Jason Molina and the owl howling pain pain pain
night birds, music to cry to, my dead dad, navigation, Hecate, and lots more lighthearted writing
While this is about birds (of the night), it’s more about music to be miserable to, and owls as death omens, and loving addicts and alcoholics, and whether birds can save a life.
(This is very long and you don’t need to read all of it but I think I needed to write it)
I’m also going to be quoting a lot from a really wonderful interview that the writer Justin Taylor1 did with Jason Molina in 2011. This is the interview - https://content.jasonmolina.org/post/148000355743/press-molina-fastertimes2011june and this is Justin’s website - https://justindtaylor.net/
When I was a teenager my mum (who has informed so much of my music taste) had a boyfriend, Phil (Sidenote - have you ever met a good Phil? Seriously?) who recorded a Leonard Cohen album from CD onto cassette tape for her. He put a little sticker label on the tape -“slash-along-Lenny”, he did this because he was a dick with a shit sense of humour but also because to so many Leonard Cohen had a reputation as the master of misery, music to cut your wrists to. Leonard Cohen is, and probably always will be, my favourite singer of all time but he didn’t make suicide music, it’s not even miserable the majority of the time. His music is sexy and funny, sometimes with a little swagger and a wink (a very smooth wink, don’t try it, you’re not Leonard). Of course there’s longing and melancholy too, but the yearning is mostly reserved for tall blondes rather than the grim reaper.
I’ve got a bunch of playlists on my Spotify with names like ‘all the saddest songs in the world’, ‘Sweet sad November’, ‘soft, sad, and melancholy’, ‘Now that’s what I call sad music vol 82’. I could spend paragraphs writing about why I love sad music so much, but my friend Vanessa Jean Speckman (an artist, a poet, a really magical human being) has summed it up so perfectly on patches and t-shirts, so I’m going to just quote her with a picture instead.
Sometimes you want to wallow in someone else’s pain rather than your own, sometimes you sing along to the saddest song and your pitiful voice cracks (yeah, but isn’t that how the light gets in?) and it makes you laugh because you’re 39 and sound like an angsty 14 year old, and the spell is broken. If I’m not doing very well and I want to weep for a while or just sing along with my voice cracking, it’s often Jason Molina’s music that I turn to. I’m a johnny-come-lately fan, I didn’t discover Jason’s music (which he performed and recorded as Jason Molina, Songs:Ohia, and Magnolia Electric Co) until after he died in 2013.
So all of you folks in heaven not too busy ringing the bell
Some of us down here ain't doing very well
Some of us with our windows open in the southern cross motel
Still waitin
Still waitin
For you to sing that song again
The one you were singin at the very fall of man
It ain't hallelujah but it might as well have been
Sing it brother one more time
Sing it brother one more time
Sing it sister one more time
Sing it sister one more time
Once for everybody who got left behind
On the Wikipedia page of one of my favourite authors there used to be a table of themes that cropped up in his books repeatedly - Wrestling, Vienna, Bears, New England, Sex Workers, etc. Maybe that’s a little part of why I love Jason Molina’s music so much, the recurring motifs mean you know what world you’re about to step into when you press play. It’s a watery world where the moon looms large over everything, each road is a crossroad and every bell that still can ring does so . The world is ablaze with light, not just the moon but stars and fire and the sun and lanterns and flashes of lightning. It’s a world populated with big cats, serpents, and ghosts.
“But as far as the imagery goes, I’ve always treated it as a rebus. These images all fit into a storyline that is completely open to the interpretation of anybody who listens to it. Maybe you don’t even have to like the music. If you sit down and look at all the lyrics to all the songs, you’ll see that there is a theme, but it’s not running in a straight line” - Jason Molina in the interview with Justin Taylor
My own work…holds that each of us has our own unique inner imaginarium. In other words, we are each haunted by different images; we each resonate with different myths or fairy tales and with different archetypal characters. Different poems and artworks illuminate our world and enlighten us” - Dr Sharon Blackie.
More than anything Jason’s songs are filled with birds. There are so many birds flying around in his inner imaginarium that it’s a wonder I can hear the guitar for the beating of wings and the call of the crows.
When I’m passionate about something I find it hard not to talk at length about it, not to write every thought I have on every thing related to it. I’m telling you this because I want you to know that a part of me (a big part) wants to write about every bird Jason Molina every referenced. Because I wrote about Leonard Cohen (who Jason Molina was sometimes compared to) I want to write about how when Leonard wrote about sparrows it was to compare them to “your small breasts”, but when Jason does it’s
Through sparrow black wind
A dead crow calls out to his wing.
