Love & Work: The Lioness Sessions

Released in the early weeks of 2000, The Lioness stands as Jason Molina’s purest transmission on matters of the heart. It’s not just that the world is ending or that death seems promised with every passing minute, as was often the case on many of his essential records. There’s also this look he keeps getting from someone he really cares about. He’s not only affected by it; he’s “thrashed by the truth of your eyes.” And when it’s time for Molina to define exactly how he feels, he tells us in his wounded, earnest tenor, “Being in love means you are completely broken.” He sustains the mood throughout The Lioness, and he intends for us to feel that way, too.

The Lioness was a transitional album for Molina and his Songs: Ohia project. The records that came before were jumpier and more raw; the music that followed was smokier and more stately. In these nine songs across 40 minutes, where a series of minor chords recur like creeping waves of anxiety, he located the glacial sadness that would characterize his best writing even while crafting his simplest love songs, jukebox hopefuls he arranged like post-rock elegies. Love and Work: The Lioness Sessions is Secretly Canadian’s latest posthumous release from the vaults of Molina, who died in 2013 at age 39 from organ failure due to alcohol abuse. The package pairs the original album with 11 previously unreleased tracks—plus devastating essays from his wife, Darcie, and several collaborators, along with photos and ephemera from the era, like the two-of-hearts he taped to the studio wall while making the record. It’s a definitive document of this tender, crucial period for the open-hearted Ohio songwriter whose work has only grown more influential in his absence.

At a show in Richmond, Ind., just before The Lioness was released, Molina introduced one of his new songs by noting that fans were starting to ask questions about his lyrics. This was ironic for him, because his style was becoming more straightforward than old oblique beauties like, “My blood’s courage courses to rendezvous/With freedom.” But those curious fans were likely asking because they heard something about themselves within the mysteries of The Lioness. In these songs, Molina created portraits of couples, zoomed in so close that you can sense every nervous glance and twitch. “I watched us talking in the mirror,” he sings during “Tigress.” His writing on romantic relationships sounds patient and studied. Even at their most contented, the songs come out feeling ominous, expanding in open-ended ways. For these tunes about intimacy, Molina assembled a band that featured Alasdair Roberts and Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat and David Gow and made him sound completely, dangerously alone.

Some of Molina’s most enduring music is here. The unaccompanied “Coxcomb Red” is an ode to physical attraction sung with such urgency that it plays like an answer to “I’m on Fire.” While Springsteen’s words evoke loneliness, Molina’s longing is as direct as a love letter: “I wanted that heat so bad,” he sings sternly, “I could taste the fire on your breath.” The span of his devotion becomes literal in the title track, where he wavers between two declarations: “You can’t get here fast enough/I will swim to you.” Swooning and hopeless in the verses and more forceful with each repetition of the chorus, the music propels and suspends his words like wind in a rainstorm. Molina was straying from his indie-folk roots and heading toward the sprawling drone spirituals he’d embrace on 2002’s Didn’t it Rain and electrify on 2003’s Magnolia Electric Co. A breathtaking rendition of the centuries-old gospel standard “What Wondrous Love is This,” the final track on the bonus disc here, showcases the clarity and timelessness he desired.

The newly unearthed material is characteristically beautiful. But Molina was a sharp self-editor, so none of these songs conjure exactly the same intensity as The Lioness itself. More tentative and mantra-like, the music sounds closer to his previous album, Axxess & Ace, whose working title of Meet Me Where We Survive was actually taken from one of these songs, “On My Way Home.” Instead of feeling like an outtakes collection, it plays like its own complete if unpolished companion—a testament to how quickly Molina evolved during his brief, prolific career. The peak arrives with “I Promise Not to Quit,” a lost classic. It stops and starts in dramatic swells, mirroring the weathered vow in its chorus: “I will work to make it work.” It’s a distillation of a dedication that seeps through every note of this set. The heart is a risky fuel to burn, but look how the fire sustains.