Songs: Ohia – The Magnolia Electric Co. 15 years on

Last year on singer Otis Gibbs’ podcast the founder of the Secretly Canadian record label Ben Swanson was asked where people should start with Jason Molina’s music. Without hesitation, he said The Magnolia Electric Co., Molina’s seventh album under the guise of Songs: Ohia (he subsequently started releasing music under the 'Magnolia Electric Co.' moniker). 

It’s no surprise to hear Swanson suggest that unfamiliar listeners bypass the earlier work, at least initially. Molina’s previous output was uniformly lo-fi and spartan – a succession of requiems and scratchy blues, recorded and delivered without fuss. They established him as a songwriter and lyricist of real class and there’s not a dud among them. But something changed with The Magnolia Electric Co. – a switch was flipped, which led to Molina abandoning his lo-fi ideals for a rockier, more fleshed out and polished sound. In Erin Osmon’s excellent Molina biography of last year, someone recalls the subject saying he’d written something “more like country songs, or songs you’d hear on the radio”, and this is certainly true, this is by a distance the most approachable of Molina’s work. There are flashes of both Neil Young and of Crazy Horse throughout.

A case could be argued that there are better Molina songs elsewhere: conceptually, the title track on The Lioness; for its simplicity, Alone With the Owl from his collection of solo dirges Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go; the wonderful Blue Chicago Moon from Didn’t It Rain. But 15 years after its release and five years after Molina’s death, The Magnolia Electric Co. stands as the shining pinnacle of his nomadic career. It hits heights not aimed for by previous records, nor reached by those that came afterwards.

To these ears, this record is the realisation of Molina’s own world view. It is steeped in his background and his upbringing in the Mid-West. This is the sound of the Rust Belt creaking to life, the rolling guitar on opening track Farewell Transmission is like a siren telling factory workers their shift has finished. The Old Black Hen is the sound of those same workers, Appalachian migrants likely, laying down their tools and taking up a fiddle after a day’s labour.

These are values Molina held dearly: until alcohol took over his life completely, he would rise at 5am, make tea, and spend hours writing songs, or doing writing exercises to sharpen his lyricism. He would take shifts in the guitar shop in Bloomington, Indiana, sometimes because he needed the money, but others because he just wanted to work. He was proud of his working class, trailer park roots, and this album is their embodiment.

It retains the mysticism of previous outings (when briefing the sleeve artist William Schaff, he said simply: “When I was making this album, I was thinking a lot about owls, pyramids and magnolias”) and throughout there are references to his obsession with death, ghosts, history and the occult. Indeed, I've Been Riding With the Ghost is a nod to all the demons he carried with him everywhere. This is also the sound of the white, male depression that would eventually help to kill Molina. It's not as immediately obvious as it is on his lo-fi dirges, but read between the lines, listen between the riffs and it’s there. 'I ain’t getting better, I am only getting behind,' he sings on top of a rollicking guitar on I've Been Riding.... 'Hold on Magnolia, I hear that station bell ring / You might be holding the last light I see / Before the dark finally gets a hold of me,' goes Hold on Magnolia.

But, it's also hard to listen to this album and not hear hope in it. This was marked progress for Molina: the first time he’d planned recording sessions so meticulously, the first time he’d properly completed chord patterns before arriving in the studio. It signified professionalism that was lacking elsewhere and perhaps pointed to a brighter future.

Unfortunately, we know that this was really the start of his decline. On 16 March 2013, Molina was found dead in his home in Indianapolis. He had drank himself to death and died alone, an isolated figure, detached from the community-driven, obsessive collaborator of yore. A decade and a half after its release, few albums have come close to matching the achievement of The Magnolia Electric Co., the crowning work of a genius we lost far too soon.

---

The Magnolia Electric Co. was released on 3 Mar 2003 via Secretly Canadian