It’s sex vs death.2 Phil was an idiot (I’m so certain he still it), it’s fuck-along-Lenny. I’m not saying one is better, sex or death, Molina or Cohen. I just want to talk about it all. I’m showing enormous restraint in just writing a short paragraph saying that I want to write it all, rather than writing ten paragraphs of it all.
I also want to note, before I go any further, that I have some uneasiness about interpreting poetry or song lyrics. I know the clue is in the word ‘interpret’ but I want to say that I don’t think anyone can say what another artist was saying or trying to say, especially me. I can only say what I hear and you should take it as that. I am writing about what I took it mean, but that doesn’t mean that’s what the artist meant.
Instead of writing a bit about all of Jason’s bird songs, I will write a bunch about one - Alone with the owl. ‘Alone with the owl’ is track 3 on his album ‘Let me go, let me go, let me go’. The album was released in 2006, 7 years before he died of alcohol abuse-related organ failure at the age of 39. In the opening song on the album, It’s Easier Now, he sings
It's easier now
That I just say I got better
It's easier when I just admit
Death comes now
The whole album sounds like a swan song to me, it’s a man who’s walking with the ghosts who haunt his songs and telling them, “I’m going to join you soon”.
Alone with the owl
Alone with the owls howling pain, pain, pain
Alone with the owls howling pain
Alone with the owls howling pain, pain, pain
You don't have to live this way
While I lived, was I a stray black dog?
While I lived, was I a stray black dog?
While I lived, was I anything at all?
Did I have to live this way?
I stood beside the ocean, not a single wave
Beside the ocean, not a single wave
Beside the ocean, not a single wave
Not a single thing left to sayWith the owl howling pain, pain, pain
With the ocean howling the same
With my life howling the same
Did I have to live this way?
Come, doleful owl, the messenger of woe,
Melancholy's bird, companion of despair,
Sorrow's best friend, and mirth's professed foe,
The chief discourser that delights sad care.
O come, poor owl, and tell thy woes to me.
Which having heard, I'll do the like for thee. - 1607 madrigal.
The madrigal is from England, but owls have been seen as messengers of woe and specifically harbingers of death all over the world for hundreds and hundreds of years.
In Virgil’s Aenid "the lonely owl on the roof wails mournfully, and repeatedly utters its long drawn funereal notes" before Dido’s suicide. 3
all over the world the owl has also been the avis turpissima, the most evil bird of all, the prophet of doom, associated with death and evil spirits - Birds with human souls by Beryl Rowland (1978)
A quick aside on the stray black dog, before I return to the owls howling pain pain pain.
It is bad luck to have a stray black dog come to one's house - Northern Ohio. Animal and Plant Lore Collected From The Oral Tradition Of English Speaking Folk by Fanny Dickerson Bergen. 1899.
I might not bothered to have include this, but it’s from Northern Ohio where Jason was raised, and I don’t doubt that the man knew his folklore and mythology, because…
I am a huge book collector. I probably have, I don’t even want to think, but it’s probably approaching two or three thousand books. I’ve never counted, but my house is full of books and guitars.
Then as far as the history stuff I collect, it’s sort of like folklore collections. - The Justin Taylor interview.
When I was researching birds as death omens I pulled out my book of Japanese Death Poems, because I recalled that there was a cuckoo in at least one of the tankas. I re-read the 12 cuckoo (Hototogisu or Cuculus poliocephalus, used in the poems as a messenger of death) poems, and then I re-read all of the rest. The same imagery cropped up over and over again - the moon, water, flowers, and birds, a poetry world that fits right into the Molinaverse.4
In Japan, as elsewhere in the world, it has become customary to write a will in preparation for one’s death. But Japanese culture is probably the only one in the world in which, in addition to leaving a will, a tradition of writing a “farewell poem to life” (jisei) took root and became widespread. - Yoel Hoffman in Japanese Death Poems
In so many Songs;Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co/Jason Molina’s lyrics what I hear is a swan song, a jisei/death poem, a goodbye. Sometimes it’s Goethe’s last words.
I’m not nearly at my last words for this piece, though maybe that would have been a fitting place to end it. Buckle up fuckleheads, I’m about to wheel my dad’s dead body out to join the conversation. I know this is meant to be about Jason Molina, and birds, and I already shoehorned Leonard Cohen and Northern Exposure into it, but it’s also about how living in the human world can be too painful to bear sometimes, for some people.
