Jason Molina on riding with the ghost.
The prolific singer-songwriter, Secretly Canadian stalwart, and brains behind Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Company and his own solo projects, talks about touring in the old world and his plans for the future.
.MP3: Jason Molina - Get Out Get Out Get Out
.ISM: What were the last 3 human words?
JM: Well I mean the whole song is more of a question than a… yeah it’s more of a question. It’s something even I wonder about.
.ISM: It seems to someone looking at your back catalogue that you just appeared on Secretly Canadian one year as a fully formed talented act, what came before that?
JM: Well I’d been playing music since I was a kid. You know I taught myself how to play guitar basically and just from listening to the radio I would just play along to the radio. I would throw on a record and try to come up with some version of that song. At the same time I started writing music pretty early so by the time I was about ten I could basically play to a decent enough level that I was constantly writing songs so by the time I was twelve or thirteen I was in a fully functioning band and we wrote entirely original material. So from that point on I played and toured a lot and wrote a lot of music so I had been doing it for quite a while by the time the Secretly Canadian started as a label. I ended up being one of the very first releases, but I changed, I mean the style was really evolving even from the very first record. I was trying to put a finger on how to be able to do these songs with or without a band. So you know sometimes the guitarist couldn’t make it to the show and I always felt like that’s no reason to cancel the whole show, maybe there’s a way that I could be a solo artist.
.ISM: You are definitely are someone with a constantly evolving sound, where do you feel like that is heading?
JM: I have no idea, I never have an idea about that. I once in a while have a solid idea of how I want a record to sound. Before there’s any songs basically I say this is the kind of record that I want to make and these are the kinds of songs and themes and types of lyrics that I want to work on for a few months and, you know, sometimes it’s a success, sometimes it turns out to be something totally different, but it’s always the goal to make a record that sounds different than the last.
.ISM: What were you objectives when you sat down to start making ‘Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go’?
JM: More or less I just gave myself the challenge to compose an entire record in a studio. And I gave myself I think I had like 2 and half days basically to do it, maybe almost three days, and I wasn’t entirely sure where I wanted to go lyrically with that record, I just knew that if I got in there and worked really, really hard that all the songs would somehow be linked lyrically. And then it only took about one or two songs and I realised I had a lot of ideas for the types of songs I wanted. And because I was very happy with Ghost Tropic which basically written entirely in the studio, and also Pyramid Electric Company was also basically all written in the studio. This literally just means you’re in the studio and you sleep in the studio and you wake up in the morning and you record songs. And doing that in a proper studio is fantastic, it’s a rare, rare, rare occurrence, I have only done that a few times.
.ISM: So you go into these intense two day sessions without any lyrics or arrangements?
JM: Well basically as I said there’s at least a framework for the song , in the more recent recording sessions it’s been recording songs that we have actually had a while to work on, on tour.
.ISM: What led you to ditching the Songs: Ohia moniker?
JM: It wasn’t a… well basically it was because it had come up on the ten year anniversary of putting out record under that name. And you know I thought I was writing a different type of song, and I really didn’t revisit most of those old songs for years and years. And I really felt like that ten years was a separate entity, totally, and it was really that simple. It wasn’t a calculated effort to write songs in a different way. It’s just that after about ten years of doing it and touring a lot I realised I’d started to be less self-conscious about how the songs might be interpreted and didn’t see that happening in the early days. I would write the song and if I felt like it was a good song so be it, but if there was something that didn’t set right with me just because I felt that it would be misinterpreted or the people would have a hard time dealing with what the lyrics were all about or the types of recordings I did, you know, I would change it so that it felt more comfortable all around. But these days I don’t really write with an audience in mind.
.ISM: When you talk about interpretation, does that include the press? Is there anything we do to piss you off?
JM: I really don’t read the press and reviews. It’s a waste of time. Sometimes someone has a great article or a great review. So I understand that press has it’s place, I guess. And there are a lot of people who get their music based on what they read about a band or a review of a record turns someone on to a record that they might never have ever heard. I never buy my music based on that, and, like I never go to see a movie that I read a review of unless it is something pretty obscure really interesting that I would never have heard of.
.ISM: Must be quite tempting to read the reviews though.
JM: Well, it’s fine to just glance at them, it’s, you know, if it’s something that they get it totally wrong, they already have their opinion and it’s already in ink, I’m not going to track every interviewer down and say I think you totally misconstrued what I was saying. Like I said, it’s more interesting to me to just concentrate on writing music.
.ISM: So what attracts you to coming to Europe and playing places like the Luminaire?
JM: Nothing special. This is in particular a fantastic venue, it sounds great, there’s a very devoted music audience here who really appreciate the bands, I have friends who’ve played here and have had similar experiences, so once in a while you have a really fantastic venue. But to me any show in Europe, or wherever, it’s just another show. I definitely don’t do this for fun, it’s not a vacation for me. I don’t really get to see the world, it looks like I do, but I see the fucking highway and I see the crummy backstage of a club and then start over the next day and do the same thing.
