Assorted Gems: What Comes After the Blues

 

MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO - WHAT COMES AFTER THE BLUES  

(rec. 2003/rel. 2005)

I think in LP sides. Basically all the time. On occasion it may not be practical (it isn’t really fair, is it, to feel miffed at Neil Young + Promise of the Real’s generally excellent The Visitor because it’s a three-sided album instead of a straight-up proper double) but at this point there’s no turning back. It’s just such an elegant form. 15-22 minutes to a side. A pause in the middle. Two openers, two closers. Two chances for an artist to grab hold of a listener (or, two challenges: fail either and the album fails). Two distinct structural, spiritual, emotional arcs adding up to a whole. The grace of it! The possibilities!

I don’t know who first had the idea of using an LP side break to draw a formal or stylistic as well as a structural dividing line (while holding on to the ideal of a single, cohesive album that’s great when heard straight through). It doesn’t matter, because being the first to do something doesn’t guarantee you’ll do it well. But I’m aware of a few great examples across time, like Neil Young’s Hawks & Doves, with its quiet, beautiful, haunted, acoustic Side A made up of songs off Homegrown (Little Wing), Homegrown outtakes (The Old Homestead), and more recent experiments in folksy psychedelia (Lost in Space, Captain Kennedy), while Ben Keith helms a rocking hoedown of deceptively simplistic, pseudo-patriotic, hilariously inventive (“up there on the old Dew Line...”) punk/country songs on Side B. Neil’s On the Beach, too, though most of its songs stem from a single set of Rusty Kershaw-produced sessions, keeps signs of life close to the front, allowing the band to stretch into soft, starry-eyed languor on the first cut of Side B, and then eschewing the band altogether for the two slow, lonesome, sad, and/yet hopeful closers. Brian Eno’s Before and After Science follows a similar pattern, with the bouncy pop songs (such as they are) collected on Side A, except for the most mournful, which opens Side B, its leftover cheer like a boat disappearing into the sunset, so that, in the concluding four tracks/seventeen minutes, there’s nothing left to hear but the monotonous, endlessly various motions of the tide. Micah Blue Smaldone’s magnificent album The Ring of the Rise has a Side A which is mostly light—though you can feel the darkness clawing at it—and a Side B that’s mostly dark, if tinged with the partial light of Harbingers and the brighter light of Iris.

I don’t know why albums aren’t structured this way more often. Jason Molina didn’t either, which is presumably why he made (well, the Magnolia/Pyramid double album, for one thing, but also) What Comes After the Blues. If you’ve never heard it—Magnolia Electric Co’s first studio offering, following the barnstormer live record Trials & Errors—stop here. And don’t come back until you’ve listened in full...

...awesome, right? Even if the songs and performances haven’t grabbed you yet, you’ll admit that when an album opens with the defiant, richly colored rock and roll of The Dark Don’t Hide It and long-time friend/collaborator Jennie Benford’s song The Night Shift Lullaby, and then barrels on into Leave the City, Hard to Love a Man, and (bridging the side break) Give Something Else Away Every Day, you really don’t expect the band to just vanish. But while there are contributions from bandmates on guitar, dobro, and fiddle on the acoustic Northstar Blues, Hammer Down turns out to be Jason solo, and I Can Not Have Seen the Light just Jason and Jennie. The band never returns. A little past halfway through Molina’s first proper band album, we’re left with, for all intents and purposes, only Molina and his wounds.

As for the material, there are eight out of eight perfect songs, plus steel guitar by Mike Brenner, who may have been (in more ways than one) Jason Molina’s Ben Keith—plus, Mark Rice’s drum fills—plus, Albini on the boards—plus, Mikey Kapinus’s trumpet part on Leave the City—plus... I could go on, or you could go listen to the record again and start (or continue) finding out for yourself.

