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Secretly Canadian is proud to announce the 15th Anniversary reissue of a Songs: Ohia classic, the Hecla & Griper EP, now appearing for the first time on vinyl with previously unreleased bonus material. After spending the summer of 1997 on the road, Jason Molina and Co. headed into Bloomington, Ind. studio The Grotto with producer Dan Burton and layed down these eight songs. Odes to the love of loss and reggae friends. If you have ever found the other pillow empty in the morning, this is what you need to dry your tears. It also features a Conway Twitty cover.This vinyl reissue contains two previously unreleased Songs: Ohia tracks ("Debts" and "Pilot & Friend") and alternative versions of two songs that would later appear on Songs: Ohia's Impala ("Hearts Newly Arrived (Hecla Session)" and "One of Those Uncertain Hands (Hecla Session).

NOW AVAILABLE: Secretly Canadian is excited to release this long-unavailable, sought-after release.The Ghost is a dark affair. As a matter of content, its themes are bleak, on the verge of total blackness. Loneliness, alienation, desperation, and dark, anxious nights. As a matter of atmosphere, the album is even darker. Surface noise has never been so important to a record's mood and tone. Yes, it sounds like it was recorded on a highway, but this is a dark fucking highway at a lonely, desperate hour and the only set of keys you have are those to the car that won't take you any closer to home. It's dead and you're scared and totally alone. It's just such an occasion that Jason Molina sings and plays of in a roundabout way on The Ghost. Recorded in one day direct to Jason's boom box with the tiny little microphone, this brand new batch of songs was written in a very short period in the early months of 1999. For Jason, fidelity was never an issue, in fact it was a tool. The boom box's inefficient battery-powered motor is just as integral to the recording as the vocal and guitar performance that occurred that February afternoon in Jason's room on his day off of work. This recording may be noisy but it is not a demo. It was originally made available in limited quantities--to be sold on the Songs: Ohia tour of the East Coast with Drunkin the Spring of 1999 and the European tour in the early Summer 1999, however Secretly Canadian recently discovered enough parts of this release to resurrect it one more time.

With the wailing lap steel of the album opener "Farewell Transmission," Jason Molina & Company usher in a new day, playing the sort of rock that your cool uncle rolled to back in the '70s. Landing somewhere on the radar sonically between Bob Dylan's Desire and Bob Seger's Beautiful Loser, though thematically in-line with Lynyrd Skynard's "Simple Man," The Magnolia Electric Co lies at the crossroads of working class rock, white soul, swamp rock and outlaw country. Boasting a doo wop-like line-up with five vocalists on the floor, featuring Jennie Benford (of Jim & Jennie & the Pinetops, who was also a key player on Didn't It Rain) and Scout Niblett alongside Jason Molina. Recorded live, in its entirety, at the hands of Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio Studio in Chicago, Illinois, with the same core back-up band that played on the Mi Sei Apparaso Come Un Fantasma Italian live album, this is the record where the Songs: Ohia fan demographics make a radical shift from the dominant bedroom universe of the world's lonely, sensitive, overqualified young white dudes, and finds refuge in the masses by being embraced by the world's truck drivers, sorority chicks, and hockey players, alike. Indeed, this is the first Songs: Ohia record with more than one song that could be played at a strip joint or monster truck show. Amid the mid-tempo slow jams, there lie some of the most upbeat material that Songs: Ohia has recorded to date.

Never has a Songs: Ohia album's process been so integral to its overall feel as is the case with DIDN'T IT RAIN, the band's sixth proper full-length. The album, like the working class South Philadelphia neighborhood in which it was birthed, has a real used goods kinda feel to it. Engineer Edan Cohen employed what some may consider "old-fashioned" recording techniques -- the entire album was recorded live with no overdubs, the full band playing in one room with the players always within arms' reach of one another; singers Jason Molina, Jennie Benford and Jim Krewson (the latter two of Jim & Jennie And The Pinetops) sharing microphones singing live together, sometimes sitting in chairs, sometimes standing. The result is a sound which resembles the warmth and personality of the classic Muscle Shoals Sound recordings of the early- to mid-70s: Willie Nelson's PHASES & STAGES, the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses", and others by Aretha Franklin, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Wilson Pickett.Inspired by the Mahalia Jackson song of the same name, the title track is a beautiful song about the shifting tides of life and the old cycle of "a lot of shit going down before shit clears up". It's a damn fine place to start an album that seems in no hurry whatsoever to make a universal statement, instead perfectly content to walk its own path toward resolution. And damn if Songs: Ohia principal songwriter Jason Molina hasn't gone and created a record that is even more intensely personal and healing than any of his previous works. Neil Young had his AFTER THE GOLDRUSH, this is Molina's DIDN'T IT RAIN. Indeed, this is the album with which Molina really leaves his mark as a serious songwriter and artist. On 1999's genre-bending Ghost Tropic full-length, Songs: Ohia made it clear that it could make a cohesive album that took its listener on a journey from front to back. Its dislocated feel set a haunting tone, and its largely instrumental and drone-like quality was the process of the Ohia eluding itself and its own tendencies, searching for the underside of its roots freshly yanked. With DIDN'T IT RAIN, Molina & Co. return to the beauty of the song form and offer up a startlingly soulful and introspective song cycle in which Molina -- accepting a comfortable degree of anonymity amongst the other players -- meditates on what it means to feel rooted again (in the city of Chicago, where he's called home for the past three years), sounding more sturdy at his core than ever.

