Like Bill Murray, Demi Moore, and Pac-Man, Jason Molina has a thing about ghosts. In the singer-songwriter's lyric vocabulary, "ghost" ranks alongside "moon" and "blues" in the top three most-used nouns, and in 2000 he named an album recorded under his previous guise, Songs:Ohia, Ghost Tropic. But Molina's phantasm fetish goes beyond linguistics; often, when his songs, voice, and production are at their best, Molina even begins to sound like a ghost, a reasonable approximation of what folk music from beyond the grave would resemble.
Molina's recent incarnation as the frontman of the southern-fried Magnolia Electric Co. has moved him away from that obsession, as despite the frequent use of the word "ghost," spectral visitations don't usually come with slide-guitar solos. Since the retirement of the Songs:Ohia alias, Molina's records have become more and more crowded, a progression away from his sparse, vacant beginnings to a more full and collaborative sound. Let Me Go3, on the other hand, represents a visit back to those alone-in-the-studio early days, and in doing so restores the haunted to his house.
