For roughly a decade and a half now, Jason Molina has been among the best-kept secrets in rock and roll. His first band, Songs:Ohia, debuted with a limited edition two-song 7” (“Nor Cease Thou Never Now”) on Will Oldham’s label, Palace Records in 1996. Soon after, Songs:Ohia moved to Secretly Canadian, where Molina has stayed ever since. Between ’96 and ’02 he released nearly two dozen records: a grab-bag of singles, EP’s, full-lengths (including The Lioness in 2000 and Didn’t It Rain in 2002), and split 7”s with such artists as Oneida, Scout Niblett, My Morning Jacket, and Alasdair Roberts (aka Appendix Out). In 2003, Molina re-formed his group as the Magnolia Electric Co., and put out what has to have been one of that year’s best rock records, “indie” or otherwise. Since then, he’s released another dozen or so records (again, across the spectrum, length-wise), some as Magnolia Electric Co., and some as Jason Molina. In 2009 Magnolia Electric Co. released Josephine, a mournful album that brought the band the closest its ever come to playing straight-ahead country. He also released a collaboration with Will Johnson of the Austin, TX band Centro-matic. A fall tour was planned in support of the self-titled Molina & Johnson, but had to be canceled on account of an illness of Molina’s, the particulars of which he prefers not to discuss.
Somewhere along the way, after a lifetime in the American Middle West, Molina moved to London. When I think of Molina’s music, I think of landscapes, and a perpetual tension between competing vastnesses—the sweep of a valley or a shoreline or a mountain; the interior wilderness of a single spirit or heart. But even an enormous space can be intimate, insular, confined in its infinitude. There’s an image I keep coming back to from the twenty-seventh chapter of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth: Axel and his uncle are many miles underground yet find themselves standing on the shore of a sea, the scene lit brighter and stranger than moonlight by luminous vapors that hover near the ceiling of a cavern so huge and high it might as well be a black sky.
In May 2010, after a few preliminary emails, I called Molina in London and we spoke for the better part of two hours. In person, he was as affable and generous as his music is moody and allusive—perhaps moreso. Since there was no particular tour or record serving as the occasion for our conversation, I felt free to range widely with my questions. To put it plainly: I asked all the things that I wanted to know. – Justin Taylor
JUSTIN TAYLOR: How’s London? You’ve been there, what, like a year now?
JASON MOLINA: I’ve been here a couple of years.
JT: Oh, no kidding.
JM: Yeah. How is it? Well, it’s a cultural study, for sure. When I first got here, it was very interesting. I’ve worked in libraries and museums a lot, over my working life. After scrubbing dishes for so long I decided that I wanted something dryer and moldier. (Laughs) All the museums here are free, and so there are some great, great opportunities for me to just stand around and read history books and look at the things in the museums. It’s unlike any big city I’ve ever lived in and I think the last time I’ve counted I’ve lived in over 33 different towns. That’s a hell of a lot for someone who’s not even 40.
JT: That is a hell of a lot. Around the U.S. you mean?
JM: Correct. This is the only place in Europe that I’ve ever lived.
JT: What inspired the move?
JM: A combination of me wanting to take a chance and my wife getting a kick-ass job. So it was like, well, when else is someone going to pay for you to move? I would have moved to about anywhere. I can’t name a city that I wouldn’t have moved to. You could have put me to Ypsilanti and I probably would have taken the chance at the change. But still my heart is really in the Midwest.
JT: I get the very distinct impression that place and region are crucially important to you. Listening to your music, I always have such a clear sense of environment—not always of which environment, necessarily, but of there being one and that the song is in it, or creating it. Josephine was grounded in the south. The Shendoah, and Shiloh—
JM: —Knoxville—
JT: —Knoxville, yeah. Also, I was re-listening to the very first Songs:Ohia album, and I somehow realized that all—or nearly all—the song titles on the album are place names. I’m not from the Midwest, so I didn’t know this by virtue of, like, recognition, but once the idea occurred to me I began industriously Googling the song titles, and I kept getting maps back for places like Cabwaylingo and Gauley Bridge.
JM: All of those are Appalachian place names, places that I have been and wrote songs and where I grew up and where my family is from.
JT: You grew up in West Virginia?
JM: Mostly West Virginia. Between WV and Lorain, Ohio, which is directly on Lake Erie in the dead center in the state, about halfway between Toledo and Youngstown. I grew up with lighthouses and coalmines. I’ve been working on trying to put that into a song, because I grew up in a place where they mine the coal, and I also grew up in a place where they ship the coal to the rest of the country. 
JT: There’s a lot of mines in your music, not so many lighthouses at least that I noticed—maybe I just haven’t picked up on them—but one of my favorite things about your albums, and about your work in general, is that there’s these key words or images that recur constantly. I actually made a list of as many of the major ones as I could come up with, and mines was on there. Let’s see what else— stars, flame—
JM: —The moon, the horizon—
JT:—The dark, the desert, electricity—
JM: Crossroads? Did that make it to the list?
JT: Damn, I didn’t catch that one. Okay, it’s on there now. But this is one of the main things I’ve been wanting to talk to you about: How conscious is this process of composition?
JM: Think a second and rephrase that question, because I think I get your gist, but try it one more time.
JT: Okay, I think what I’m asking is, Is it a formal strategy, or is it something you find yourself really compelled to do? I guess you don’t have to go either/or on that.
