Thinking Outside

The Sojourner Box Set Doesn't Mean Jason Molina And His Magnolia Electric Company Are All Out Of Ideas - Just The Opposite

originally published September 19, 2007

Jason Molina, both solo and through his groups Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., could be one of independent music's most prolific songwriters. In the span of 11 years, he has released nine full-length Songs: Ohia albums, one live album and two full studio albums since Songs: Ohia evolved into Magnolia Electric Co. in 2000, two solo albums and roughly 20 EPs, singles and other assorted in-between-album releases.

Molina himself says he's used to finishing entire albums in three days - sometimes with some in-the-studio songwriting included in that short span of time. So maybe his fans should have seen a project like Sojourner, his new release on Secretly Canadian, coming all along. But it's still an impressive achievement, even by Molina's prolific standards.

Sojourner is a box set of entirely new material. It features one CD, Nashville Moon, recorded with the Magnolia Electric Co.'s touring band. A second CD, Black Ram, finds Molina collaborating with a variety of musicians - including producer and sometime Athenian David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame - whom he had never even met before the sessions. A third CD, Shohola, captures Molina performing in a solo acoustic session, while an EP called The Sun Sessions comes from a single post-midnight recording session at the legendary Sun Studio in Memphis. Then to top things off, the Sojourner package includes The Road Becomes What You Leave, a DVD that documents a tour through Canada by the group.

All in all, the box set represents a mother lode of musical output from a period of only about 18 months - a time span that also saw Molina release a solo album in 2006, called Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go.

Even Molina seems impressed by what he has accomplished, openly wondering how he'll be able to follow up something so substantial as a box set. "I really sort of set myself up an interesting trap by putting out a project like this," he says. The Sojourner project started out with the Nashville Moon session at the Chicago studio of respected alternative rock producer Steve Albini. And while Molina initially thought the session might produce the next Magnolia Electric Co. CD, he soon realized it would be part of something far bigger, as he continued to turn out songs that seemed to belong together.

Eventually, a framework for Sojourner began to take shape with each of the three full-length CDs showcasing Molina's music in a different way. "It's really the first time, I think, that I'm getting close to the way that I want to present the music, where it shows all of the different ways that I'm happy doing this kind of music," Molina says. "I like to perform with just guitar and voice or just piano and voice. I like the more traditional country elements sometimes, and then I also like the more abstract and psychedelic and sort of gray areas that I explore on Black Ram."

The Nashville Moon CD was an attempt to capture the live sound of Magnolia Electric Co. by recording the songs immediately following a summer 2005 tour. "More than 90 percent of that material was music we took on the road," Molina says of the songs, which were recorded live in the studio, complete with his vocals. "We toured extensively for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I really had grown to appreciate the arrangements as they stood. To me, it was really important to get into the studio as soon as that tour ended, so we could have the closest interpretations to the live performances as we could get."

This live-in-the-studio recording approach on Nashville Moon captures a good bit of the live Magnolia Electric Co. experience, while unveiling such first-rate tracks such as "Montgomery," "Lonesome Valley" and "Hammer Down" that showcase the group's sweetly burnished country rock sound (think Harvest-styled Neil Young or Son Volt as reference points).

Where Albini served essentially as a recording engineer, simply documenting the performances by Magnolia Electric Co. in his studio, Lowery was involved on a deeper level in the recordings that emerge on Black Ram - including being one of the musicians who plays on the songs.

"I would call him more of a 'producer' because he took my idea to come to a studio to work with musicians I had never played with before, that I'd never met before, and basically write in the studio a record," Molina says. "So David was instrumental in getting me musicians who were very open to working on the fly, musicians who were open to changing things even if they felt like what they played was really successful, just try it again from a totally different angle."

Black Ram offers some of the most intriguing music on Sojourner, as the disc moves from the atmospheric touches of "Will-O-The Wisp" to the stark and bold rock of "What's Broken Becomes Better," and then from "In The Human World" to desolate piano tune "The Old Horizon."

When recording the Shohola CD, Molina followed an approach he likes to use to inject an element of risk into recording solo. Essentially, he takes an already completed song and forces himself to try a totally untested approach when he records it. "Like, I'll maybe have written the song on dulcimer, but then I'll just force myself to record it on a guitar, even though I haven't totally changed the arrangement and I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it," he says. "So when I do these recordings, every sort of second is truly dangerous because I'm not exactly sure how the vocal melody is going to land… I put all of these challenges up for myself when I'm doing the solo recording.

"I think lyrically that session is very strong," Molina says. "I think it's a lot of challenging material, personally challenging material."

For the most part, the sparse setting of Shohola works just fine, as songs like "The Spell," "Steady Now" and "Night Country" boast vocal melodies that stand strong in the austere and intimate solo setting.

The Sun Sessions EP contains only four songs, but it represents a special moment for Magnolia Electric Co. On a tour stop in Memphis, Molina arranged for Magnolia Electric Co. to play a gig in exchange for several hours of studio time at the storied Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, among others, recorded some of their early hits. Because Sun Studio operates as a museum during the daytime, it's available for recording only late at night, which for Magnolia Electric Co. meant a midnight studio booking.

"We came up with an EP worth of tunes that I think are very strong, and I think that we got more than what we would have ever anticipated," Molina says. "I think we all left there feeling like we had really done something special."

With Sojourner having arrived in stores in early August, it's no surprise to hear Molina say that the current Magnolia Electric Co. live set leans heavily on songs from the box set. But, he noted, there are fresh twists.

"The way some of the songs are presented on the box set we've tinkered with and changed around, changed the arrangements and instrumentation," Molina says. "That makes [the shows] really exciting from a musical perspective."

Alan Sculley

WHO: Magnolia Electric Co., The Watson Twins, Drakkar Sauna
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, September 22
HOW MUCH: $8 (advance), $10 (door)