I hear the great beast calling
Everything is really fucking bleak right now buddy. The whole place is dark as I said the other day. It's almost too much to take. But one thing I promise you is that no matter how many of them it seems like there are – and there are quite a few to be fair – there are more of us. The vast majority of people do not want any of this. Most of our lives are not animated by spite and revenge and a desire above all else to do harm. Most of us do not derive our sense of well-being from abusing our power over others. Most of us are normal.
One thing I've been doing a lot lately when I feel like shit is gorging myself on the music of the late great Jason Molina. It doesn't make me feel better per se – or at all I guess due to the generally downtrodden nature of the songs – but it makes me feel like a human being. A flawed and fucked up and heartbroken one sure but a human being nonetheless. It reminds me how beautiful and precious a thing that is to be. Something worth holding onto if you can. Something worth recognizing in others. Something worth defending.
Today music journalist and Molina biographer Erin Osmon writes about two recent Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. concerts in Texas and the recently released I Will Swim to You tribute album. Osmon previously wrote for Hell World about her top 5 Molina songs alongside twenty other writers and musicians.
Luke O’Neil
She was also kind enough to send over a bunch of high quality videos which I unfortunately had to trim and fuck up to get them to post in here. Sorry! I'm usually really precious about anyone else singing Molina songs but Will Johnson really captures the necessary weariness and sadness. From all the videos I've seen the entire band sounds so good. Here's hoping they come to Boston sometime soon.
Read a bit more from me down below and help pay for our great contributors if you can. Some things are still good.
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Mark your calendars for my book events in NYC on November 12 and in Boston at The Sinclair on November 8. More details on that one to come.
Every single night I think it's almost over
Almost over, almost over
Every single night I think it's almost over
Uhh, the mess we're in
Every single night I hear the great beast howling
Great beast howling, great beast howling
Every single night I hear the great beast howling
Uhh, the mess we're in
Would you like to see the whole place in ruins
Instead of all the things that they keep doing in our names
Would you like to see the whole place a wreck
And built back as something we all might respect
Uhh, the mess we're in
Now every single night I think how we used to be decent
How it hasn't been recent
Every single night I think how we used to be decent
Uhh, the mess we're in
I hear the great beast calling
by Erin Osmon
Last Saturday, a crowd of 500 gathered under the big Texas sky. In Denton, a vibrant college town north of Dallas, old folks, middle-aged folks, 20- and- 30-somethings and kids with big black X marks on their hands coalesced around Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co., the latest tribute to the late singer-songwriter Jason Molina of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. It was a night whose emotional vibration may only be described as divine. At Rubber Gloves, a long-running DIY rehearsal space and venue — a continuation of the kind of “Texas weird” consecrated by Willie Nelson and Armadillo World Headquarters in the 1970s — the band’s outdoor performance, and the energy it stirred, was bigger than our physical bodies. Its spirit met each rapt soul in its place, and freed it of its burdens.
The Ohio-born Molina’s songs are steeped in a heartland-meets-Southern gothic mysticism that blends ghostly imagery with the natural world and the Rust Belt’s powerful grit. The owls, moons, ghosts, horizons, broken hearts, and iron ore of his lyrical menagerie are tantamount to hieroglyphics etched in stone — immortal and mysterious, affecting and singular, a series of clues that transport its audience to a specific place in time. When placed in the context of the night’s players, they took on a new power.
Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. is a portmanteau of Molina’s band Magnolia Electric Co., which released a string of incredible albums between 2005-2009, and the singer-songwriter Will Johnson, who issued a collaborative album with Molina in 2009. On September 19, the new group, created in tribute to their late friend, released a 7-inch single of new versions of Molina’s “Wooden Heart” and Johnson’s “Twenty Cycles to the Ground,” both from the Molina & Johnson album, which the pair never got to tour behind due to Molina’s struggle with addiction. They also issued a scorching, digital-only version of Magnolia Electric Co.’s “The Big Beast.”
Riding with the Ghost video by Erin Osmon
Johnson, a mainstay of the Texas independent music scene, who releases excellent records under his own name, and who led the beloved indie-rock band Centro-Matic, is himself a serial collaborator. He’s worked with everyone from David Bazan to Jay Farrar, and is also a member of Jason Isbell’s band the 400 Unit. His work with Molina, born of a boy scout-like getaway near Denton, where the pair wrote with a fervor, and also shot bb guns and made visual art, makes him a very logical and natural stand-in for his late friend. His raspy singing voice, born in Missouri and molded in Texas, is aligned with Molina’s in its Southern-steeped Midwestern inflections.
