The pace of Jason Molina’s songwriting was such that scarcely anybody could keep up with him. Not his band, Magnolia Electric Co., who’d witness Molina crafting albums’ worth of new material while on tour. Not his label, Secretly Canadian, who would still be at work promoting the previous album he’d handed them while he’d emerge from the studio with one more to add to the queue. Molina even seemed to be competing with himself, filling live setlists full of material that hadn’t yet been released, and producing so much material that the very best of it sometimes didn’t receive the spotlight it deserved.
Like the great songwriters that came before him, Bob Dylan or Neil Young or George Jones, Molina never sacrificed feeling or meaning at the expense of keeping a creative machine operating at full capacity. And feeling was an inexhaustible resource for Molina, even as his escalating addiction to alcohol suggested he’d do anything to escape it. It seems almost contradictory that songs that touch something so dark and so vulnerable could come out of him in such dizzying succession. These aren’t the 90-second power pop absurdities of Guided by Voices, but a slow-motion glimpse at an unrepentant ache.
At his most prolific, Molina could carve out a streak of music that all seemed interconnected in its desperate beauty; in 2000, a breakthrough year for his Songs: Ohia project, he delivered two studio albums, the stunning The Lioness and Ghost Tropic, along with the primarily improvised after-hours studio seance Protection Spells. He also contributed a song to a split 7-inch with Glen Hansard, and the live recordings captured in that era, including Mi sei apparso come un fantasma and Live: Vanquishers, each include songs like “She Came to Me As a Ghost,” which never made it to a proper studio album.
Molina achieved peak production only half a decade later, a creative streak burning hot during the tour cycle behind 2005’s What Comes After the Blues that coincided in part with Magnolia Electric Co. fully solidifying as a band. Just two years earlier, he’d retired the Songs: Ohia name, ushering in a new era with the Magnolia Electric Co. album, one more informed by a richer, louder, rock ‘n’ roll sensibility. And in between studio and stage time with the band, Molina embarked on side quests, recording solo or with a different group of musicians entirely, seizing upon a career-record creative streak that saw him recording songs he’d written only days earlier. All the while, his struggles with alcohol and depression increasingly interfered with his ability to function as bandleader and touring musician, his frantic songwriting an ephemeral adhesive for what he couldn’t stop from fracturing.
“With the tear Jason was on, he’d have another eight records done in the two years it would have taken to release [those albums] properly, not to mention those records cannibalizing themselves both from an artistic and marketing perspective,” said Ben Swanson, co-founder of Secretly Canadian, in Erin Osmon’s Molina biography, Riding With the Ghost.
The three and a half albums Molina and company recorded in 2005 and 2006, Sojourner, were released under the Magnolia Electric Co. banner, though it’s a lot more complicated than that. Only two of the records in the collection, Nashville Moon and Sun Session, feature the full Magnolia Electric Co. band. One of them, Shohola, is a stark series of Molina solo recordings, while The Black Ram, features another set of musicians entirely. Molina, the one constant at the center of the Ohia/Magnolia universe, is the center of gravity that holds everything together here. (When you change the g to a j, Magnolia is an anagram of J.A. Molina.)
Steve Albini recorded the first of the four sessions comprising Sojourner‘s sprawl at Electrical Audio in Chicago, notably also where the band recorded Magnolia Electric Co. And fittingly, the album that resulted, Nashville Moon, is cut from a similar cloth, all full-band rock arrangements streaked with the lap steel leads of Mike Brenner. And while the session doesn’t feature a song as epic and enduring as the masterful “Farewell Transmission,” there’s a timeless grit and beauty to everything here that places these songs only a few notches below that 2003 album’s peaks at most. “Don’t Fade On Me,” slowly escalating in intensity, rides a delicate line between desperation and something more sinister, Molina singing, “Even that tired old moon has finally come back to town/And she’s been asking for you” against Brenner’s weeping licks. There’s also a full band arrangement of “Hammer Down,” which appeared on What Comes After the Blues as a hushed acoustic piece, as well as the furious drive of “No Moon on the Water,” Mark Rice’s drums cracking with explosive impact.
In 2006, while in town for a show, Molina was given a few hours to record at Memphis’ legendary Sun Studios, the site of legendary recordings from the likes of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. The session produce four finished songs within a narrow window, and as such, Sun Session is the shortest of the four records on Sojourner, but no less affecting or powerful in slight runtime. Its recording quality is pristine, lending each song an unobscured and gorgeous clarity. Among its songs is a gentler re-recording of Magnolia Electric Co.‘s “Hold On Magnolia,” as well as a cover of the standard “Trouble In Mind.” Though its greatest moment is its first, “Talk to Me Devil, Again,” a standout moment of pop songwriting immediacy coursing with Molina’s uniquely mythic perspective, curiously catchy even as he seeks to make a Faustian bargain in service of heartbreak: “Devil unwind what’s empty/Devil unwind my heart.” The session also includes “Memphis Moon,” one of the most romantic of this era, if somewhat fatalistically so, imagining Molina and his wife Darcie as stars: “I know that we faded out, but oh, didn’t we shine.”
