The fortunes of Secretly Canadian have always been tightly intertwined with those of Jason Molina. In the 1990s, a group of friends in Bloomington, Indiana, heard his debut 7" for Will Oldham’s Palace Records, fell under the spell of that careening voice, and drove all the way to New York City to sign him. While not the fledgling label’s first release—SC001 is a reissue by North Dakota band June Panic—Molina was Secretly Canadian’s charter signing and would prove to be a franchise artist. Throughout his 15-year career, he built up a formidable catalog first as Songs: Ohia and later as Magnolia Electric Co., and the label has treated his music with great affection, reverence, and purpose, especially on 2007’s Sojourner, which collected stray Magnolia Electric Co. recordings in a wooden box. After Molina’s sad passing last year following a long battle with alcoholism, Secretly Canadian began reissuing his back catalog, obscure releases and popular albums alike.
The latest posthumous package is Journey On: Collected Singles, which gathers nine of Molina’s first 7" singles, including that first Palace release, a few one-offs, and his sides of splits with Oneida, Scout Niblett, and Glen Hansard. The vinyl comes in a canvas box with a CD, a wooden turntable adapter emblazoned with his crowssbow insignia, and a booklet with liner notes by Chicago writer Erin Osmon. It’s a handsome set, of course, and essentially a prequel to Sojourner—right down to the pinstriped record sleeves. If Magnolia Electric Co. was specifically an album-oriented project, one that fed into his fascination with Neil Young and other classic rock acts, then Journey On repositions Songs: Ohia as a singles act, one best served by the strictures and confines of the 7" format. This is not entirely true, of course. Songs: Ohia’s spectral folk music inspired a number of excellent albums during the late 1990s and early 2000s, including its self-titled debut full-length and 1999’s Axxess & Ace.
As Osmon writes, the 7" medium was chosen as much for its financial benefits as for its aesthetic appeal: “The goal of the 7”? To burn brightly, to share and inspire via a portable format that artists could afford to self-produce and ship and fan kids with shallow pockets could afford to buy at basement shows and ramschackle all-ages joints.” At this stage in his career, it was a good format for Molina, and Journey On reconnects him with this particular DIY scene, even if the collection might outprice such origins. His first release, “Boys,” was pressed onto a flexidisc for Wingnut magazine, which credited the song to “unknown artist” even as the front cover promised a “giant interview with the cryptic author of ‘Songs: Ohia.’” Nearly twenty years later “Boys” appeared on a flexidisc in Wingnut magazine, it’s hard to imagine how music this mysterious would have originally emerged, or how Molina and others cultivated that sense of shadowy enigma.
“Cryptic” is a perfect description of Molina’s approach to music, as these aren’t songs so much as they are ghost stories, possessed of a campfire intimacy and austere accompaniment. Most feature Molina alone with his guitar, occasionally with the distant patter of drums to suture the melodies together. Jennie Benford, of Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops, occasionally stops by for company, her voice adding a compassionate counterpart to his. Even when Molina plays with a full backing band (sometimes featuring his label founders), the music sounds skeletal, intimate, hushed, tortured. “Haunted” is a cliché for this style of music, yet there does seem to be some kind of hellhound on his trail; the world presses heavy on these songs. “It’s not just evil that stalks the American sky,” he sings on “The Gray Tower.” “It’s not just bad luck, it’s just what can happen.” What’s beyond evil? Nothing, and that nothing is much more frightening.
The 7" format also allowed Molina the freedom to entertain new lyrical and musical concepts without having to fit the results into a longer work or worry about how they compliment other such experiments. Journey On rambles from the lo-fi dirge of “Boys” to the more polished acoustic picking and strumming of “Black Link to Fire Link”, yet he also understood the importance of silence to these songs. The most dramatic moments are when the instruments fall away to leave only his only his voice and the hesitant strums of his electric guitar. On “Keep It Steady,” the quiet between notes and syllables might even be louder than those notes and syllables.
A few of these songs would not be constrained by the 7" format. “How to Be Perfect Men”, for example, appeared on 1999’s Axxess & Ace, and “Lioness” anchored 2000’s The Lioness. The emphasis on format, however, means that we can hear these songs in a slightly different context, and “Lioness” in particular resonates with much greater intensity here. The album version sounds like a rock song, with barbed guitar licks and an insistent tempo that underscores the chorus: “You can’t get here fast enough!” By contrast, the Journey On rendition turns the song into a duet, with Benford presumably voicing the title character. The pace plods, as though the moment before consummation is the most vivid aspect of such all-consuming lust. “Whether you save me, whether you savage me, I want my last look to be the moon in your eyes,” Molina sings, without flinching. It’s impossible to tell which would be preferable, and that ambiguity ranks the song among Molina’s most illuminating recorded moments.
That’s why it’s crucial to listen to these eighteen songs on vinyl. The CD plays like a long, meandering album that gently dulls some of the most intense moments here. To fully grasp these harrowing songs, it’s necessarily to play a side, then flip the record; to unsleeve and resleeve the vinyl between spins; to slip the adapter on and off the spindle; to consider each song individually. This is not a new way to hear Molina–in fact, it’s actually the oldest way to experience his music. Yet, the process of playing these 7" singles makes these songs burn more brightly.
