Phthursday Musings: Can't Quit The Blues

A few years ago, the Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard released an EP featuring five songs written by the late Jason Molina. Some of Molina’s bandmates from Songs: Ohia play with Hansard. It’s a beautiful tribute, one of those rare times where I would argue the legacy of the songs is furthered by the interpretation.

Hansard’s tribute, when it came out, immediately went to maximum rotation for me. It was one of the first times I played the hell out of something I didn’t physically own. I never managed to get my hands on a physical disc, and to this day, still haven’t. (Keep in mind, I generally don’t want vinyl: I don’t have a record player, and don’t see a particularly compelling reason to get another one. I want the CD. I’m old school.)

A few months ago, I thought, I really do want that CD. I looked online, hoping to find a somehow still new version. Couldn’t find one and what I could find seemed way too overpriced. So I put an eBay watch on for it. Got a notification about it last week. Somehow didn’t actually follow up on the notification… but did think to look at Spotify, and it was back. It hadn’t been there for literally years, but there it was. And I’ve been listening to it a lot.

This version of “Hold On Magnolia”, live not long after the tribute disc came out, is stunning, and speaks to my above point about furthered legacy:

I’ve tried, multiple times, to write about Jason Molina. Even now I find that what I might be able to do is write around him, but not exactly about him. But I’ll try.

Brief bio: Jason Molina played solo, and then put together a band with a semi-revolving group of musicians, under the name Songs: Ohia in the mid-late ‘90s. His early albums are sparse, stark, and even ghostly. From 2000 to 2003, Songs: Ohia went on an unfathomable run, releasing four albums, three of which are absolute classics - The Lioness, Didn’t It Rain, The Magnolia Electric Co. - and none of which sound especially like one another. Then he broke up the band, moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and formed a new band, Magnolia Electric Co., which released classics of its own. But his mental condition and health spiraled downward, his drinking became something beyond excessive, and he died in 2013.

A few years after he died, there was a resurgence of interest, largely surrounding the release of Erin Osmon’s Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost. It’s the best book of its kind I’ve read, and I’ve read a few. I wrote a lengthy book review for Third Coast Review then, and what I realize now in reading over it is how it gave me an opportunity to write a lot around what I thought without writing about what I thought.

There was a reading / Q&A held shortly after the book’s publication, at Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago (more about Quimby’s some other time.) The other core members of Songs: Ohia from the time that The Magnolia Electric Co. came out were there. A couple months later, a tribute show featuring them and a lot of guest vocalists was held at The Hideout. In both places, I had this strange thought: I am with my people.

My dad went to see the singer-songwriter John Stewart dozens of times. John Stewart had been a member of the famed folk group the Kingston Trio, and was an accomplished songwriter whose credits include “Daydream Believer”. I myself went with him to see John Stewart on at least two occasions, once when about 12, once when I was 21 at the Abbey Pub.

John Stewart never really stopped touring, and during the ‘90s and into the ‘00s, my dad managed to see him, let’s say, an average of once a year. These shows could be in small, somewhat obscure places - a small bar venue in Milwaukee, say. And over that time he’d start seeing the same people at these shows. And at some point, he actually started to get to know some of these people.

This subject came up in a conversation with his old friend John at some point, during which my dad made the assertion that these people he kept seeing at these John Stewart shows, well, to him, they were his friends. John vehemently disagreed. Now, my dad has talked about all kinds of things to me over my time on this planet, and I can only guess at what he would guess at might be the kind of thing I actually absorbed from any of that. As it so happened, it was this retelling of this conversation which struck me as a remarkably important thing, something I still think about.

And I thought about that while sitting in Quimby’s, while standing at the Hideout. And I thought: these are my people. And: these should be my friends.

What I suspect is that the kind of connection I had developed with Jason Molina’s music was not too dissimilar from the connection that my dad had developed with John Stewart’s music. What I recall from seeing John Stewart is that you were imbued with the sense that the man wasn’t just singing songs for you… but rather that he truly had special insight into the world, insight he didn’t necessarily ask for, and he was there to share that insight with you. And with Jason Molina, I’m not sure I’d say that it was special insight… I am not even sure what the correct word is. But he had, wittingly or not, tapped in to a deep vein of the blues, and what he mined from that vein, we were on that wavelength, or maybe sometimes on that wavelength, or maybe he just pulled us in to that wavelength. If John Stewart was a conduit of knowledge and wisdom and grace, then Jason Molina was a conduit of… something deeply beautiful, but also deeply ambivalent. Something I’ve long had a hard time explaining well, but if you’ve read me for long enough, you know I’ve written frequently about embracing the ambivalence, soaking up the human condition.

I think what makes Glen Hansard’s interpretations so wonderful is that here is a highly acclaimed singer-songwriter, much more famous than Jason Molina, who also understood that he’d come upon someone who had mined those ambivalent blues, and found such depth to them that you can hear how he has been moved when he plays “Hang On Magnolia”, and you can even hear that he’s moved more than one way. Ambivalence can often be a lonely thing, and for it to be a point of connection with people, that’s incredibly powerful.

Those are the kind of blues you just can’t quit.

I’m of course using “the blues” to mean something more than (but also less than) what might conventionally be meant. John Lee Hooker, to name just one, is The Blues, but the blues are a state of mind, and also how we work through that state of mind. And, I would argue, so much of the blues, even The Blues, are not about wallowing really, but about something else, something close to Kurt Cobain’s “comfort in being sad”.