I love that the bandleader & songwriter does himself one better after what was spiritually and sonically, if not officially, the first Magnolia Electric Co record, where The Old Black Hen and Peoria Lunch Box Blues (two Jason-penned, guest-sung songs) opened Side B. What Comes After the Blues makes room for a five-minute song Jason didn’t even write. The Side A closer, moreover—Hard to Love a Man—was on its way to the songwriter’s scrap heap when Jennie Benford, who loved the song and had worked hard on the harmonies and a fingerpicked guitar part, intervened. The idea of opening the album with the aggressive sound of an electric guitar strumming an Am chord full force was also not Jason’s. And Hammer Down, the album’s sole 100% solo cut, was written in the early morning of one of the very days the band spent powering through full-band takes with Albini at Electrical Audio. So though structurally the album implodes into loneliness, at heart it’s a group effort. The lyrics that the album ends with may be conflicted and torn, but Jennie’s voice is right next to Jason’s, keeping him company, mixed just as high.

Lyrically/thematically, it might be said of this album in particular, and Jason Molina’s writing in general (at least the post-Songs: Ohia catalogue, which is what I’ve been getting to know), that the time spent exploring the darkness, only to find what appears to be inescapable doom (whether personal or, as in the opener, universal)—this tendency is not what it may sometimes seem to be—a tribute, or a toast, to despair—but, rather, the act of spitting in despair’s face.

When Jason sings in death’s persona, “See, I had a job to do / But people like you are doing it for me / To one another,” the violence in his voice is at once an accusation and a challenge to himself and the listener: all right then, if that’s the case, and clearly it is, then let’s stop. 

In the famed opening lines of Leave the City (and by the way, Jason’s writing is one of the best examples I can currently think of, of what it is exactly that songs, as an art form, have over poetry or prose fiction; read the best Molina off the page and you have license to shrug, but hear the same words set to the chords and melodies Jason chose, played by the band he put together, and sung with that inimitable phrasing, with emotion drawn from the noblest parts of his spirit——and feel your own spirit falter), the sadness in the first line is tempered by the gentle, broken-down humor of that afterthought in the second.

And then there are my favorite lines in what is currently my favorite song on the record—Give Something Else Away Every Day, weary as the desert moon—here’s how they go: “It was easy making myself the same / It was easy making myself less / But to get better? / That’s the hardest thing.” Again, you have to hear Jason sing it, and you have to hear the band back him. But when you do, what you’ll have taken in is not an admission of weakness, not someone confronting an impossible task and taking a daunted step back; you’ll have found a beacon that burns strong enough and bright enough to guide someone out of the dark once and for all.

[P.S. Recommended further listening: the charming, insightful, and articulate Brent Walburn hosting a roundtable discussion with several players on the album, about the album. Worthwhile for, among much else, a fantastic Albini anecdote and a member of Magnolia Electric Co shitting all over my favorite song.]

(Back to: A Personal Canon) 

The baffled explorer's springtime report

In the past twelve months, I’ve had the good fortune of finding my way to not one, not two, not even three or four, but five brilliant songwriters. In a great year I make two such discoveries, tops.

In the case of Pain of Salvation’s Daniel Gildenlöw, I had an overdue awakening to the excellence of an artist I’d long treated with skepticism. I’ve detailed my road into Daniel’s arms elsewhere, but I want to note that watching the long and beautiful documentary series I Set Myself on Fire, which covers the making of Road Salt and some of the touring done on its behalf, helped. In it, Daniel is vulnerable, honest, funny, charismatic. The devotion to band and craft that he displays helped me learn to respect the albums I don’t love (the early stretch, up to and mostly including 2004’s “BE”), but sheer awe overcomes me once that dedication collides with music I can’t really imagine sounding better than it does, or being better-written than it is (2007’s Scarsick on).

Then there's Ragnar Zolberg, who co-wrote the music on Pain of Salvation’s In the Passing Light of Day. Before his stint in Daniel’s band, Ragnar had a power-pop group called Sign (with an excellent so-far-final album, Hermd, in 2013) and a darker, quieter, more ruminative solo career. He continued to put out albums while he served as Daniel’s second/lead guitarist in Pain of Salvation, and so he has gone on doing—modestly, without fanfare—since leaving. As my journey through his discography has revealed, it’s all gold, from 2008’s The Circle (Darker Side) right through to last year’s Forest Lovesongs and Hjartastjaki.