It’s also because I can’t write about Jason’s life5 or what it was like for the people that loved him and lived with him. I can’t write about how it feels to be an addict or an alcoholic (though I could write books on the various faulty ways I have chosen in the past to soothe pain) or how it felt to love that particular alcoholic. I can write about what it was like to watch someone kill themselves in slow motion though and be helpless to stop it. And I feel like it’s okay to shoehorn my dad’s pain in here because Jason Molina’s pain is my dad’s pain and my pain is your pain, because (I will re-use this analogy a million times) aren’t we all one big starling murmuration soaring and then diving, contracting and expanding, and on some level feeling all the pain and all the joy all at once?6
I have to edit myself when talking about my dad, not because I’m keeping secrets for him, but because the tragedy of his life was vast and complicated and the pain he inflicted on other people can’t be spoken about without the context of who he inherited from and how it was part of the legacy he left (along with some anger management paperwork and a pair of jean shorts) so that the living got to keep some of it for years after too. I could write pages and I wouldn’t have covered it. I deserve my second round of applause (a standing ovation this time please) for restraint in writing right now.
Death and my dad were associates in my head from a very young age, as far as I was concerned they were on first-name terms. They met when my dad was 9 and death came to a room he wasn’t allowed into and took his mum. Sometimes he came very close to introducing my mum to his associate, he did the same with his girlfriends after. My youngest brother told me his earliest memory is covering his mum’s head with his hands in an attempt to stop my dad, who was also his dad, from caving it in with a cricket bat. Death was coming after my dad too, in quite a literal sense. He had people after him who he said wanted to kill him, I always believed it but when he got pistol-whipped in a pub in Dorking (not the pistol-whipping capital of England) I believed it more so. When my mum woke me up the night before my tenth birthday and said we needed to leave the house because my dad (who didn’t live there) thought the people after him were coming for us I felt like a formal introduction had been made between myself and the avis turpissima.
So far, so Messenger of woe, Melancholy's bird, Companion of despair. My dad struggled with addiction before he met my mum but stopped after his first encounter with hepatitis. I don’t remember when my dad started taking heroin again, it was some time after he started dealing, and the reason he got into money trouble and thus pistol-whip and “we’ll kill you” trouble. He had ignored commandment four of the ten crack commandments.
I wasn’t in regular contact with my dad in the years leading up to his death but I bumped into him once when I was 14 and accompanying my friend while she picked up a speedball from a local dealers house. My dad was not the dealer but he was the one to open the door. He asked me if I drank, if I smoked, what drugs I took. I told him the truth which was some port once but I didn’t like it, and no I hadn’t even tried a cigarette, and no never. He told me I would, I would end up with addiction problems because that was my legacy. It wasn’t said with malice, it was said with resignation.
When people asked about my dad I called him a word that I’ve grown to hate because it dehumanises, that I used because it dehumanised. “Oh he’s a junkie” I would tell them. I would tell them every dark thing about him because I was a teenager with big feelings trying to elicit big feelings and big reactions, and because I carried some of his pain with me and I needed people to know how vast that pain was.
The last time I saw my dad alive was more surprising than the time I bumped into him a drug-dealers house. I was 16, my mum was younger than I am now, and my dad was 42. He turned up at our house and told my mum he wanted to get back together with her. He told us his girlfriend had overdosed 9 times now. He told us he was going to get clean, he’d been accepted into a great detox and rehab programme. He was going to get therapy. He was drinking heavily as well as using and it seemed to have really damaged his brain. He laughed at stupid jokes, and repeated himself often, and thought my mum would get back together with him. He looked corpse-adjacent, his eyes were sunken and his skin was sallow. If we were living in an epic Roman poem the owls would have filled the room, shrieking and wailing long drawn funereal notes. I didn’t need an owl. After he left, I said to my mum “he’s going to die soon” and my mum agreed that it was unlikely that he had a whole year left in him. I attempted to deepen my pre-grieving practice, learn how to love a ghost but more detached now.
I never thought about if my dad was pre-grieving too, if he knew he was dying and maybe didn’t want to. When he did die, in the timeframe my mum had predicted, it wasn’t the cirrhosis or overdoses of his friends (your friends and family too probably. Just like I’ve never met a good Phil, I’ve never met a person whose life hasn’t been touched by addiction in some way). He was riding his bike (drunk, at night) and a vehicle ploughed into him and he flew 20 feet in the air (I think that’s what they said at the inquest), and then fudged the landing. Bad at being a bird of the night. There was an investigation for a few months to see if the car had made him fly on purpose, the police decided in the end that they couldn’t call it either way.