It’s embodied in the last line of “The Old Black Hen”, where Molina writes:

tell them that every day I livedI was trying to sing the bluesthe way I find them

Molina chose not to sing his own song on his own record though. He brought in Lawrence Peters, and the result was magical. Molina himself seemed to understand, even in real time, that the vein he had tapped into was something his collaborators could expand upon, and he had the prescience and audacity to call it “the blues”.

Some time after that, “Hollywood” Steve Huey, one of the original Yacht Rock guys (as in the guys who made the Channel 101 show and devised the definitions of the genre, not the guys who actually made the music decades earlier), on the wonderful Beyond Yacht Rock podcast, define a musical genre he termed “The Ache”. Here’s the YouTube playlist that includes the songs from the original list.

The Ache overlaps with the blues, though I think it’s not quite the same thing. The Ache is very tied up in a sense of longing. There’s a bittersweet element to longing, as you’re often longing for something that excites you. It drives you mad, but it keeps you going.

In a very different medium, there’s the famed children’s books about Frog & Toad, written by Arnold Lobel, published in the 1970s. Admittedly I never encountered them when I was little, but we read Frog & Toad stories to our little guy. Frog is a little more happy-go-lucky. Toad is a bit of a curmudgeon. But they are the best of friends.

One of the Frog & Toad stories is “Shivers”. This is an audio version of it:

What strikes me most about the story is what comes in at the very end:

Frog and Toad sat close by the fire. They were scared. The teacups shook in their hands. They were having the shivers. It was a good, warm feeling.

Lobel too is tapping into a similar vein as the blues, a similar vein as the ache. Why would being scared - having the shivers - be a good, warm feeling?

I think this is the sort of notion that outright terrifies some people. I think they would rather embrace a more Sartrian kind of miserableness than embrace the inbetween, the overlap, the ambivalence. They’d rather know where they stand, even if they stand in the fifth ring of the inferno, then be subjected to purgatory. And that, I think, is a terrible outlook on life.

There is, you know, a flipside to the blues, the ache, the shivers. But how can there be a flipside to deep ambivalence?

Well, there’s Jonathan Richman.

Nobody makes such sad happy music for blissfully melancholy people. Nobody makes such exhiliratingly joyous music for the miserable.

Is there an opposite of the shivers? Could that be Jonathan?

One thing about not quitting the blues: we tend to fall back into the blues we know. But that vein is constantly being mined.

I keep a list of music I should listen to - I’ve probably mentioned this before. Sometimes it doesn’t grab me. Sometimes I’m knocked out, beyond any expectations I might have had.

Such was the case recently listening to Amythyst Kiah.

Her album from last year is Wary + Strange, and stylistically, it cuts a stunningly wide swath. Sometimes the album sounds like it’s from pre-grunge late ‘80s or early ‘90s rock, maybe adjacent to Bonnie Raitt. Sometimes the album sounds like it’s cut from a similar cloth as Black Pumas, that mysterious “psychedelic soul” sound. Sometimes, well, it sounds like she’s channeling one of the greatest miners of them all, Gram Parsons. And she does it on an album where she references Michel Foucault.

And yet I think, on a level that can’t be defined sonically, she’s on a wavelength that - to my mind - John Stewart and Jason Molina were on.

This set is from World Cafe, with a quieter, stripped down combo behind her. It’s a good place to start. But I’d encourage you to listen to all of Wary + Strange on repeat multiple times.

Sometimes you wander away from the blues. Maybe for a while. I find I even manage to wander away from connecting with music altogether for long stretches of time. But I always come back - and it’s all of this stuff that I’ll keep coming back to. My go-to playlist on Spotify is called “sad sick shit”. Either you know exactly what I’m talking about, or, well, you’ve long since decided everything I’m writing about here is nuts. Or, perhaps, both.

I’m only really skimming here a lot of the complicated thoughts I have in this realm. This just felt like a good time to take stock of it.

The first studio album from his second band, Magnolia Electric Co., was What Comes After the Blues - a title steeped in ambivalence itself. Was it a statement? A question? A rhetorical question?

The song of the same name came out some time later, on the Sojourner box. As it so happens, Magnolia Electric Co. as a band was at its core a blues-rock band. It’s not coincidence they sound like Crazy Horse - he asked them to be his band after seeing them perform Zuma in its entirety.

Within the more conventional blues mein, he couldn’t help but push the limits. He had to keep mining. Until he couldn’t.

We all have to keep mining. Until we can’t. But we don’t need to worry about when we can’t. We’ve got the picks now, or whatever our varied tools are. Keep mining. Because we can’t quit these blues.

I do wonder sometimes whether the people in that room at Quimby’s really were my people. And whether maybe they still are.

And yes, I did buy the Glen Hansard disc, finally. Just now.

A few more items to share if you want to keep exploring:

Amanda Shires with an inspired version of “Just Be Simple” from The Magnolia Electric Co.:

Kevin Morby & Waxahatchee with a pandemic era cover of “Farewell Transmission” live to Instagram, which is an especially weird way for any Molina song to be presented:

And I should include John Stewart. This TV performance is from 1969:

This one is from 1981 - and I definitely hear elements of the ache in here:

And this one from 1998, within a month or two of when I last saw him. You can get a sense of the dignity and wisdom evident in his presentation - and also the vein from which he spent a lot of time mining:

Of course you can explore YouTube like I have. There’s a lot more where all these came from.

I’d be remiss not to end with this, the song we came in on, but performed by just Jason, live from 2006:

It is, in the end, perhaps his saddest song… and also, perhaps, his happiest.