When I was in Chicago in April, I called Jason Molina and asked him if he wanted to meet up for drinks and chat about Chicago for the book I’m writing. Our conversation inevitably strayed to his new albums–the solo record called Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, and the next Magnolia Electric Co. installment, Fading Trails (which, at the time, was called Nashville Moon. I asked about the recording sessions, and Molina paid tribute to his fans, who had a lot of influence on the band’s re-visiting previously recorded songs. “I really felt like—lyrically—they did fit, and I didn’t feel like I cheapened them somehow by having put them out on a single or anything. So, I’m really happy with [it].” Of course, none of these ended up on the final version of the album. That’s a slight disappointment. Nevertheless, Fading Trails is a sharp, concise effort. Nine songs in (calculating…calculating) twenty-eight minutes!? Rage…rising….rising…
Ahem.
Even closer to Molina’s heart is Let Me Go^3 (as I call it). “[It’s] a collaboration of me and another engineer just basically leaving one recording setup, and I just moved microphones around during the day while he would be at work sometimes, and I would just hit record—it was that easy. He set up a monitoring system for me to listen back to it. I didn’t really have to know anything technical, I could actually just listen to playback and say it’s garbage or not garbage and move a microphone on my without knowing anything other than what my ears wanted to hear. Let Me Go is just gut instinct.” It’s wrought with solitude and emptiness—the inner turmoil of a man about to make a painstaking move from his home in Bloomington back to Chicago. In the record’s reverb-drenched vocals there echoes the depression of recording an album in a pitch black garage, surrounded only by the dim glow of a lamp, candles and silent film projections.
Molina has sometimes toed the line between embarrassing and admirable honesty, and this solo album might be the best realization of his goals as a songwriter. And as much as this recording reflects the impending environment shift that awaited him at its completion, he’s happy. And he has no plans to stop his prolific output any time soon. “I want to live in Chicago as long as I can…I love the city,” He says. “I do all of my living by working hard on the music right now. It’s a really sad when I think about it, but it’s like…that’s really been my home since I was a kid. Whenever anything goes wrong, whenever anything goes right, whenever I’m really inspired, whenever I’m just in total despair…I just turn that into music.”
Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go and Fading Trails are both available through Secretly Canadian.
