Protection Spells

Secretly Canadian is proud to reissue a limited run of Songs:Ohia's Protection Spells, a collection of some of the mostprecious time capsules in the greater Molina Vaults. ProtectionSpells has a spotty release history, with long periods out of printand limited formats. It returns to print now for the first time inover a decade (possibly two) and for the first time on vinyl.Of Protection Spells, Molina had this to say: "The Protection Spells is a collection of songs recorded over aperiod of several Songs: Ohia tours. Presented here are nineentirely improvised pieces. The approach to these songsinvolved no rehearsals, no second takes, no additions and nogoing back. What you have here are songs that just happenedin real time. The many musicians on these recordings werefriends, bandmates, and, at times, total strangers. I have longhoped to offer the listener a chance to have some of these greataccidents on record. It is a direct look at my songwriting process, only a little more risky, and nobody has any idea what directionwe are going until we all start working on it together. I thinkthat the years of improvised music I played in the past helped tostrengthen the risk-taking with these songs. Here the goal wasto still have basic songs without falling into long freak-out noiseexperiments, saving that kind of exploration for live settings. Youwill notice the appearances and disappearances of ideas thatcould never be recreated, not that they are all brilliant, but theyare certainly not forced. The seemingly arbitrary moments ofstrange repetition the lyrics, the clear lack of a preconceivedsystem of established song parts, all are the marks of improvisedsongwriting. Since even the singing had no idea what thefloorplan of the song was to be, there were some unanticipatedtroubles and some shy steps taken, but I have preserved thesemappings of the dangerous musical byroads that Songs: Ohiahas always depended on. I hope you enjoy this." - Jason Molina, July 10, 2000