Farewell transmission

In one of his most affecting songs, Jason Molina sings of a lonely lioness willing to swim across the river Nile to meet death or delight in the embrace of her lover, welcoming either fate as preferable to waiting anymore.  Perhaps more than any other, the song entwines Molina’s yearning for connection with his fascination with death and exemplifies his inner turmoil and other-worldly artistry.

Molina courted fame but would never give an inch to achieve it. He wrote hundreds, if not thousands of songs, and faced that abyss in every one, perhaps in the vain hope the perfect song might deliver salvation.  He urged courage and perseverance in the face of existential dread, endlessly striving to convince himself, yet drank himself to death at the age of 39, with one of his last records pleading with the world to let him go. He was hounded by his talent, rather than its master, or beneficiary.

He believed with all his heart in the ghosts he serenaded, but also in the power of protection spells.  He collected random trinkets – candles, animal bones, flags, coins, cigar boxes – from an early age but spurned material possessions.  He sang of hope in the face of despair, courage in the knowledge of futility, but ultimately Jason haunted himself. He was the best songwriter you’ve never read about, the best singer you’ve never heard.

Wherever he ranks among the many troubadours who’ve ragged their souls raw across the blacktop of America’s forgotten byways, Jason Molina is now a spectral figure, haunting the bars and small halls he played to the clink of drinkers’ glasses rather than rapturous stadium applause.  A ghost-eyed bard of the Midwest, he picked through the pieces of his fractured soul for precious fragments of prayers and incantations, inhabiting the blues where others just performed them.

Though he viewed songwriting as a job and dedicated his life to it, Molina exuded emotional authenticity because he lived every line he ever sang. Disappointed and tormented by the life he sought, he wasn’t playing dress-up in the clothes of depression, as that darkness had taken root deep within. Too self-aware for Springsteen’s bombast and denied Dylan’s moment in history, he was unfortunate to emerge as grunge dominated the airwaves, and – as in life itself – struggled to find himself a musical home.

But from the rust-belt laments of Songs: Ohia to the thumping new country of Magnolia Electric Co., his delicate voice traced the same tremulous angelic wire of vulnerability and defiance, offering paeans to the redemptive power of despair. Most modern pop songs are merely layers of digital production with nothing at their core, but, stripped to the living bone, the sparer Jason’s achingly beautiful songs were presented, the more powerful they became.

Simple words, strung like pearls, that howl their meaning at you, his lyrics read like abandoned drafts of Rimbaud’s suicide notes, like Raymond Carver and Townes Van Zandt settled a bar fight with a pen dipped in blood instead of punches.  Molina didn’t write lyrics so much as he performed poetic exorcisms, purging his demons onto the page and casting them into the air with a poet’s precision and a drunk’s honesty.

Take Farewell Transmission – a song so devastatingly beautiful it changes you every time you return to it. Recorded live in the studio, it’s seven minutes of naked, existential dread wrapped in a melody that would entrance a nightingale. When Molina laments “The real truth about it is no one gets it right / The real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try” he’s not so much divining the meaning of life as summoning up the will to live.

He conjoured art from the ether to summon his demons, both to understand them and challenge himself to fight back.  His genius – for cursed by genius he was – was inextricably linked to the torment that overwhelmed him in the end. The same demons that fuelled his art eventually consumed him but he remained ‘thankful for the blues‘. It’s the oldest story in rock ‘n’ roll, but the inevitable denouement doesn’t detract from its tragedy.

Despite constant touring with his bands, Molina wrestled with the bottle as another avenue of escape for over a decade. Finally, after four lost years in isolation, he passed away in 2013, leaving a catalogue of songs that serve as both a fitting epitaph to his creativity and a shocking indictment of the music industry’s failure to recognise and appreciate it.

In a world of disposable pop, thuggish talentless rap and algorithmic playlists, Molina’s music stands as a defiant middle finger to the bland commoditisation of music. Defying passive, background listening, it demands emotional and intellectual engagement from the listener, drawing you into his dark but wonder-filled world. It remains the perfect soundtrack for existential crises at 3 am, for long drives through nowhere towns, for those moments when the weight of existence feels like it might just crush you. AI can reproduce Taylor Swift because her music already sounds like it was replicated by a robot, but no machine can embody the frail majesty of Molina’s muse.

So, here’s to you, Jason Molina, America’s Nick Drake, another beautiful loser, cartographer of the American night. Your songs were flares sent up from the trenches of the soul, signalling to us fellow travellers that we’re not alone in our loneliness, that while the stars may fade, there remain hope’s sparks of light. In a culture that worships at the altar of success, you sang the praises of glorious failure, and in that you excelled like no other.

In one of his early songs, Molina mourned “there are no fortunate men”, but while fame and fortune eluded him, we are richer by far to have known him.  As long as there are dark highways and darker nights, as long as there are hearts yearning for connection in a disconnected world, his spectral music will endure as a delicate thread between this world and the other.

Somewhere out there, “through the static and distance”, I like to think you’re still singing through your last solo session, for some cosmic radio station, still searching for glimpses of truth in the spaces between people, places and time. Just listen, Jason implores us all at the end of that song. Listen.