This week’s song was recommended by a reader. Thanks, Mia!
Do you ever look at an old photo of yourself and wonder when that version of you became the current version of you? You can see that you look younger in the photo. Shockingly younger. But when, precisely, did those changes happen? When did your eyes change? When did that line appear? Did you wake up one morning with an older-looking face?
Of course, other than a drastic haircut or a removal of braces, the changes that come with age are incremental and undetectable. It’s rare to see a photo of yourself and think something like, “that’s the last photo of me as a kid,” or “that’s the first photo of me as an adult.”
For musician Jason Molina, 2003 might have been an identifiable turning point.
From 1995 to 2002, Molina fronted a band with the cryptic name “Songs: Ohia” to significant critical acclaim and a devoted if slightly underground fan base. From 2004 until 2012 he fronted a different band, with different musicians, called “The Magnolia Electric Co.”
Which is all fine, but it raises an interesting question about the album he released in 2003: who is it by?
It was released as a Songs: Ohia LP, so it’s easy to say that it belongs to that band’s catalogue. Except that the moniker “Songs: Ohia” is nowhere to be found on the cover; the only text to grace the album art is the album’s name, which is – guess what – The Electric Magnolia Co.
So maybe it’s an Electric Magnolia Co release? But it wasn’t recorded with the musicians who would later form The Electric Magonlia Co. And to complicate things, on the vinyl release it does say “Songs: Ohia” on the sticker in the middle of the record.
Maybe it’s most accurate to say that it’s two things at once: the last release by Songs: Ohia and the first release by The Electric Magnolia Co.
It’s a graduation photo. A rare picture you can look at and see the beginning of one thing overlapping with the end of another thing.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Because it’s a demo version, it’s very rough and unpolished, like a diary entry written in the first minutes after waking from a dream.
2. Because it’s a demo version, you can hear ambient noise from the room Molina was in when he recorded it, and it sounds like a window’s open and a hint of birdsong is just barely audible.
3. Unfortunately, 2003 was (according to one bandmate) the beginning of Molina’s destructive relationship with alcohol. Almost ten years to the day after recording this demo, Molina died of organ failure related to his alcoholism.
Maybe there’s an alternate timeline somewhere in which Molina’s life branches in a different direction after recording this demo. Maybe he goes for a walk and listens to the birds and makes one or two small decisions slightly differently, and lives to look back on 2003 as the turning point it deserved to be.
Recommended listening activity:
Doing something that your future self will thank you for.