 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 368: 10.22.21 This is a joint review for both The Road Becomes What You Leave (2007) & Recording Josephine: Magnolia Electric Company at Electrical Audio (2009) It's hard to write about Jason Molina, a towering presence in the world of singer-songwriter who died far too young from complications due to alcoholism at the age of 39. Are we more drawn to his work (now) because of that? It's hard to compartmentalize it otherwise. At some point, one would imagine, the drink starts to drinks itself, and the sadness becomes almost secondary in time. The disease is real and its peril lies in how it feeds off itself. It's corny but I always think about Nicolas Cage's voiceover in Leaving Las Vegas: "I can't remember if I started drinking because my wife left me, or if my wife left me because I started drinking." It doesn't matter in the end. |
Mama here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws / Must be the big star about to fallHe repeats the line. It's almost too good and he seems to know it. The song hits its fever pitch and then quickly dies back down. These two short films, which my curiosity for the man led me to recently, are both quite different. The Road Becomes What You Leave is short, only twenty minutes, a meditation on touring, mostly wordless (dialogue-free), with only Molina's voice and his backing band as the soundtrack. It's remarkable in how unremarkable it is. Here is a man who played music for a living, if you can call it that.
Recording Josephine: Magnolia Electric Company at Electrical Audio is, well, exactly what you the title tells you it is: a 70-minute document of the band recording one of its final records with Steve Albini in Chicago. He doesn't seem like a man who would be dead four years later, and that's perhaps the saddest and scariest part. As it is in his songs, meandering and mysterious, his spirit lives on, however.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 368A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 369 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 368A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 369 ⫸
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