.ISM: Do you enjoy your time on stage?
JM: Yeah, I mean that’s the main, the main draw for me, is that in that hour or so that I’m on stage I really am able to reconfigure songs and lyrics and change it around. So to me I don’t consider myself really a performer, I’m just a songwriter. And yes I’m on stage and yes there’s an audience there and I appreciate that they pay their hard earned money to come see live music and buy the record and support the band. But yeah that hour on stage is really, it means everything to me.
.ISM: How does the experience differ when you are with a larger band like with Magnolia?
JM: It’s well, I mean, you actually have a musician or group of musicians to interact with rather than just you and the audience. Cause’ some nights it’s just interesting to talk to the audience and make jokes and other nights it’s more interesting to just bury yourself in the set and not really have a verbal dialogue with the audience, but you know with the band the concentration is on the dynamics, and given the limited structure of the songs and the basic framework of it, how can we reconfigure it in real time. Both experiences are great but I don’t prefer one to another.
.ISM: So what kind of music is coming out these days that gets you excited?
JM: Well I mostly listen to old country music and old blues these days. I’d say that I really don’t keep up with current music. You know every night I get to play with a support band and sometimes I see three bands in that one night that I was really excited about and I’ll buy their records or they’ll give me a copy of it. So basically I’d just say the stuff that’s exciting are the bands that are playing live a lot, touring around and really working hard at delivering their songs in a way that’s not just getting it from a record shop, getting it from a computer. I like the human element.
.ISM: So do you find is more attractive about music that was made in days gone by?
JM: Well just because there’s a limitless amount of it, and I’ll be long dead and gone before I would ever make it through probably half of the early country that got recorded. I don’t think that there is a higher value to older music versus now, I don’t have that opinion that bands aren’t creative or original or really strong important artists now. Yeah there’s no Otis Reading right now but in 30 years someone will be recognized as doing something at a level artistically and all round it’s integrity is intact. And also another appeal to the older stuff is that there wasn’t a hundred years of recording history where musicians learned how to play songs from a recording. These are people who the only way that they ever heard music was to go see it performed live. They weren’t listening to songs on the radio and getting ideas, they were getting ideas from seeing the stuff happen for real in front of their faces. Now a lot of people are writing songs and learning about music exclusively from having heard thousands of records and songs and having studied them.
.ISM: You do a lot of interviews, what kind of question do you wish that you were asked more often? What do you wish that people were interested in?
JM: Basically I mean I like to talk about the craft of writing music and the difficulty of writing music, how it is always a struggle and a learning experience when you wrestle with an idea to try to get it into a song. That’s interesting but it’s also nearly impossible to articulate what that is.
.ISM: Do you feel that you are getting better as an writer?
JM: No I just think that I’m getting, I don’t have to edit so highly anymore. I used to write 20 songs before I’d ever commit one to tape, because it felt like it was taking that long to come across a song that I was truly happy with. Now I write at the same pace but I’m not throwing away quite as much music.
.ISM: What have you learned from your years in the music industry?
JM: I wouldn’t call my experience having been in the industry. If anything I have done quite a lot intentionally to remain far away and hands off from the over-exposed commercialized self-promoted type of world that this really is, this music world. Like I say it’s way more interesting to just play the music. I’ve made quite a lot of decisions that other bands would probably think are just insane, like not taking the opportunity to do a feature interview or a cover story on a magazine. Sometimes the high-profile stuff is interesting, sometimes the people are very very good writers, good interviews and you never know. But I’d say that one of the thousands of thousands of things that I’ve learned after doing this for so long is that there’s no experience in the world for a musician that is better than travelling around all over with a guitar in your hand and going to a place you’ve never been before. Your friends aren’t there to support you and especially when you are starting out you don’t have records out. I was already touring before I ever had a record out and that’s inspiring still to me to see bands doing that.
.ISM: Have you ever considered forming Molina Records?
JM: That would be terrible. I am a terrible, put it this way, I don’t have a head for business, but I think I have a good ear for new talented stuff because I see it ever night, like I said I’m seeing sometimes three support acts, sometimes these people have never made a record. I would never see myself working on the other side of the record.
.ISM: Have you read any good books recently?
JM: We I just got Billy Joe Schaver book but I haven’t opened that yet but I know that’s going to be great.
.ISM: Any books that have influenced your music?
JM: Well, I mean I read all the time so of course. Any music that I hear ultimately is going to influence my writing, maybe it’s not conscious. And the same thing with reading and any kind of art that I’m exposed to. But with touring so much recently this year be I can’t say that I’ve read a lot cover to cover.
.ISM: What would your desert island book be?
JM: I think, an unabridged dictionary.
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