JM: I think of a song as something you build. It’s not something that you do, it’s not something that comes out of your gut. It’s like you have bricks, you have mortar, you have a trowel – You don’t have a building plan yet, you just have all the raw materials and you just start building it and you hope to god you get something good. But as far as the imagery goes, I’ve always treated it as a rebus. These images all fit into a storyline that is completely open to the interpretation of anybody who listens to it. Maybe you don’t even have to like the music. If you sit down and look at all the lyrics to all the songs, you’ll see that there is a theme, but it’s not running in a straight line. It’s like the dawn coming on, or dusk. It’s always in that purple-grey area. But when I say a mule, I really mean a mule, and when I say the horizon I really mean the horizon.
JT: I love this concept of the rebus. I wonder how that extends from individual songs to building albums, and to what I’ve heard you refer to elsewhere as “song cycles.”
JM: Well, it’s songwriting algebra, I find one angle and that is usually just a song or a riff and I know that it’s going to be the cornerstone for the entire record. So, I have yet to sit down and say “this is going to be the theme of the entire record,” but I’ll write eight songs, throw away seven. One seems to be very interesting and I try to pursue whatever it is that is interesting about that song, and that’s the way I weave the tapestry of all the lyrical themes for each song. I’ve written every single record to be one piece. There should be a side A and a side B. And when I start I don’t know how many songs will be on the record. Sometimes I’ll record ten songs that are thematically related, and then they just never make the record because it doesn’t seem to be a cohesive piece. The worst thing you can do is weave that tapestry and leave some holes in there, where you’re like “I think this song is pretty good, it doesn’t really fit with the others but I’m going to leave it in there.” That’s criminal to me, because it wrecks the beauty of everything else you’ve done.
JT: What is fascinating to me about this is that these ideas sounds a lot like what I hear from contemporary poets. Especially, the idea of, on the hand the serial poem, coming down from Jack Spicer, and then at the same time, which I guess is kind of Spicer also, the chapbook, which for contemporary poetry the chapbook seems to me increasingly like the base unit of composition.
JM: I’ll riff on that. I think chapbooks are amazing. They were the precursor to the independent record label. They are usually put out by small publishers that take great pride in what they do. Down to the paperweight and the artwork and the typeface, they take great care and they don’t care that they are only given only 30-40 pages. They produce these beautiful things.
I am a huge book collector. I probably have, I don’t even want to think, but it’s probably approaching two or three thousand books. I’ve never counted, but my house is full of books and guitars. I think a chapbook is like a music broadside. It’s a beautiful way to present song, and I think that you’ll see an interesting project, hopefully the very next record. It’s going to be a while, because I’ve had some serious health issues, but what I’m working on is something that’s never been done. I’m positive of this. it’s not Luddite, but it definitely harkens back more to the literary world than the music world, and it’s not going to be a book. So you can thank your lucky stars that I didn’t write a shitty book about a horse dying in the desert, because that is probably what I would write.
JT: I’m tempted to ask you for more details, but you seem to have a pretty firm idea of what you’re willing to give away and not. I mean that answer was pretty tightly-constructed, it felt like, as far as saying certain things and not saying certain things.
JM: Well, I’m not being cagey here, but I’ve seen this happen before with other artists that I know – when you state what your next project is going to be and you don’t deliver in a very specific way that fits what is in the mind of each individual listener—they get all pissed off. So If you say, “I’m going to write a record about World War I bi-planes,” and then it turns out all the songs are references to pilot names, and battles, and the types of bombs, and the amount of ammo that they have in the machine guns, that really freaks out people that really just wanted to hear about the bi-planes. So I’ve tried to lay off giving the very specifics. One beautiful thing about being on an independent label – and Secretly Canadian must be one of the best record labels in the world, is that I could hand in a record of me just playing “Taps,” and they would put it out as a record, if I said that that was my new record. It is a beautiful thing when you can give yourself the space, or you have been given the space, to just make a piece of music. I try my damnedest to do that, and I know that there’s a bunch of people sitting there in Bloomington, Indiana who are going to stress out about how to sell this thing. It’s sort of like I’m the cannonball and they’re the cannoneers.
JT: I want to go back to the book collecting. Are there particular authors or eras or anything that sort of guides your collection, or is it more freewheeling?
JM: Sure. 19th century American authors: you name ‘em, I love ‘em. As far as poetry goes, pretty much centered on Irish and Scottish poets. I religiously avoid things like Byron and a lot of the big English heavy hitters.
JT: How come?
JM: They were fucking racists! And it’s in their poetry! I’m not going to stand reading three hundred lines, and figuring out the meter, and getting into the story, then land on this insane racism. I just can’t do it. But I like all the Chicago poets, pretty much anything on the Black Sparrow press. Then as far as the history stuff I collect, it’s sort of like folklore collections. 300 pages of stories about Bachelor’s Grove in Chicago, or Gore Orphanage in Ohio. I love to see the collections of these stories because you can distill them down to pretty much three to five facts that are in every one single one, maybe a name is changed but it is still the same thing. This is a thing passed down passed down passed down, you know. Stuff like that. I believe strongly that that’s what sparks poetry, from the troubadour tradition. I like math books, too. I collect math books.
JT: Math books?
JM: Yeah, like student math books. I like to see a 1923 7th grade student math book, because usually in the back it has a pocket with a ruler, or some kind of notation in there, it just brings me back to the fact that songs are built like that – maybe you’re not going to be Stephen Hawking, but you might be able to build a great song, a song is just a part and a part and a part, that’s all it is, it’s just like writing a book, it’s just the chapters go by much faster.
To read the second installment of this interview click here.
Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy and the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. He lives in Brooklyn and at http://www.justindtaylor.net/ pan> ...
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