Gone But Not Forever

When Jason Molina sings, "I've been riding with the ghost/ I've been doing whatever he told me," you don't doubt the guy for a minute. What better way to start any Halloween playlist than with a song from a guy who knows from ghosts, real ghosts, the ones that won't be bought off with a scoop of candy corn?

And what better song from arguably his biggest album, Song: Ohia's The Magnolia Electric Co. than Track #2, "I've Been Riding With the Ghost?"

Forget about those other fake Halloween playlists. Come to the dark side. No, we don't have cookies. We don't have peeled grapes. We don't have jump scares.

This is the Jason Molina Halloween playlist. Yes, our host tonight is Ghost Jason himself.

For your listening pleasure, what we have here tonight is a hefty serving of unflinching death on the half-shell-- the good old dirt nap itself. We have geese walking on your grave and owls calling, "pain, pain, pain," as they fly over. We have the law of eternal return.

Of course, what returns-- as every real horror fan knows-- is not the same as what went away.

Real ghosts do not perform the Monster Mash, and they are not a graveyard smash. Real ghosts may crack a wry joke or two, but they're dark and gloomy jokes that whistle past the graveyard. After all, life is pain, and then you die.

Man, she must be fun at parties.

Actually, I am. But the party's less Ghostbusters and more My Best Friend's Exorcism. Kids dressed up like the Frozen princess? Fun-size candy bars? Get off my lawn! Where's Freddy Krueger when you need him?

The real Halloween is graveyards, owls, the Moon. Blue flames, red taillights. Fog and darkness. Things that won't stay buried in the ground. Ominous futures foretold. The cold icy fingers of a lonely ghost. The larger owls with claws out front.

We might as well get started with a little mood music. Twelve minutes of "Incantation," from the somewhat controversial Ghost Tropic album should raise a few hairs on the back of the arms.

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You just met the guy, and you're already thinking, Whoa. What's up with all the ghosts? You're not wrong. Ghosts are such a constant theme with Jason that he's got not one but two albums with “ghost” in the title-- The Ghost and Ghost Tropic. Plus he's got those ghost-adjacent album titles like Protection Spells and Eight Gates.

Erin Osmon, Jason's biographer, tells us early (as in page 11!) that:

“...he truly believed in ghosts, and that many people are ghosts...we owe it to ourselves to give each other space, especially ghosts.”

Not that he was great at giving ghosts space himself. As a child, he reported many supernatural encounters, including some in the family home that may have been brushed off as night terrors. However, there was physical evidence of some of these encounters. For instance, when prospecting on a friend's property, he found a rare coin. The old man who led him to the coin was 1) unseen by everyone else, and 2) seemed to fit the description of the property's long-deceased previous owner.

Of course, not even a Halloween playlist can be all ghosts all the time. In the midst of death, we are in life and all that. Fortunately, Jason also knew his way around a good love song.

One of my favorite serenades is, "Such Pretty Eyes for a Snake," which expresses this cheerful sentiment:

"...If I came upstairs with you/ I bet I'll be just in time-- just in time!/ To be part of something / I'll regret my whole life."

How could a girl resist?

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That's from Trials and Errors, a live album from what is now called the Magnolia Electric Co. Yes, I know, up top Magnolia Electric Co. was the name of the album and Songs: Ohia was the name of the band, but Jason believed in keeping the crowd on their toes.

He was also a history buff, and if we learn nothing else from history, we learn about carpe diem because, like it or not, pretty soon we're all history. In "Captain Badass," from Song: Ohia's Axxess & Ace, here's how he lets the love interest know maybe it's time to get a move-on:

"There ain't no contest against the final day / We'll rise above us either way... We get no second chance in this life."

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There's always got to be a slow dance. "Being in Love," from Song: Ohia's The Lioness, sets the peppy note of optimism we've come to expect from this artist: “Being in love means you are completely broken...”

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Angsty pickup lines are all very well, but once we've got the Halloween honey in the passenger seat of the trusty car, it's time to move forward to the gloomy riding around on dark ill-fated roads in search of some moonlit Lover's Lane. Owls are always included at no extra charge.

"Alone with the Owl," from Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go comes with a nice video.

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Of course, the most nightmarish road trip is the one that brings you back home. Straight-up doom-on-the-rocks is too much for that situation. When things get truly dark, you need to toss in a little bouncy bravado.

“Don't This Look Like the Dark” from Trials and Errors gets this so right it's scary:

"Six and a half hours into the West Virginia night / Half a mile from home and I was makin' pretty good time / Thought I'd gone far enough I couldn't lose the trail / And I stepped through the door, I still found a way to fail."

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Well, shoot. The dark isn't all bad. For one thing, you can hide things in it.

Oh. Wait.

"The Dark Don't Hide It," is from Magnolia Electric Co's What Comes After the Blues. (Spoiler: It's more blues.)

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Driving around in circles angst, romantic angst, angst with owls, death, flying off without our bodies... As magical as it sounds, all good things must come to an end. Even Halloween night. Do enough of that stuff, and you can probably guess what comes next.

That's right. Death. Extinction. The Blue Oyster Cult said we could be like Romeo and Juliet, but why settle for them, when we can be like the dinosaurs, only with a moodier soundtrack?

Just think, a million years from now, when the speed of electromagnetic transmissions has brought our radio waves a million miles out from the long-cooled embers of the dead Earth, our space brothers from another galaxy will pick up the final message:

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"Farewell Transmission" is one of those songs that made Song: Ohia's Magnolia Electric Co. such a classic they changed the name of the band to the name of the album.

"We will be gone but not forever." The space brothers may consider themselves warned.

You see, in the spirit of eternal return, nothing ever dies forever. The human race may have blinked off with a whimper and not a bang, but the human spirit will go on in the afterlife. Some ghosts may go away quietly, but others stick around.

And so the final song is not so much a eulogy for the human race, but a riddle. "The Last Three Human Words," also from Trials and Errors, is addressed to a new ghost-- "You're not my girl anymore / You're a ghost in the west"-- and eventually she is presented with this question:

“He said the last three human words / Were the same as the first three words. / Don't you ever wonder what they were?”

Hint: They're not the first three words that come to mind. But all the clues you need are in the song. So, chin up, shoulders out. You've already done life. How tough can death be? Those kids who dressed as princesses for Halloween might be freaking out right about now, but you never flinched and you'll be a brilliant ghost.

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Get the whole Jason Molina's Ghost Party playlist on Youtube:

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Author's Note: I'm into lo-fi, which isn't flavor of the month or even the decade, but if enough of you hit that <3 button, I might be persuaded to do Jeff Mangum next. I have a previous story about music, which is a little bit about Julian Casablancas, but it's also about having a creepy dad. So you might want to approach that one with caution. It's here if you want it.

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Helpful Links

Erin Osman, Jason Molina: Riding With the Ghost (2017) is available on Amazon and probably other retailers too, but I bought my copy there.

Here's Jason's page at his label, Secretly Canadian, where you can buy all the usual stuff. Mp3s, vinyl, merch.

Here's artist William Schaff's page.

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