Today I usually try to remember something silly or funny about Jason. So now I’m thinking about how he wanted us to get three grey kittens and name them Cloudy, Misty, and Murky, and write a series of children’s books about their adventures. 🖤🐾🐾🐾
When an emotional affair I had foolishly gotten into with a woman on the other side of the world invariably imploded, she sent me the lyrics of The Lioness. It was my introduction to Jason's work. I was absolutely wrecked by it. Destroyed.
"Want my last look to be the moon in your eyes. Want my heart to break, if it must break, in your jaws. Want you to lick my blood off your paws."
Thanks for that introduction, Valentina. Sorry for my part in what both of us went through...
Real truth about it is, no one gets it right. Real truth about it is, we’re all supposed to try. There ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross. I really knew it all along.
I just wanted to share with you all something I wrote today while thinking about Jason. It unexpectedly echoes the leitmotif of this beautiful message as well as some of your beautiful comments here, friends--none of which i saw until after I scribbled this down. Maybe we're all just on the same wavelength, which is why we're here together. And that feels so significant. Thank you for sharing and listening 🎶
Jason Molina haunted me long before he died. Now that he is gone, his music inhabits my life like a beloved, and I pray permanent, ghost. His voice overlays the tape hiss I hear behind my own heartbeat. Today is his ninth deathday. It’s still hard to reconcile a world that doesn’t contain him. The way Jason’s music permeates my existence has always felt unspeakable, but I want to try, like Jason urged by simply singing it straight out on the transcendent Songs: Ohia slow burn Farewell Transmission: “The real truth about it is, we’re all supposed to try.”
There is a spaciousness in Jason’s sparse recordings that both pushes back and reflects the void. Stares into it and dares it to grow while somehow breaking it down into perceivable parts. His music is incapable of artifice. The tensile power of his guitar. The insistent, reedy tenor of his voice. How he could sing with a freight train’s harrowing timbre and speak to human loneliness at the same time. Even when his voice was frail, hesitant, when it broke or faded off, it was powerful. The candor of imperfection in a single song-take will always astonish me. His voice cuts straight through static, through distance. Even the distance of death and the static of time. Maybe especially those.
“I will try, and know no matter what I try, I will be gone but not forever,” he sings, further into Farewell Transmission. And he is right. He is with us even though he has left us. Everything he has given remains.
“Listen,” he sings at the end of that song. Which is what I’ve been doing. Which is what I will always do. No need to try.
Today I usually try to remember something silly or funny about Jason. So now I’m thinking about how he wanted us to get three grey kittens and name them Cloudy, Misty, and Murky, and write a series of children’s books about their adventures. 🖤🐾🐾🐾
Oh my god I love this so much. Thanks for sharing.
“We will be gone, but not forever “
When an emotional affair I had foolishly gotten into with a woman on the other side of the world invariably imploded, she sent me the lyrics of The Lioness. It was my introduction to Jason's work. I was absolutely wrecked by it. Destroyed.
"Want my last look to be the moon in your eyes. Want my heart to break, if it must break, in your jaws. Want you to lick my blood off your paws."
Thanks for that introduction, Valentina. Sorry for my part in what both of us went through...
...to have lived so long in such a little while...
This whole life it's been about
Try and try and try
And try and try and try
To be simple again
Real truth about it is, no one gets it right. Real truth about it is, we’re all supposed to try. There ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross. I really knew it all along.
Still waitin
For you to sing that song again
The one you were singin at the very fall of man
It ain't hallelujah but it might as well have been
Sing it brother one more time
Sing it sister one more time
Once for everybody who got left behind
Whip-poor-will
I just wanted to share with you all something I wrote today while thinking about Jason. It unexpectedly echoes the leitmotif of this beautiful message as well as some of your beautiful comments here, friends--none of which i saw until after I scribbled this down. Maybe we're all just on the same wavelength, which is why we're here together. And that feels so significant. Thank you for sharing and listening 🎶
Jason Molina haunted me long before he died. Now that he is gone, his music inhabits my life like a beloved, and I pray permanent, ghost. His voice overlays the tape hiss I hear behind my own heartbeat. Today is his ninth deathday. It’s still hard to reconcile a world that doesn’t contain him. The way Jason’s music permeates my existence has always felt unspeakable, but I want to try, like Jason urged by simply singing it straight out on the transcendent Songs: Ohia slow burn Farewell Transmission: “The real truth about it is, we’re all supposed to try.”
There is a spaciousness in Jason’s sparse recordings that both pushes back and reflects the void. Stares into it and dares it to grow while somehow breaking it down into perceivable parts. His music is incapable of artifice. The tensile power of his guitar. The insistent, reedy tenor of his voice. How he could sing with a freight train’s harrowing timbre and speak to human loneliness at the same time. Even when his voice was frail, hesitant, when it broke or faded off, it was powerful. The candor of imperfection in a single song-take will always astonish me. His voice cuts straight through static, through distance. Even the distance of death and the static of time. Maybe especially those.
“I will try, and know no matter what I try, I will be gone but not forever,” he sings, further into Farewell Transmission. And he is right. He is with us even though he has left us. Everything he has given remains.
“Listen,” he sings at the end of that song. Which is what I’ve been doing. Which is what I will always do. No need to try.
“Simply to live, that is my plan”