Ragnar writes and sings with a fearlessness and directness that won my heart at once, and I really mean at once. Of Artistry, the first solo song of his I tried, had me captivated, in disbelief, before my first listen to it was over. His songs have made me cry God knows how many times. If it was from Neil Young that I learned how powerful an “unvarnished heart on sleeve” approach to lyricism and delivery can be, Ragnar revealed how vast and deep that kingdom really is. 

I was shown more of the kingdom when, a few months later, a list of music recommendations by Colleen Kinsella of Big Blood included the Yoko Ono albums Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space. Big Blood’s 2017 album The Daughters Union is dedicated to Yoko, and on 2020’s Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream?, 11-year-old Quinnisa, the band’s occasional third member and perennial firebrand, named Yoko Ono alongside Joan of Arc as someone who “changed the century.” Colleen’s 2022 list got me investigating the individual albums, whereby I learned that Fly and Approximately Infinite Universe are double albums. It’s usually when I discover that some intriguing artist I’ve been investigating has made a double album that I commit to giving them, and it, a proper try. So with Yoko. By the end of Side A of Approximately Infinite Universe, my mind was in splinters. By the end of Side B I was completely won over.

That was autumn. Come winter, I fell in turn to Richard Dawson, having stumbled on the cover art to The Ruby Cord in the week of its release and gazed at it awhile in that "Oh, right on!" kind of way. Reading up, I learned it was a double album. Alright then. I also realized that I had previously read intriguing reviews of Dawson releases (Peasant, Henki), and played a track or two each time, but things hadn’t clicked. Time to try again, because reviews of The Ruby Cord (mixed reviews, no less) made it sound phenomenal. And it was. I started with The Fool. Loved it. Went on listening in order. Loved the gentle Museum and especially its poignant, level-toned catalogue of the photographs on display. I was floored by the next song up, The Tip of an Arrow, with its gorgeous Joe Hisaishi-esque verses and unabashedly heavy metal (via folk) refrains. And the album closed with a song that made me think of Big Big Train. I think the sequence of my thoughts about the Big Big Train/Horse and Rider connection would have gone something like this: "How could that even...? What?! Too good!!!"

So then of course it was right back to Track 1, the 41-minute, LP-length opener, Disc 1 of a double album in the form of a single song: The Hermit. One of the best songs ever, as it turns out: a story that starts with a dream, awakes into the quotidian and not exactly lonely present, gazes backwards in a long and riveting, mostly a capella flashback, and concludes with a holy vision of the bloody center of life, suffering, and death.

Research showed that Richard Dawson has a band (Hen Ogledd) with, ahem, a double album (Free Humans). The album opens with the wild and evocative masterpiece Farewell (those lyrics, good lord! I mean, the thermal baths? and the sadness! and the bassline!). What exit did I have? And Crimson Star? "We were naked! We were naked!" But while those were both primarily Richard compositions, the contributions of his bandmates proved that, evidently, they were mad geniuses as well. Thus on, also, to Bulbils...

And now, with a mere month to go before my awakening to the splendor of Gildenlöw and Zolberg turns a year old, the doors of a fifth hidden palace have opened to receive me, and here I am, already a diehard fan of Magnolia Electric Co. How did I not find, and fall for, Jason Molina earlier?! Greatness always seems blindingly obvious after the fact. How, I wonder afterwards, could there have been a time when I was into Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but not yet into Brian Eno? How could I have spent so long adoring the Frusciante-helmed Red Hot Chili Peppers albums without delving into his solo discography? And how is it that, given my already multi-year interest in the generation of songwriters born in the 1970s, I found my way to the likes of Chadwick Stokes, Ned Collette, and James Jackson Toth, even (through the Vic Chesnutt/Undertow Orchestra connection—though I also, unwittingly, saw him drumming for Monsters of Folk at their Beacon Theatre concert in 2009) brushing up against Molina collaborator Will Johnson, but skipped ignorantly past the lighthouse that is Molina himself?

But all to its rightful season, of course. If you gathered every pearl on your first plunge, where would you find the time to live with your discoveries, to learn from them, to be nurtured and hallowed and remade by them? It would be like trying to enjoy the gentle, patient rolling of a mountain stream when you’re standing under a waterfall.