It’s an ugly thing to admit that I relished telling people my dad was dead, but it’s true. I did because I was still a teenager with big feelings and I wanted to elicit and be present for the reaction to big feelings, but this time I’d been allotted an even bigger portion of the pain pie and I wanted it to be seen. Immediately after telling them (unless it was a man telling me to smile, or the ticket man on a train I couldn’t afford) I would feel a pang of regret and I would want to soothe the pain I had just caused. As far as I saw it (at 17) there were two ways I could soothe, humour or reassurance. My sense of humour is inherited from my mum, and it’s dark and stupid and occasionally goes way beyond the pale.
I went to visit my dads body, I had gone to a festival the day I found out (because I had pre-grieved of course. Also because I looked up the five stages of grief and very sincerely told people I had managed to whizz through them in just a few hours so no I’m fine to go), which meant he was a few days dead by that point. His neck was a bit twisted and one eye wasn’t closed properly and his mouth hung up, and his skin had gone from sallow to liver-failure yellow and his pores were gigantic. Six Feet Under had not prepared me for this, they hadn’t done the usual embalming and gussying up because of his hepatitis (a more recently acquired one, a worse letter on the hep alphabet).
Have you ever heard a barn owl screech? I recall I made a noise similar to that.
When I used humour to ease the discomfort that I had just wrought with my news, it would be by doing an impression of my dad’s dead head. Not me and my reaction to it, not the scream in a cold death-stink room, or the wailing in the car on the way home but here it’s okay because he’s just a series of funny contortions not a real life person. Maybe it was not just really lame humour, but some kind of exorcism as coping mechanism. It was the much less frequently used route though.
The second path I took was to immediately reassure the person that it was okay because he was never going to get better, his life was tragic and hard and it was too late for him to fix it. I’d stop short of "he’s in a better place now”, but that was the gist of it. It was already a write-off, his whole life, nothing to mourn here, please move along, I’m very sorry for bothering you.
This was for me more than them too, if it was inevitable then it’s okay, kind of. I granted my dad some redemption after he died, I understood (not excused) every shitty choice he made as a consequence of his suffering and forgave the ones that were mine to forgive. I felt like a big champion A+ griever for it, she’s done it again the girl who went through every stage of grief in 2 hours has achieved what takes some monks their whole lives. Applause, applause - wow another standing ovation? But it was easily granted, this posthumous redemption, because it was saying fuck hope.
If there was a bit of hope, that not every owl screech is a foregone conclusion, that he’d find his way through the pain, if I imagined that it had been a real possibility that he might have navigated a way to sobriety then there was the very real and hard work of no-it-wasn’t-“meant to be”-mourning to be done and going through the fury instead of swallowing it all (another piece of the pain pie).
If you have been reading my stuff since the Gut Feelings (or even Blue Rib) days you may have read me writing about my dad before, and part of me feels embarrassed to do it again. You can write one piece ever, and one conversation per person ever, about your dad dead and after that you’re milking it. Let his bones rest, it’s a cheap trick trotting out your trauma again - my inner critic (Colin) has said this at the beginning and end of every paragraph I’ve written today. It’s oversimplifying it to say that in writing about it, in examining it through different lenses, in sharing it, I’m somehow transmuting some of the legacy of pain he had resigned himself to me inheriting. But that is true, that is one of the truths.
I took a big detour through dead (and deadbeat) dad city, to arrive back in the Molinaverse. Remember when I told you that we’re all one starling murmuration and we swoop and soar together, and then afterwards I took you swoop, swoop, swooping without any soar? We’re going further down now. Have a little palate cleanser song.
I wrote, a million and one paragraphs back, that in his music I hear a death poem or a swan song, but I hear something else too - a lot of references to navigation. A compass, the moon, maps, and the north star - the north star who says “Kid you're so lost even I can't bring you home” .
Birds navigate using the stars too.
I hear someone who wants just a little more light so that they can find their way out, so they know which way to go at the crossroads.
JT: There’s a lot of mines in your music, not so many lighthouses at least that I noticed—maybe I just haven’t picked up on them—but one of my favorite things about your albums, and about your work in general, is that there’s these key words or images that recur constantly. I actually made a list of as many of the major ones as I could come up with, and mines was on there. Let’s see what else— stars, flame
JM: —The moon, the horizon—
JT:—The dark, the desert, electricity—
JM: Crossroads? Did that make it to the list? -
The Justin Taylor interview again
There’s an ancient Greek Goddess of crossroads, Hecate.
Hecate was worshiped where a road forks; that is, where she would be looking in three directions. Her worship was carried on at night; and as she was thought to roam the streets on moonlight nights, it is no wonder that she became a goddess of magic and secret arts, no wonder that ghostly beings followed in her train, no wonder that dogs barking at the moon were associated with such a goddess and even were offered to her in sacrifice. The practice of burying the dead along the streets outside the city gates was one more link between Hecate and mysterious spirits.” - The mythology of Greece and Rome, presented with special reference to its influence on literature. 1907. Arthur Fairbanks.
