Erstellt am: 24. 3. 2013 - 15:02 Uhr
Cross the Road, Molina
Less than a year ago I interviewed The Wave Pictures at a pub in St Pancras Station. When we were done, talk turned to Jason Molina of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. (limited) fame, with me in the largely ignorant and David Tattersall in the gently proselytising role of the concerned fan.
His life's work is currently streaming here.
This was when he first told me his Great Jason Molina Story, a moving tale of a collaboration that only lasted one afternoon, an album that never was, and the mystery of Jason Molina, beaten up and injured and lost in London.
Dave then told me about a tribute album the Wave Pictures were planning. In 2011 Molina's family had posted an appeal on his behalf on the internet. Molina was ill, he had no health insurance, and the bills were piling up. An all-too common tale in recent years.
So the Wave Pictures had set about about making one, maybe two tribute records, with a little bit of help from some of their less and more famous friends.
Last week when Jason Molina's death at the age of 39 was announced I was reminded of the project. I called David, and he told me all about the current state of the tribute, which, it turned out, had been all but ready for release at the time of Molina's passing. Naturally, I couldn't resist asking Dave to tell me The Story again for my radio show, and he duly did, in that understandably well-rehearsed, but still extremely touching way.
I was going to publish it here on my blog, but when the Wave Pictures' tribute Songs of Jason Molina went online on Saturday, I found that it comes with Dave's own written version of the very same story, which matches my transcript almost verbatim.
The Wave Pictures
So this is why I have left it out of this blog. A good excuse to go to the bandcamp page and buy the album.
Alternatively, you can hear it all on my radio show FM4 Heartbeat on Monday, March 25 from 10 to 12pm CET (9 to 11pm GMT). Meanwhile, here is the rest of what Dave had to say:
"[The tribute]'s still supposed to be happening. The Wave Pictures recorded a bunch of songs over a year ago, we made an album, and that's gonna go up really soon in the next few days as a Bandcamp page (it already has, ed.), so you can download the songs and you can make a donation to Jason Molina's family. And then there are the songs we collected, a bunch of cover versions from different friends of ours: Jeffrey Lewis, Herman Dune, Darren Hayman, Allo Darlin, Coming Soon and a few other people. We managed to get a couple of big names. We got Will Oldham, he did one, and we were waiting for Devendra Banhart. And we were just kind of waiting for everything to come together to do it. When we got the news a couple of days ago it was still very much a project in motion, and we just hadn't quite got everything together yet, you know, there was a lot of people still saying they would get back to us with their covers and things like that. And now I think there's a record label in America, as I understand it, who put out Jason's last album, who are doing a CD. So we're going to give them whatever covers they want from the ones that we've got together, so that they can sell the CD for a bit more money. And then we'll make the other covers that are left over available digitally at some point, so that people can still hear them and make a bit of money for him. And then I think we're going to do a gig in the summer because his family still desperately needs the money. We were still working on all those things when we heard the news, you know."
"I get frustrated because people always say: Oh he was in Will Oldham's shadow. He's just like a poor man's Will Oldham. I think that's nonsense, I don't think they have anything that strongly in common even. No need to compare them. I personally think that's the real deal. An album like Axxess and Ace is just a phenomenal piece of work for me. It changed the way I thought about a lot of things, about songwriting and stuff. Because I think there's something so direct about it and so completely what it is. There's no effort made to [...] be difficult or avant garde, but there's certainly no effort made to be accessible either. It feels like genuine expression to me, completely from the heart and unaffected. Anti-pop in some sense (laughs). All the things that the world needs more of. There's almost nothing between you and him. It's a direct connection. That's the type of voice that he had. That's how it feels to me."