When placed alongside the surviving members of Magnolia Electric Co. — Jason Groth (guitar, vocals), Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner (lap steel), Pete Schreiner (bass, vocals), Mark Rice (drums, vocals) and Mikey Kapinus (keys, vocals) — Johnson was free to both channel and salute the songs’ author. There were moments where it felt as if Molina was singing through him, as on the stirring “Hold On Magnolia,” and the “long dark blues” refrain of “Farewell Transmission.” And there were others where Johnson and company clearly made the songs their very own. They transformed “Steve Albini’s Blues,” an eerie and minimalist bluegrass-adjacent incantation from the Didn’t It Rain album, into a psychedelic blast of electric guitars, lap steel, and primal rhythms that stretched beyond the seven-minute mark. They applied a similar treatment to “The Big Beast.” The group’s harmonizing on “Just Be Simple” elevated the song — as beautiful as it in its recorded forms — to its fullest emotional sonority.
Steve Albini's Blues video by Erin Osmon
The band, who’ve been friends and collaborators since their undergraduate days at Indiana University in Bloomington in the late ’90s — I wasn’t that far behind them, having graduated from IU in 2002 — operate as a psychically connected unit at this point, performing Molina’s catalog with remarkable heart and precision. Johnson’s ability to fall in with them, seamlessly, and with evident skill, was impressive but also unsurprising given his collaborative track record. On stage, they were a band of brothers united by a fallen leader, and the songs were a connective thread between realms — a cathartic and otherworldly hymnody uniting Molina, his friends and his fans
There’s been plenty of appreciation for Molina in the years since his untimely death in 2013 from the effects of alcohol use disorder. Earnest covers posted to Youtube, tribute albums and charity gigs, band-member reunion shows, and counter-cultural name-checking has mounted a not insignificant wave of en memoriam momentum. There was the blessed sense that Molina’s legacy would endure as it long had – in a DIY sphere of his own making, among die-hard fans and the independent musical peers he grew alongside over his 20-year career. After years of interviewing Molina’s family, friends, bandmates, peers and record label representatives, I released my biography, Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost, in 2017 — as a labor of love and a labor of labor, just the way Molina would’ve liked it. Though my passion for the Midwestern songwriter burned bright, I couldn’t have predicted the groundswell of enthusiasm that has amassed over the last couple of years, a newfound love for Molina among a younger wave of country-tinged indie-rock bands and, subsequently, the cultural cognoscenti, the likes of which are unprecedented in his posthumous story.
Farewell Transmission video by Erin Osmon
Its burbles began as higher-profile singer-songwriters such as Kevin Morby, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and Jason Isbell began issuing covers and touting their love of Molina on social media. But it exploded as a gifted 20-something songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina, Jake Lenderman, who performs under the name MJ Lenderman, was anointed by the indie-rock hype machine and name-checked Molina amid his rapid ascent beginning in 2022. Soon, similarly minded bands such as Wednesday, Squirrel Flower, Fust, Case Oats, and many others — all of whom were pre-pubescent at the height of Molina’s career — trumpeted their love of the Ohio-born songwriter.
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This culminated in the release of I Will Swim to You this month, perhaps the best Molina tribute album to date, which consists of earnest and often highly imaginative Molina covers by younger-gen musician fans including Lenderman, Horse Jumper of Love, Friendship, Trace Mountains, and more. Conceived and compiled by Jeff Casazza of Run for Cover Records, it’s a testament to the long tail of Molina’s influence, which stretches far beyond what many of us had once known or even imagined. When I was working on the press bio for the album, Casazza told me how he’d loved Molina since his high school days. He emphasized the importance of Jason’s body of work to music heads like him and the even younger artists on his label. I agreed, of course, but I also couldn’t help but feel like I’d been let in on a generational secret, one that gave me great hope.
The show in Denton was part of a short tour in Texas that also touched down in Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. has also added three dates in Virginia and North Carolina this December. The San Antonio show, at a rough and ready honky tonk called the Lonesome Rose, which Molina would’ve loved, was similar in its full capacity and open heartedness. There were tears and audible jubilation. That Friday and Saturday in Texas, in the dusty confines of an urban roadhouse, and under the constellations of the Denton sky, there was the sense that Molina’s spirit lives among us, immortal like the world’s first ghost.
Erin Osmon is a music journalist, critic and author of books on Jason Molina and John Prine. Her forthcoming book, about heartland rock in the 1980s, will be published by W. W. Norton in spring 2026.
For my new book We Had It Coming – which I'm told is shipping as we speak – I used a bunch of Molina (and David Berman) lyrics as titles. Here's one of them which I probably already shared but who cares.
