Farewell Transmission: RIP Jason Molina

“Almost Was Good Enough (Once)” has the closest thing to heavy metal chord changes, which is another, albeit minor, influence on Molina, and the bitterest bite. “It’s been hard doing anything/winter stuck around so long,” are among the bleakest lyrics on the album—“Did you really believe that everyone makes it out?” The country swing of “The Old Black Hen” is the most directly “country” thing on the album. With the lyric, “Tell them that every day I lived/I was trying to sing the blues/The way I find them,” it’s not hard to see why he chose country singer Lawrence Peters to sing this.

Scout Niblett’s voice is sweet on “Peoria Lunch Box Blues,” perhaps necessary to transport the terror of “You see when you are just a kid/They think you won’t remember what they did” to the heavenly heights of “the constellations and Comisky’s lights.” The Neil Young–esque country stomp of “John Henry Split My Heart” creates a sense of American folklore epic. The album closes with the slide guitar ballad “Hold On Magnolia,” in which he admits, “In my life I have had my doubts/But tonight I think I’ve worked it out with all of them,” yet the closing lines, “Hold on Magnolia, I think it’s almost time,” are somewhat eerie.

The lyrics of the songs on this album form a unified statement of theme and tone that ties the set together, like most great rock albums. It’s an essay on specifically American forms of pain and loss and loneliness, as well as a relentless searching for self and strength and a kind of honesty and simplicity, which is remarkable and is so rare that it almost takes you aback in the moment of recognition.

As with all country-derived genres—all singer/songwriter music for that matter—the quality of the artist’s voice instills the music with much of its expressive quality. By the time of Magnolia Electric Co, Molina’s voice had matured to the point of expressing an acerbic wit and a great sense of melancholy simultaneously, yet still maintaining a plainspoken quality, without dramatic flourish, but somewhat confessional. A bit of Midwestern twang in his voice speaks of the soul of the heartland of America.

Molina’s alcohol problems dated back to 2003 at least, the year of Magnolia Electric Co’s release, and by the end of the decade, was taking a toll on the music, as bandmate Jason Groth noted in his “Magnolia Electric Co Tour Diary” on the blog, The Beach Dog: “I think I can safely say that we experienced very high highs and extremely low lows due to Jason’s performance inconsistencies and his difficulty—or perhaps resistance—to communicating with us and others,” Groth recalls. By 2009, Groth adds, the consistency had returned, as Molina kept his drinking mostly to after the shows. The band played Salt Lake several times, and the show at the Urban Lounge May 20, 2009 that I attended must have been one of the “highs”—there was something effortless, artless (without artifice) about his performance. If he had trouble communicating with the band, he connected with the audience immediately, seemingly instinctively, the mixture of pain and joy transmitted so very directly that the audience found it easy to relate to, be moved by and embrace.

By late fall of that year, tour dates were canceled due to “health problems,” and the last show he ever played was a solo date, March 26, 2010 at the Luminaire in London. In September of 2011, a message from his family on the Secretly Canadian website, secretlycanadian.com, explained that he had been in various rehab facilities, without mentioning his exact condition. In a post dated May 5, 2012, the Magnolia Electric Co site went into a little more detail about his hospitalization, and was optimistic about him returning to music. On March 18, 2013, Henry Owings, founder of Chunklet Magazine, wrote on the magazine’s blog: “Jason leaves behind him an enviable body of work that will be continually rediscovered because what Jason wrote wasn’t fashion. It was his heart. It was his love. It was his demons. And ultimately, it brought his life to an end.” The impact of Jason Molina’s passing on other musicians is evidenced by an online bulletin board on the Magnolia Electric Co band website, magnoliaelectricco.com, full of messages from other music notables.

It doesn’t seem that long ago, watching him perform live—only a little over four years since seeing him on the Urban Lounge stage, but the distance is a chasm, a gulf that there’s no way to bridge. The recordings are a kind of connection to that, a phantasm you can conjure up that appears for moments on end before disappearing again. You can return to the music again and again, try to trace Molina’s attempts to map out the course he was traveling, but you can’t follow after him, not in this life.

Jason Molina tried to look unflinchingly at everything through his music—the darkness and the light. In the song, “Farewell Transmission,” there’s the line, “I will be gone, but not forever,” which would make a really formulaic, clichéd closer. But there’s a better line to use for this attempt to encapsulate his work and life, from a little later in the same song: “The real truth about it is/There ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross/I’ve really known that all along.” The quest he was on never ended.