Transmissions From The Molinaverse - 22nd January

A regular update on all things JM.

Photograph by Matt Pence

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Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all doing well & have had a good start to your year!

S&D is ready to get going again then…

We’re starting the year with a Molinaverse edition to catch up and lay the plans for the year ahead.

2023 will no doubt be a year full of meaningful moments for us fans of Jason & his music - twenty years since the release of the defining Magnolia Electric Co., twenty-five since the release of ‘Imapala’, Jason’s 50th birthday and of course ten years since he passed away this March.

We mean to mark all of these events by celebrating Jason’s life and music - digging deep into these records, sharing demo’s, talking to those involved in their creation and digging into his enduring influence among musicians today. A lot of this will take a few more weeks to pull together so please bear with us but we are so excited to share some great things with you in the coming weeks and months.

For now, this week in January marks the release of three important records in Molina’s catalogue: ‘The Lioness’, ‘Pyramid Electric Co.’ and ‘Trials & Errors’ - we’re also sharing a beautiful composition and tribute that some of you may already be familiar with but is worth sharing again.

All the best,

S&D

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A Moment For Jason Molina

NPR’s Tom Huizenga sums this up beautifully: “This beautiful and meditative tribute to the late singer-songwriter, performed by Irish guitarist Simon Jermyn, is composer Caleb Burhans' wistful dispatch to a cherished friend he never met. The music unfolds slowly before shifting into a mesmerizing groove that takes the mind into a very deep space”

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“Want to feel my heart break, if it must break, in your jaws”

17th January 2000 - Songs: Ohia's release ‘The Lioness’.

Secretly Canadian’s press release:

Opening with an epic and ending with a little spartan ode, THE LIONESS is songwriter Jason Molina’s fourth and most dynamic and empassioned full-length album to date. Recorded at Chem19 Studio in Glasgow, Scotland, with his Glaswegian friends Aidan Moffat and David Gow of Arab Strap, and Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out, as well as with Songs: Ohia veterans Geof Comings and Jonathan Cargill, it is, on its exterior, a much darker affair than each of its predecessors. Perhaps it was the Scottish weather and company which gave it such a feel, for at the core of THE LIONESS, there is a warmth and tenderness unmatched by previous Songs: Ohia recordings. Indeed, this is a dark and sultry record, but not a melancholy one. While the last Songs: Ohia album AXXESS & ACE was an album which revealed many of the painful truths about love through its loss, this is an album about the beauty of love as seen from its rich foundational and experiential stages.

https://secretlycanadian.com/record/the-lioness/

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18th January 2005 - Magnolia Electric Co. release ‘Trials & Errors’

Secretly Canadian’s press release:

Recorded only a few months after they had formed, Trials & Errors captures Jason Molina’a new band Magnolia Electric Co. on one magical night in Brussels in 2003. It is a scintillating audio document of one of America’s most important contemporary live acts evolving into something really special and doing what it does best – whipping an audience into a frenzy. This set captures Molina & Co right after Molina had retired the Songs: Ohia machine in favor of this powerful new vision of his. Two years in the planning process, the new project took its name from the last Songs: Ohia full-length album. Composed of a nucleus of four members, this particular show captures the newly christened band on its first tour in its earliest state. Still a four-piece with Pete Schreiner providing the back beat drum pulse, Mike Kapinus on bass and melancholic trumpet, and the two Jason’s dueling over guitar solo space: Molina’s down-tuned guitar matching his now settled tenor voice, and Groth’s Creedence-channeling rhythm guitar and solos filling out the upper register. With Molina as the principal songwriter, the songs are as classic as his fans have come to expect over the course of seven Songs: Ohia full-lengths (all released between ’96 and ’03). With his new band, however, fans can finally enjoy a stable & more-than-able rhythm section that just gets tougher and tougher with each performance. Like a juggernaut that simply chews up everything in its path, on Trials & Errors, the new Magnolia grinds through three old Molina favorites (two from Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain and one from the Songs: Ohia album Magnolia Electric Co), three songs which will be released on the upcoming Magnolia Electric Co studio album (out Spring 2005) as well as four songs that will only exist on record in their live form as presented here.

https://secretlycanadian.com/record/trials-errors/

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20th January 2004 - Jason Molina releases Pyramid Electric Co.

Secretly Canadian’s press release:

This is a record of lullabies for adults – an album to lull them to a place they remember only at the quietest of moments. The guitar is a slow dance where melody and rhythm take each other by the hand. Remember the first time you heard the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”? Pyramid Electric Co is “Gimme Shelter” slowed down to 16 RPM. Jason Molina captures the same epic struggle in tone & weight. Most of the album it’s just Molina in a room with a guitar, except on one tune he’s at the piano; he is Nina Simone and he is singing his guts out. Although the Songs: Ohia front-man is all alone on this album (the first under his birth name), this is not a sparse recording. He is surrounded on all sides by ghosts and an otherworldly sonic ambience. We have engineer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, The Faint, Racebannon) to thank for that, for making this a well-populated album of one. After having worked together on Songs: Ohia’s Ghost Tropic, it seemed a natural fit. Molina slept in the studio, writing late into the night, then Mogis would arrive in the morning and document the tunes written the night prior. Yes, this loner is singing in a room as though no one will ever hear him, as though he’s entombed for eternity. Or perhaps it’s just that he was trapped in the flatlands of Nebraska for one especially lonely Winter season. On Pyramid Electric Co, Molina’s low-pitched vocals resemble those of West African singer Ali Farka Toure. This whole record, in fact, seems to borrow quite a bit from African musical tradition. The guitar shuffles back and forth like a pulse. And this heart has melody as its guide. There’s a timeless cadence to this song and you’re not quite sure how old you are anymore. It slips every now and again, like an old goat up the hillside, but it always catches itself.

https://secretlycanadian.com/record/pyramid-electric-co/