The sound movement on GHOST TROPIC will seem sudden to some; without warning. To others, it'll seem a very logical step in a very foreign direction. On its fifth proper full-length, Songs: Ohia has stepped outside the box and has delivered its most subtle record of fantastic depth to date. Indeed this is the most cohesive and "album-like" Songs: Ohia has ever been. The eight songs on the record sprawl out into one another, telling one long sonic tale, allowing very little room for chapter breaks or piss stops. In this regard, Lou Reed's moody classic BERLIN comes to mind as a worthy fore-bearer. But it's the strange ethnic flavor in which GHOST TROPIC is steeped that makes it stand apart from its predecessors, albums which were all received as crossing guards for the Great American lost highway. Surely this album will leave those expecting such fare scratching their heads. Blending the electro-acoustic minimalism of the David Bowie and Brian Eno Trilogy with the percussive worldliness of Tom Waits' SWORDFISHTROMBONES, the group seems to hop the globe from a British Isles folk rock influence to an Ennio Morricone-like Spaghetti Western feel to the faintest echoes of the Chinese Classical ringing like a death murmur in the distance. And the songs, they build in a slow, unconscious manner, pulsing with an intensity, but never betraying their most simple core with too much instrumentation or calculated progression. Yea! GHOST TROPIC is the first album which reveals Songs: Ohia's own Tropicalia Blues in full bloom.But what has brought Songs: Ohia to this critical juncture? Perhaps it is purely circumstance -- that four men were brought together to play as bedfellows for a week on the great plains of Nebraska. Acted out and recorded at the Dead Space Recording Studio in the state's capital of Lincoln, GHOST TROPIC was performed by principle Songs: Ohia songwriter, singer and guitarist Jason Molina; Appendix Out principle and Ohia alumnus (having played on THE LIONESS) Alasdair Roberts of Glasgow, Scotland; Lullaby For The Working Class drummer and new Ohia recruit Shane Aspegren; and engineer Mike Mogis of Lullaby For The Working Class and Bright Eyes.

Opening with an epic and ending with a little spartan ode, THE LIONESS is songwriter Jason Molina's fourth and most dynamic and empassioned full-length album to date. Recorded at Chem19 Studio in Glasgow, Scotland, with his Glaswegian friends Aidan Moffat and David Gow of Arab Strap, and Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out, as well as with Songs: Ohia veterans Geof Comings and Jonathan Cargill, it is, on its exterior, a much darker affair than each of its predecessors. Perhaps it was the Scottish weather and company which gave it such a feel, for at the core of THE LIONESS, there is a warmth and tenderness unmatched by previous Songs: Ohia recordings. Indeed, this is a dark and sultry record, but not a melancholy one. While the last Songs: Ohia album AXXESS & ACE was an album which revealed many of the painful truths about love through its loss, this is an album about the beauty of love as seen from its rich foundational and experiential stages.

Songs: Ohia is Jason Molina. On Axxess & Ace he is assisted by Geof Comings (Party Girls), Michael Krassner (the Lofty Pillars, Boxhead Ensemble, Edith Frost Band), Joe Ferguson (Pinetop Seven), Dave Pavkovic (Boxhead Ensemble), Julie Liu (Rex) and Edith Frost. It was recorded by Krassner at his Truckstop Studios in Chicago. What resulted was the most full-sounding Songs: Ohia record to date. Liu's aching violin playing with Molina's desperate vocals transport the songs to great depths."There is no bullshit on this record. It's a love song record, so I wrote as directly to the point as I could. There is nothing snarling or cynical anywhere on the record. It is not invented stuff either. It's a desperate record, it's a jealous record, it's an imperfect record. It is also as incomplete as a man. This record wasn't made to rid me of any doubts or to heal me. The end result should show a man, anxious to learn, anxious to share, anxious to curtail all that is selfish. A note about the record as physical fact: it was done almost entirely live and first take. None of us were paid and the musicians all heard these songs for the first time on the day we made the record. Needless to say we could never have predicted the range and the urgency of this record's atmosphere. We are all very proud of this new Songs: Ohia record Axxess & Ace."

The fabled second Songs: Ohia full-length, originally released in 1998 on cd by Happy Go Lucky and lp by Secretly Canadian, will enjoy a re-release by Secretly Canadian this August. The new version of the cd will have expanded artwork and will be widely available around the globe. Still available on LP as well.Lorain, Ohio; it's a tough place to grow up. You either escape or you don't. Given the industry that exists (or existed) there - the steel mill, Ford plant, and shipyard - the mix of people is like none other. One thing is for sure though, it's blue collar through and through. What's this have to do with a new release from Songs: Ohia? Well, Jason - main Songs man, like myself, grew up in this god-forsaken hole of a city and as much as you can leave the city, it never leaves you.IMPALA offers further testament to the songwriting talents of Jason Molina. The 13 tracks contained herein offer a glimpse into the soul of a man burdened with trying to exorcise the demons of life, loss, and subsistence. This isn't something one can fake. It comes from growing up with the knowledge that the factories your parents worked in are not an option for you and that your only real option is to try and get out (easier said than done).Paired down to only Jason and Geof Comings for this release, the tracks on IMPALA are simultaneously the sparsest and most textured yet to be released by the band. Consider this to be the most honest and strongest release yet from Songs: Ohia. Our suggestion; Head to the local Knight's of Columbus, grab a seat at the bar, order a Genesee, and drink away your pay check to this one. That's what they're doing in Lorain.

Albino deer have crept from thick blankets of bayou fog, dusty country roads bear witness to crawling men resembling tattered garbage bags, Civil War remnants pick fragile banjos for the dancing campfire dead... This I have seen yet not one of these glorious sights equals the power of Songs: Ohia... Another offering shall calm the howl from an angry cold winters' night. To a shattered slab of stone on the unforgiving coast of Canada. Thanks.