'The last light I see': Jason Molina's melancholy landscapes

Artist: William Schaff

Jason Molina was born in 1973 in Lorain, an industrial town in Ohio, growing up in a trailer overlooking Lake Erie - one of the five Great Lakes of North America. He describes the dual beauty and severity of this environment as formative to the music he would go on to make, an influential blend of blues, rock, and alt-country:

“I grew up in a burnt-out shipbuilding and steel making town. Lorain is profoundly important to my music. It is the environment where I learned to walk away from the darkness. It is a place of water and storms and falling red sky and lightning. I learned to write music there about the world because out there it was immense and sudden. I learned that misery is not to capture but to learn about. Lorain and I have an unspoken agreement to always remain in each other’s lives.”

-Molina quoted in 1999, as republished in Sam Stephenson's article Jason Molina’s Love and Work (2018)

When I first listened to 'Farewell Transmission', regarded as Molina's magnum opus in all its elegiac majesty, I was captivated by the mysterious landscapes it invokes, oscillating between homecoming and fatalistic gloom. The song spoke to me, but was I being led out of the darkness, or into it? 

Molina's long-time struggle with alcoholism, and resultant tragic death in 2013, makes it difficult to read the song without feeling the sway of the latter interpretation: his 'farewell transmission' finally delivered after a hypnotic repetition of 'long dark blues' in the outro. And yet, the last word of the song, spoken against the beautifully co-ordinated musical fade out, bids us to 'listen', half-rhyming with and yet undermining the finality of the previously uttered 'farewell'. How can we read the song, and does it offer any solace against the 'terrible recognition' and 'approaching annihilation' recognised by Lisa Wells? 'Listen', Molina tells us. 

The first part of the song seems most clearly inspired by Molina's hometown of Lorain, conjuring a cosmic yet distinctly industrial landscape where 'set up hearts' work together in a strange communal purgatory. As a power blackout turns the inhabitants of this 'place' into 'brothers' and 'sisters' labouring in the 'cold grey rock', 'hot mill steam' and 'concrete', the verse culminates in a powerful, rhythmic generation of collective energy as their hearts 'All at once start to beat'. Imagining a liminal aural space poised between 'sirens' and silences', Molina transfigures industrial labour into music: the drums, mimicking heartbeats, propel the listener further into the sad machinery of his lyricism. 

The song's cryptic quality only increases. Fully in the swing of the cosmic-industrial 'heartbeat' of purgatorial labourers, Molina moves from this collective to have his speaker address an unknown other concerning a 'secret out of the past'. The secret, it seems, is a person who is deceased but can be 'resurrected'; the speaker fantasises about interacting with this 'ghost' through 'blood' and 'ashes', even more strangely imagining himself as a bird: 'I'll streak his blood across my beak/ Dust my feathers with his ashes'. It's almost as if, by the act of resurrecting, the speaker transforms into something more desperate and primal - perhaps an analogy for the paradoxes of creating something raw and beautiful. But I'll let this one go - to try to explain away mysterious bird imagery is not something I stand for. 

Luckily, the ensuing verses are slightly less cryptic, as the speaker moves into a more general address again, declaring 'I will try' and 'I will be gone... but not forever'; he is now the one facing death and perhaps contemplating future resurrection. He goes on to voice a set of truths, 'no one gets it right', punctuated by the confession, 'There ain't no end to the sands I've been trying to cross' - this delivery caught between candid recognition and hopelessness. The elemental energy of the 'fossil fire' and 'fossil blood' at the song’s beginning are now absent, as barren ‘sands’ stretch out. Molina invokes shadows of a collective in 'we're all supposed to try' and 'we will be gone', but his speaker ultimately seems isolated by a comprehension of the inescapability of his personal destiny, 'I've really known it all along'. This fatalistic line sets up Molina's song-machine for its sublime conclusion. 

As the drums rises to a climax, a wave of reckoning seizes the speaker as Molina sings desperately yet powerfully, 'Mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws'. The initial collective heartbeat and desire to ‘resurrect’ - even the endless desert - have now been swallowed up in this moment of apocalyptic conquest; the moon is hunted prey to the animal 'jaws' of midnight, as an extended night concedes to brutal revelation, 'Must be the big star about to fall'. The generation of energy has been rendered impossible: the music drops and Molina’s voice lowers to a soft hypnotic tone, repeating ‘Long dark blues’ in sublimely coordinated harmony with female backing voices. It is as if the beginning’s latent darkness returns, yet more seductively and dangerously: the speaker invokes 'will-o'-the-wisp' lights, folkoric tricksters that lead travellers astray, conjuring up images of Southern plains or swamps. We have no choice but to follow Molina’s voice like one of these ignes fatui as he half-speaks, half-sings, lulling us into inevitability ‘Through the static and distance’. His long-awaited signature, ‘a farewell transmission’, is soft – then the hypnotic alternation between 'Long dark blues' and 'Listen' resumes. This final word, spoken as both command and plead, encapsulates the song's delayed revelation and desperate loneliness. 

Right, so I'm definitely being led into the darkness one way or another... but it's so beautiful, transfigured into the 'dark blues' of Molina's music. And anyway, as the speaker confessed earlier, 'My kind of life's no better off/ If it's got a map, or if it's lost'. In this song, miracle and apocalypse exist side-by-side; 'transmission' is not mere communication but a physical exchange of energy, a shifting of matter. Molina has led us into the dark, but he's inscribed words into it - the moon is dead, but its 'fossil blood' is harvested again at the song's beginning. The listener has been initiated into an endless cycle of lights and blackouts, beauty and fear and sadness, recalling Molina's description of Lorain's 'storms and falling red sky and lightning'. This song powers through its dark and haunted landscapes like a weary yet determined heartbeat-machine, the ‘transmission’ at its core signalling a reimagining of industrial process as a continual generation of miracle and communion.