Inspired by the Lonesome Road

Jason Molina has been traveling yet another lonesome highway with Magnolia Electric Co., heading from Tucson to a Thursday night gig in Austin.

The band has just gotten off Route 10 to partake in a favorite sustenance (hot, spicy barbecue), and Molina is ready to address the recurring metaphoric markers in his songs -- bright moons and falling stars, solitary vehicles weaving through lumbering mountains and barren plains, distant horizons and sudden crossroads -- and the emotional detritus of life on the road. Given the generally downcast nature of his lyrics, it's as if Molina spends an equal amount of time observing external landscapes and exploring interior ones.

"I've been touring since I was a teenager," says Molina, 32, something of a year-round road warrior whether with his band or solo.

"Geography to me is a symbol," he explains. "You have some writers that write characters into their songs, or they even are a character within their songs. I've never written music like that, so the symbolism of the landscape, the road and these horizons to me are very real things, the tools I use to interpret the world."

Molina's hardly complaining, by the way. "No one tells me I have to go out. I tour when I don't even have a new record out," he says.

That qualifies as a joke, probably inadvertently. After all, since the 1996 release (under the name Songs: Ohia) of the seven-inch single "Nor Cease Thou Never Now" on Will Oldham's Palace Records, Molina has recorded 26 albums and EPs. The latest is "Sojourner," a limited-edition box set of four CDs, each representing distinct recording sessions with varying lineups in different locations between 2005 and 2006.

Packaged in a cigar-box-style wood crate, the set also includes a pewter medallion engraved with Magnolia Electric Co.'s logo, a fold-out map of the stars and "The Road Becomes What You Leave," a half-hour DVD documenting that lonely life on the road. Molina spends much of it writing new songs, often starting at 4 a.m. Some are only hours old when they're performed on stage.

Perhaps it's because he writes so much that Molina needs his unusual New Year's rite. "I burn everything that's not finished; it's very liberating," Molina says of his songwriting binge-and-purge ritual. "When I sit there and write a lot of material, I don't suffer something that's not working. . . . There's no love lost."

"Sojourner" was previewed with last year's "Fading Trails" CD, which included a few songs and served as a sonic Whitman's Sampler tracing Molina's evolution from the subtle, stripped-down indie-folk of Songs: Ohia and occasional solo offerings to the emergence in 2003 of Magnolia Electric Co.

Magnolia has explored Neil Young/Crazy Horse-style guitar-driven rock and rootsy country-rock, along the way developing a larger audience for Molina's music. Whatever the name, the common denominators have been Molina's melancholy but hopeful lyricism, his sometimes wobbly tenor, a blue-collar work ethic and a refusal to fix his sound in concrete.

"A lot of people who might come to this music new don't understand that each record pretty much sounds really different from the others," says Molina. "I've always tried to make some sort of technical departure or some sort of change in approach to where if you get one record, I promise you the next one's not going to sound the same. 'Fading Trails' was for people who'd just heard of the band to grab and to get a taste."

"Sojourner" is the full four-course meal, opening with the haunted country-rock of the first CD, "Nashville Moon," recorded at Chicago's Electrical Audio with Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies).