Jason Molina
c/o Ashley Lawson
4632 Quincy Adams
Ct. Lorain, OH 44053

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With our sincere thanks, The Molina Family

Jason Molina Talks Molina & Johnson (by Tom Breihan)

As previously reported, Magnolia Electric Co. main man Jason Molina has teamed up with another member of the scratchy singer-songwriter folk-rock pantheon, Centro-matic frontman Will Johnson. The two have formed the creatively monikered duo Molina & Johnson, and their self-titled debut is due November 3 from Secretly Canadian.

Pitchfork recently spoke with Molina about the album, BB guns, and Michael Jackson.

Pitchfork: So you’ve got this new album coming out.

Jason Molina: Yeah. We’re really, really proud of it. I’ve had a rocky couple of years, but when the shit hits the fan, the music seems to do pretty well for me. Not to flog the dead horse, but this album came immediately on the tail of the death of Evan Farrell, our bass player. That was in December, and we went in the studio in February. I more or less hadn’t even touched a guitar. I would just stare at the guitar and know that I needed to just do something. And so I came up with this idea.

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to collaborate with Will Johnson?

JM: I try to do collaborations with as many artists as possible. It’s really excellent and fun to actually work with another songwriter. It’s very rare to get multiple songwriters who don’t typically work together to actually get in a room and do something that’s not half-assed. Will Oldham and Alasdair Roberts were the first to take me up on it. We made [the Amalgamated Sons of Rest EP] a few years ago. I thought that was greatly successful.

Will Johnson had approached me a few times at shows. One night in Austin after a show, I said, “You know, we’ve been talking about doing something together for years. Fuck it, we’ll pay for everything; we won’t get any labels involved at all. We won’t even tell anybody.” It was a complete secret. We holed up in this studio that I had never worked in. We enlisted a couple of local musicians, and we flew in Michael Kapinas from Magnolia. And we just wrote our asses off and came up with a pretty decent record.

We stayed in the studio. We had this thing we built we actually called “the War Room.” We put in a long desk, and we had stacks of paper, Sharpies, and pencil sharpeners. We’d sit side by side and just write. We wouldn’t even say anything to each other. We would eventually look at each other’s work and talk it out. One day, we needed a thesaurus badly. Both of us were just stuck and pissed off. But we’re out in the middle of the country. So we drive into town, we buy the only thesaurus that we can find in this used bookstore.

Pitchfork: Couldn’t you just go online?

JM: Are you kidding? When I write a record, I don’t even touch a computer. I don’t even bring my cell phone. That would have spoiled it, I think, to be sitting on your laptop all day, looking up a stupid word that you must already know.

So we get the only thesaurus in town, we get it back, and it’s just a shitty little paperback. I realized what a terrible piece of shit this was, and so I passed it over to Will, Will looks at the thing, and we both look at each other. We took it out back, we hung it in a tree, and we shot it.

Pitchfork: Did you buy a gun specifically to shoot the thesaurus?

JM: No, no. [laughs] I do love guns, but this was just a BB gun.

Pitchfork: Did the BBs make a dent?

JM: Oh yeah, that thing was trashed. We had a whole shooting gallery in the back of the studio, and we shot everything. The best thing to shoot are full cans of soda. When you shoot, it’s like fireworks. We had a firepit and we had cookouts. It was a real working man’s record, and all the gloves came off. We just got in there and wanted to work, and everything was on the table. Because if we fucked this up and we had complete artistic control, then we were useless. You have songs on there where it’s just completely Will’s idea; maybe I threw him up a lyrical bone or something. And vice versa. And then you have ones that are just full-on collaborations. It’s a great way to work.

It was a special and weird recording situation, which I recommend to any independent musician. We had the ultimate leverage. We both had recent successful records. Here we are with this finished record, and we just made a list of the labels we were going to send it to. Secretly Canadian was number one on my list. But there were some other labels. With labels in a rocky position right now, what better help for a label that’s in trouble than to just hand them a guaranteed break-even record? We paid for it. The label has nothing invested, except for their time and their aesthetic, their push.

Pitchfork: Will you tour behind the record?

JM: Yeah, absolutely; it’s already booked.  We have a pretty solid band put together, and we’ll do a pretty solid U.S. tour. Will’s on tour right now with Monsters of Folk. He’s friends with all of those guys. I looked at that lineup and I thought, “That’s either going to be a massive failure, or the most awesome thing of the year.” Then Will got the call to play drums for them, and all of the press was already done. So that awesome chance to have another awesome songwriter on that bill was kind of lost, because he’s just the drum guy. It sucks, but it’s such an amazing opportunity for him. He gets on these big tours, and he works them hard. I like the tours where we can just maintain Magnolia as the headliner and take out our support band, and we deal with all the money.

Pitchfork: If you could do another record with any songwriter, who would you pick?

JM: I would ask Howe Gelb, [Mark] Kozelek, or [Mark] Eitzel, for sure. With other songwriters, their label obligations are much more strict than mine. Secretly Canadian is famously modeled on that Touch and Go principle of letting the artist do what they want and then helping them out. But a lot of these more established artists have a more complicated working existence than I do. I’d really like to do another record with a female artist, maybe an established singer-songwriter. I like people that can strap on a guitar and don’t sweat the fact that you have to come up with a song in an hour. I want to work with someone who won’t feel like they have to play along with Jason Molina. I want them to just have the confidence.

Pitchfork: It’s cool that you’ve got the freedom to do that.

JM: Well, everybody probably has the freedom. I think about someone like Michael Jackson, who had the world at his disposal as far as money. He could have had this amazing recording studio, probably something like Prince has. But where is all the work? What did he do for fucking 18 years? He did some big high-profile tours and some records that tanked, but he had all the freedom in the world. He could have had any musician, any songwriters come in.

These people who have everything at their disposal as far as cash and connections, I think they just get so mired in the business side of things that they don’t just sit at home and record records. Anybody can do that. Look at Bob Pollard; how many records and songs has he done? And they cost nothing. It’s just a 4-track, a microphone, a couple bottles of Budweiser, and go.

Tracklist:
Twenty Circles To The Ground
All Falls Together
All Gone, All Gone
Almost Let You In
In The Avalon/Little Killer
Don’t Take My Night From Me
Each Star Marks A Day
Lenore’s Lullaby
The Lily & The Brakeman
Now, Divide
What You Reckon, What You Breathe
For As Long As It Will Matter
34 Blues
Wooden Heart

Full-length collaboration between Jason Molina & Will Johnson of Centro-matic.