Come hang out in New York with me and a bunch of great writers.
Thanks as always to my dear boy Dan Ozzi for the shout out in his great music newsletter Zero Cred. Be sure to check out his podcast No Disrespect with another sometime Hell World contributor David Anthony.
Anthony wrote about the music and life of the late Rick Froberg and about growing up in a funeral home.
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Anyway here's what Dan said about my book. Listen to the man. About this one single thing.
We’re a little over a month away from the release of Luke O’Neil’s new book, We Had It Coming. Luke very kindly sent me an early copy and every night before bed I read a couple of his short stories and then proceed to have the most fucked up dreams imaginable. Probably unrelated.
Luke has been dropping a few early looks in his newsletter Welcome to Hell World, like this one. Vignettes and glimpses from the edge of civilization. Nobody’s doing it like Luke right now.
Our man Austin L. Ray of How I'd Fix Atlanta is raising money to buy out medical debt in Georgia again. He wrote about the process of doing so for us a couple years ago. Chip in here if you can.
It's bleak out there. But we're gonna do some good this week. How I'd Fix Atlanta has partnered with Undue Medical Debt to help a bunch of ATLiens this week, and we need your help. Give what you can. Tell everyone you know. unduemedicaldebt.org/campaign/whe...
— Austin L. Ray (@austinlouisray.bsky.social) 2025-09-22T12:29:57.148Z
He also wrote about his favorite Molina songs coincidentally and about TV on the Radio a while back.
Luke O’Neil
Chotiner: You've written a lot about the band Weezer over the years. Me: That's right. Chotiner: And The Blue Album is their best work as you've said. Me: 100%. Always has been. Chotiner: In 1996 in a letter to your high school girlfriend you wrote... Me: Can we go off the record real quick?
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2025-04-22T23:02:22.641Z
There has been another Chotinering. This time with Obama ghoul Cass Sunstein. Chotiner is of course everyone's favorite interviewer because he has the exceedingly rare journalistic superpower of asking follow up questions.
It's all quite good but I really liked this exchange about Kissinger.
In terms of human rights, I’ve always found it a little bit puzzling, given what you write, and given who your wife is, that you two were so close to Henry Kissinger. Of all the pre-Trump political figures in America, he is the one I think of as in some ways the opposite of liberal, given his behavior toward the rest of the world.
I’ll tell you a story. I wrote a book a few years ago on Star Wars. We invited Dr. Kissinger to my Star Wars book party, and he said, “You wrote a book about Star Wars? Why’d you write a book about Star Wars?” He was puzzled and courteous, but really confused. And then he came to the book party, which was quite generous. He was a busy person.
But, despite his busyness, he came to the book party.
Yeah, and then I gave a talk on Star Wars, and he came up to me afterward and he said, “Oh, I see why you wrote a book on Star Wars. There’s a lot there. It’s, like, about families and it’s about governments and freedom.” The amount of curiosity and generosity that he showed was incomparable. I don’t know anyone who showed that level of curiosity and generosity. And we really got into Star Wars. He just wanted to think about it. I know there are strong views about his career, and I’m hardly an expert on his career.
But your wife is one of the great human-rights experts in the world. I asked you about him being anti-liberal, and your response was that he was very nice to you about your book.
About Star Wars.
It is certainly a touching story. But that’s not totally an answer to the question.
Yeah. Well, I don’t know. What he would think of this book I’d love to know.
But no second thoughts about being friends with him or anything?
I feel generally very grateful for friendship, and he was, when I knew him, a person of immense kindness. Those who think of him as someone who was something horrible or worse, I don’t know what to say about that.
But you could have an opinion on it. You have an opinion on all kinds of things, right?
Well, on him and his role in government, that’s not something I’ve particularly studied, so I don’t know. I know some people who think he was a horrible historic figure. They would say, “Would you be friends with Genghis Khan? Would you be friends with Stalin?” And I wouldn’t be friends with Stalin, so I concede that.
Well, the next time someone brings up a terrible anecdote about Cambodia or Vietnam, I will definitely drop the Star Wars story to show that people have two sides.
Yeah. And I get those who think you shouldn’t be friends with someone who did terrible things. I hear that. I can just say that he was, as a very large number of people would say, though many fewer would say it publicly, an extraordinarily generous friend.
Professor, thank you so much for doing this.
Great, thanks. If we go light on the Kissinger part, I wouldn’t complain, because it could dwarf everything else.
It sure could!
Be back in a couple days. Stay safe out there. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.