Following the Sun Studios session, Molina headed to Richmond, Virginia, on a solo excursion to record with David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, leaving the rest of the band wondering if that was the end of the line. It wasn’t, though the musicians that Molina worked with—including Lowery, session musicians like Alan Weatherhead, who had recorded with Sparklehorse, and even a subtle whistling cameo from Andrew Bird—helped shape the music into something breathtaking in its almost mystical beauty. On The Black Ram, they captured something highly charged in its supernatural darkness, not unlike 2000’s Protection Spells but with a finished product that feels more potent—more whole.
“We were trying to create a big open space around his voice, which required us playing a little bit less,” Lowery said of the sessions. And the end result is an album that, despite being only 30-odd minutes of a larger whole, stands as one of the greatest Molina ever wrote and recorded. Yet it’s also inseparable from the grief that hangs over it, Molina’s mother having died as he was recording it, while Lowery himself was shellshocked by the death of some close friends who had been murdered in a home invasion. That grief bleeds through songs like “In the Human World,” a gentle and sad, twilit ballad that finds Molina lamenting, “You’re gonna lose a lot/You’ll get used to it somehow,” while also insisting, “This time, I’m leaving nothing behind.”
The Black Ram‘s title track is one of its most immediately stunning highlights, bolts of electric guitar streaking in the distance like lightning against Molina’s acoustic guitar. In contrast to the grief-stricken opener, the song is more imagistic and spiritual in nature, Molina asking, as if through Buddhist koans, “Who swallows the tides when no tides come?/Who binds the names to the nameless one?” before it erupts into an almost doom-metal crack of thunder. “What’s Broken Becomes Better” carries a heavy stomp that suggests an immensity despite its open spaces, while “Will-O-the-Wisp” hovers in a kind of supernatural mist, pitch black yet somehow iridescent, a murky wood overrun with fireflies. “By the moon I hear you mourning low/Are you weary?” Molina asks, “I am, I am.”
There’s more of a jagged edge to “A Little At a Time,” its heavy riffs cutting through negative space, while “Blackbird”‘s juxtaposition of distorted guitar and banjo is where The Black Ram comes closest to a proper Magnolia Electric Co. recording. “And the Moon Hits the Water,” however, is among the most dazzling moments on the album, and the most chilling, lyrically, a brooding dirge with sinister underpinnings, Molina offering some of his most soul-stirring imagery: “First light of the world and the moon hits the water/Never gets this dark until it knows what you owe.”
The final piece of Sojourner is Shohola, recorded by Molina alone, stripped of any embellishment, the bare acoustic recordings almost demo-like in their simplicity but captured in higher fidelity. Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that a song like “The Spell,” employing the same chord progression as “Farewell Transmission,” is something like a skeletal sketch of a song that became something much more elaborate. But the strongest pieces among this beautifully naked set of songs comprise its one-two opening suite, “Steady Now” and “Spanish Moon Fall and Rise,” gorgeously immediate, their melodies wanting for no additional ornamentation. Fittingly, these two songs also close out Fading Trails, the 2006 album released as a bite-sized, single LP-length showcase of Sojourner material.
That release became something of a point of contention among members of the band. Conceived as a compromise of sorts from Secretly Canadian, who proposed it as a way to meet listeners halfway should the idea of only obtaining these songs via an elaborate, more expensive box set seem too heavy a lift. But the group, who were more enthusiastic about honoring this productive streak via a four-disc collection, felt it diluted the effort, and to their point, its tracklist is somewhat curiously selected. It features selections from each of the four Sojourner chapters, though with certain exceptions, like “Talk to Me Devil, Again,” few of them feel like the Best of the Box. As it is, the songs are good, but it feels more like a sampler than a summary.
The space between What Comes After the Blues and the release of Sojourner saw Molina reaching personal lows even as his creativity was at an all-time high. He’d start drinking shortly after waking up in the morning, and his band would often half to take great efforts to keep alcohol away from him on tour. When they did, the shows could be transcendent, like a sold-out performance in Shepherd’s Bush, England featuring three encores, culminating in a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” It also doesn’t take much digging through the songs on Sojourner to hear the torment that followed him like the moonlight that so frequently populated his songs, one he nonetheless rendered beautifully.
Though a little pricier and more overwhelming than a single album, Sojourner boasted not just a wealth of material but an elaborate overall package, impressive when released on CD in 2007 and even more so in larger vinyl format in its 2023 reissue, presented in a wooden box and featuring inserts with maps of constellations. But if you’ll forgive the cliche, the collection is more like four seasons in two hours, the stark Shohola its barren winter, the bright and gentle beauty of Sun Session its spring, the roaring rock ‘n’ roll of Nashville Moon clearly the summer, and the haunted arrangements of Black Ram encapsulating the eerie air of autumn.
I’ll never fully understand why The Black Ram was never released as a standalone, a piece of work on par with the nocturnal ballads of Didn’t It Rain. And when I moved to Richmond, I felt an eerie chill when I realized the studio where my band rehearsed was across the street from where it was recorded. But it’s also a necessary part of what Sojourner represents, the full spectrum of Molina’s music, captured all in one place—the anguish, the beauty, the stillness and the storm.
Magnolia Electric Co. : Sojourner
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