Jason Molina’s prolificacy is at once extraordinary and anxiety-inducing. The leader of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. created an immense and unexampled body of work in his 39 years, teeming with an assemblage of images drawn from nature, travel, his relationships, and his experiences as a boy on the banks of Lake Erie—the moons, magnolias, owls, and big cats he so deftly positioned as a reflections of his heart and psyche, over autodidactic acoustic guitar meditations and explosive electric roots rock. In the ’90s and early ’00s, Molina’s sensibility and pace were unrivaled, and today he stands among the greatest songwriters of the era.
For newcomers, finding an entry point into his massive catalog can feel intimidating. For fans, the exercise of knowing Molina through his work becomes a labor of love, an act of hard work that the singer-songwriter, who religiously punched his personal songwriting clock like a 9-to-5 job, would have no doubt appreciated. It’s especially true because he almost never explained himself, or his songs. It’s an elusive quality I’ve become intimately familiar with as his biographer. Almost five years after his untimely death related to alcohol abuse, new work from Molina’s busy mind and dedicated output continues to emerge, and it’s an exhilarating thing when the songs recall a period of Molina that is particularly precious to fans, and can stand on their own as fully realized reflections of Molina’s style. Such is the case with a pair of tunes now available through the Temporary Residence label.
With the turn of the new millennium emerged two distinct sides of Jason Molina. In 2000, he recorded and released the contemplative and meandering meditations of Ghost Tropic, written and performed largely off the cuff with friend and collaborator Alasdair Roberts in Lincoln, Neb. The following year, Molina drove a rented jet-black Crown Victoria to Philadelphia to record Didn’t It Rain, an earthy song-set rooted in the ethos of blue-collar workers in the industrial landscapes of Chicagoland. Sonically disparate as they seem, the recordings endure as the earliest representations of each side of Molina’s coin, a binary quality that became increasingly acute through his solo works and collaborations with his band Magnolia Electric Co.
Between those two albums, Molina created a handful of lesser-known works in the apartment he rented in Chicago, a space adorned with only a 4-track recorder, a vocal mic recommended by Steve Albini, a collection of vintage guitars, and some auxiliary keyboards and percussion. Among the songs he wrote there was a one-off single for the Temporary Residence label. At the time, the 18-minute untitled track Molina submitted was his entry into the label’s Travels in Constants series, where artists would record an EP that centered on the theme of distance. Newly reissued, the sprawling track is a defining precursor to the contemplative works Molina would soon create and release under his own name. For the purposes of the reissue, the label christened the formerly untitled track “Travels in Constants,” and included as a B-side the song “Howler,” a lyrical theme not unfamiliar among the many metaphorical wolves Molina sang of in his short life.
There’s a classical flare in the acoustic guitar picking of the title track, reminiscent of “The Body Burned Away” from Ghost Tropic. The quality is so similar that it’s plausible that the riff was either intended for, or inspired by, the session. But like so much with the elusive late songwriter, he never explained the work. “We were talking a lot back then and he used to joke that the ‘Travels in Constants’ track was ‘probably too out-there’ for his proper albums,” Temporary Residence’s Jeremy DeVine explains via email. But that’s the extent of the exposition Molina provided.
The track is canonical in its use of time-honored Molina imagery, including the moon, the owl, and the black versions of those two things, holding fort beside them. “The moon’s above like a sickle,” Molina insists, as if any moment it’ll drop and reap harvest. Its palpable intimacy and hushed posture peel back the curtain on Molina’s home studio, the sacred space that served as an incubator for his most beloved works, including Didn’t It Rain and what is widely considered his opus, 2003’s The Magnolia Electric Co. It’s as if he’s inviting the listener to spy on him.
”Howler” has an intro that’s similarly pensive, filling the recesses of Molina’s music room and 4-track with guitar reverb and programming from a primitive keyboard, a lower fidelity take on the driving line behind “Being in Love” from The Lioness. Molina sings in his stirring tenor that he’ll write his shadows and his echoes out in blood, presumably a pact with his muses. That if there is nothing else there is a being, a howler, that will both drive and haunt him.
Both sides of the “Travels in Constants” single foreshadow 2004’s Pyramid Electric Co. and other future solo works. While perhaps not the easiest entry point for the uninitiated, for Molina fans, the two songs are an invaluable glance into his divine spaces. The single’s cover, too, is personal—one in an endless string of abstract drawings Molina created throughout his life, traced from a credit card and filled with oil crayon gestures. It’s a profound chance to know him, without explanation.
