The late Jason Molina began his career by enduring constant comparisons to Will Oldham. The analogy became a lazy one, but its basis is understandable. Molina’s debut single under his Songs: Ohia moniker, 1996’s “Nor Cease Thou Never Now”, was released on Oldham’s own Palace Records, and his quivering, sing-speak cadence bears an unmistakable resemblance to Oldham’s. That association endured—up to and including a 2002 collaboration between Molina and Oldham (plus Appendix Out’s Alasdair Roberts) called Amalgamated Sons of Rest. But there are two other singing-songwriting contemporaries of Molina that make for equally apt comparisons: Ryan Adams and Elliott Smith. Adams’s Gold came out in 2001, and its unabashed ode to heartland-fueled classic rock emboldened a generation of punk-and-indie shitkickers to embrace their FM-radio roots. Smith had turned increasingly away from indie rock and toward a more organic classic-pop sound in the late 90s and early 00s—that is, until his suicide in 2003 cut that evolution short.
That year also marked the release of Molina’s best and most pivotal album: The Magnolia Electric Co., which showcased his own strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name. Molina’s work on Magnolia wasn’t as cryptically oblique as Oldham, as stadium-sized as Adams, or as harmonically polished as Smith. It was, perhaps for the first time in his recording tenure, pure and full Molina. But the album installed itself into the American songwriter landscape circa '03 in a way that closed the circuit among his peers and secretly, quietly willed a pocket of the zeitgeist into being.
The 10th anniversary of The Magnolia Electric Co. is upon us, hence the obligatory 10th-anniversary reissue. The album would have called for the deluxe retrospective treatment even if Molina hadn’t died earlier this year, of organ failure related to his long struggle with alcohol. The respectful euphemisms have flown. The bottom line, however, is harsh: Molina drank himself to death. But Magnolia is not a drunk record, nor is it a drinking record. While legions of alt-country troubadours have drained the tear-in-my-beer song of much of its traditionalist proof, Magnolia is sharp, clear-eyed, and savagely focused.
Beginning the album with “Farewell Transmission” is more than an act of perversity. Molina lays out his blueprint not just for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the album*,* but for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the band. What once was jittery and hesitant in his delivery is now howlingly powerful; gone is Songs: Ohia’s push-and-pull between intimacy and stridency. In its place is red-blood, full-throated, post-hippie country rock, right down to a name that evokes both Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia”. Only this is Cosmic American Music scorched by the heat of reentry, space-cowboy romance for the year of the Columbia shuttle disaster. “Must be a big star about to fall,” Molina rasps in awestruck wonder over amber waves of twang and pedal-steel majesty. The sweetheart of the rodeo now works at a truck stop somewhere on Route 66, handing out the men’s room key and smiling crookedly to hide her missing teeth.
Route 66 is mentioned by name on “John Henry Split My Heart”, and it’s more than just an obvious stab at harnessing American mythology. But it is that—an homage to the folk archetypes of a relatively young nation, yet one that hauls around so much weight. Calling Molina a death-obsessed singer-songwriter would be as off the mark as calling him a drunk singer-songwriter. Still, the gravity of “John Henry”—especially its bruising distortion and spiraling chords—hits like a Dust Bowl twister. And on “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost”, a more hushed meditation on absence and regret builds into a stiff, inexorable shuffle toward death, complete with ghoulish backups by Molina’s frequent foil, Jennie Benford of Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops (the group with whom Molina recorded the sparse Didn’t It Rain in 2002). “Ghost” is almost Halloweenish in its spooky, oohing, voice-and-guitar refrain, but that dead-leaf brittleness raises gooseflesh. And when, on the churning threnody “Almost Was Good Enough”, Molina chants, “Almost no one makes it out,” it’s Crazy Horse galloping along the lip of a cliff.
For every act of negation—self- or otherwise—on Magnolia, there’s an imperative. “Just Be Simple” is Molina’s lone commandment, only he wields his Occam’s razor with a gentle subtlety, even as his arrangements are far more textured and complex than they let on. “Everything you hated me for/ Honey, there was so much more,” he sings softly and cleanly; meanwhile, what he doesn’t sing screams volumes. The obvious reference is to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”, only here there’s no external narrator, no motherly figure through which to filter homespun wisdom. This is a hard-earned, heart-damaged cautionary tale told far too late for caution to do any good, and Molina seems content to judge no one but himself. “Hold on Magnolia” also delivers an order, but again it’s directed inward. “You might be holding the last light I see/ Before the dark finally gets a hold of me,” he pleads over lonesome strums before adding doubtfully, “Hold on, Magnolia/ I know what a true friend you’ve been.” The eerie similarity between “Magnolia” and “Molina” isn’t lost on anyone.
The dark-horse tracks of Magnolia have only gotten better with age. Presented back-to-back in the middle of the album, “The Old Black Hen” and “Peoria Lunch Box Blues” feature guests vocalists—grizzled country singer Lawrence Peters on the former and British-born singer Scout Niblett on the latter. Both are excellent. On “Black Hen”, Peters drawls like molasses across a honky-tonk funeral waltz; “Peoria”, on the other hand, conjures a mystic, distorted-folk lope worthy of Sandy Denny-era Fairport Convention. More than just being strong on their own, though, this one-two punch gives Molina a breather from all the turned-earth bleakness—plus it describes the entirety of the spectrum he draws from: orthodox Americana on one hand and otherworldly atmosphere on the other.
When it comes to the bonus tracks, not a moment is wasted. The complete set of guitar-plus-vocals demos—originally included in a limited-edition run of Magnolia upon its first release—shows the bones of “Black Hen” and “Peoria” with Molina himself supplying the vocals, studies in haunted restraint that recall the Songs: Ohia of old. “Just Be Simple” is given the most felicitous treatment as a skeleton of its full-band self. Every crevice and shiver of Molina’s voice is allowed to hang in empty space, naked and aching. The pair of newly restored outtakes, “The Big Game Is Every Night” and “Whip Poor Will”, are essential to the album; hearing them in the context of the established track listing, it’s hard to imagine how Magnolia ever did without them. “Whip Poor Will” is light and sweet, a melancholic confection in which Molina plucks at taut strings and duets with Benford, whom Molina begs to “Sing it, sister, one more time.” Their harmonies on the chorus are jagged, uneven, vinegary, perfect.
But it’s “The Big Game Is Every Night” that truly astounds: 10 glorious minutes long, the song pulses like a severed vein, its rhythm slowly ebbing out as Molina sings, “The last thing I see/ Let it be me helping/ Honestly, let it be me working/ On being a better me.” Only Molina knew if he fulfilled that promise to himself before he died. Ultimately, that’s all that matters about Magnolia, regardless of its maker’s deserved place in the pantheon alongside Oldham, Adams, and Smith: the way Molina sank his roots so deep, they took up more than they could bear.