A lot of rebus material there.
Hecate takes on the role of guardian not just of roads, but of all journeys, including the journey to the afterlife. In art and myth, she is shown, along with Hermes, guiding Persephone back from the underworld with her torches. - Wikipedia.
William Schaff , the artist who did the Magnolia Electric co album artwork, made a map for Jason (can I interject here to say I feel like I’m being overfamiliar every time I omit his surname and overformal if I include it every time. It feels weird both ways), a map to help him find his way through troubled times. You can read about it and look at it here- https://www.twentyfourbit.com/2013/03/mark-kozeleks-its-easier-now-cover-and-william-schaffs-molina-map/
His friends wanted to help him find his way, up to surface level, onto the right road, onto a brighter road. Just in case you didn’t click the link, (you should click the link it’s a beautiful map), the map never made it to Molina.
How do you help someone navigate their way out of addiction? How do you meet them in the underworld and not end up staying down there yourself? I don’t know, if I knew I would save everyone.
You’ll want a pay off. I said I was going to get us off the ground but I only took us 20 feet in the air and then I fudged the landing. I don’t have the answers, and I wouldn’t believe anyone that told me definitively that they have the answers. Do birds represent freedom for everyone? I think for some people they represent knowing the way while we’re all down here looking for a map.
I meandered around the houses to get here, but we’ve nearly arrived at our destination - a tree somewhere just beyond my front garden. Nearly.
There’s a consequence to saying fuck hope. If you say fuck hope, then you say if my life is shit and piss right now then it will always be shit and piss. If you say that then how do you keep your head aboveground? Everyone has to be redeemable, or none of us are.
Real truth about it is
No one gets it right
Real truth about it is
We're all supposed to try - Songs:Ohia
We’re going looking for this tree in the dark but two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. There’s a nightingale singing in the tree, it arrived back in the village a couple of days ago after migrating all the way from west Africa.
I don’t think any music is “slash-along” music (even Morrissey), but if there were such a thing then the nightingales song (melancholy though it is) is the opposite. It’s aren’t-you-glad-you-stayed-alive-at-least-until-now music. I don’t think birds alone can help you find the way, I don’t think they can save a life. But any bird call or song (nightingale or owl) paid attention to at the same time as stars on a cool spring night is a reprieve. Maybe all you can do is walk the line from one reprieve to another.
What comes after the blues? Birdsong. What came before the blues? Birdsong.
Now, from a whippoorwill sittin' high on a hill
They took a new note
And they pushed it through a horn
Until it was worn into a blue note
And then they nursed it, yeah, rehearsed it
And then gave out the news
That the Southland really gave birth to the blues - The birth of the blues
I emailed Justin to ask for clarification on something from that interview but I ended up not being able to fit it in the piece. I still wanted to share it though because it’s birdy, and thus exciting. It seems that the album name Nor Cease Thou, Never Now was a reference to a line in ‘Sumer is icumen in’ - the 13th century cuckoo song I wrote about in my piece on cuckoo celebrations. Justin was super gracious in emailing me back and brought it to my attention that the interview recording is up on Spotify -
In the same interview he talks about his love of Irish and Scottish poets. I wanted to share something by the 19th century Scottish poet James Montgomery, that sounds like it could be Molina lyrics, but I couldn’t find a place to shoehorn it in.
Swims, like an eagle, in the eye of noon,
Or wails, a screech-owl, to the deaf, cold moon ;
Haunts the dread brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
Or hums, a glittering insect in the air
Sex vs death. Leonard Cohen, who aligned himself with the nightingale and Molina, who aligned himself with the owl. Sometime later this month I’m going to write about the 12th century debate poem The owl and the nightingale. But this made me think about that.
If you want to read about Jason Molina’s life, by all accounts this is a good place to start - https://www.pagesofhackney.co.uk/webshop/product/jason-molina-erin-osmon/ I haven’t actually read it yet but I fully intend on buying both that book and another with the same title as soon as I can (afford new books) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609916/riding-with-the-ghost-by-justin-taylor/
I wrote 90% of this on one hours sleep and when I wrote this out I wasn’t sure if I was being sleep-deprived nuts so I wrote into google “are we all connected?” Lots of LinkedIn blog results but I’m keeping it in, trite and true.
You’re right – I didn’t need to read it. But I’m very glad I did.
For sad music I recommend John Dowland. His song Flow My Tears was so popular he signed his name 'Lachrimae'