Townes Van Zandt is a great example. Somebody gave me a Townes record and the production was terrible. He’s a great songwriter, but he probably had no control over the production on a major label back then, no chance in hell that he could say, ‘I think that maybe we don’t need a flute solo on this song.’”

Still, Van Zandt’s songs have stood the test of time, and there’s a good chance Molina’s will as well.

“You can’t learn how to write songs by sitting down and listening to a record — you really can’t,” concludes the author of thousands. “At some point, you have to just sit down and write your own damn song. And then, if it’s a good enough one, you’re gonna have to follow it up with a better one.”

Tracklist:
It’s Made Me Cry
Rock Of Ages
The Compass, The Candle, The Bell
Protection Spell

Released for Record Store Day 2009, all proceeds benefit the Evan Farrell Memorial Fund.

i’ve spoken with jason and while he’s happy to see all the business record store day 2009 brought to independent music retailers he was disappointed that so many fans were unable to obtain the 7″. he asks that rather than pay exhorbitant ebay prices (none of which will benefit evan’s family) you consider waiting for the digital release (which does).

the money you save will be better spent on the elaborate will schaff coffeetable book with the jason molina 10″ that is due out later this year on graveface records.