E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ohia player Jason Molina’s Magnolia Electric Co. boosts production BY MIKE MILIARD

"Thanks for being punctual, because believe me, brother, I do not wanna do this interview," says Jason Molina when I reach him at home in Indianapolis. He’s just arrived back from tour stops in Spain and North Africa, but even though he’s staving off some wicked jet lag, he’s willing to talk because he likes our paper. "When I lived in Providence, the Phoenix was a big part of my life there."

Molina has been touring and recording prolifically since 1997 with an ever-evolving cast of co-conspirators — including indie avatars like Aidan Moffat and David Gow from Arab Strap, Edith Frost, and Scout Niblett — under the name Songs: Ohia, a version of which will come to T.T. the Bear’s Place next Friday. The 10 records and two EPs Molina has put out under that name have been object lessons in asceticism, primarily acoustic studies of the dynamics of subtle rhythm, texture, and tone, with his keening voice and a tenor guitar the crucial elements in a stark, foreboding strain of folk.

"Steve Albini’s Blues," an austere evocation of desolate, rain-swept roads and solitary radio towers from last year’s Didn’t It Rain (Secretly Canadian), is emblematic of that æsthetic. Yet Molina’s recent collaboration with Albini himself, for Ohia’s latest, Magnolia Electric Co. (Secretly Canadian), has changed that sound significantly. Recorded live at the scabrous punk legend and renowned recording engineer’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, Magnolia’s sound is immense, a gathering storm of thunderous guitars, wailing lap steel, and backing choruses. Molina says it was only "circumstances . . . the limitations of the studios and the time frame and the budget" that prevented him from making a record like this before. For Magnolia, he continues, "we went to a world-class recording studio, with an engineer who actually is a human being."

This is Songs: Ohia’s most rockist record, its songs often harking back to the big-guitars ’70s. Molina’s first albums had seen him likened more than a few times to the harrowing spareness of Will Oldham. But Magnolia Electric Co. brings to mind another idiosyncratic singer-songwriter. "On this tour, I’ve gotten a lot of ‘Why aren’t you opening for Neil Young?’ " says Molina, who shares a last name (no relation) with the drummer of Crazy Horse. "My record collection is almost entirely ’60s and ’70s bands. I used to keep it to 10 LPs. I’ve gone up to 50 by now, but no more. Whatever I’ve got in that 50 is what I listen to; then, if I have to get something new, I pitch something out. But it always goes back to, like, three Lou Reed records, four Neil Young records . . . a bunch of country music, a few blues records. I absorb that music almost like it’s in my blood. I don’t sit down and learn cover songs, but it’s gotten so much that I actually integrate Neil Young songs in the live set. Just spontaneously."

Another ’70s icon with whom Molina is often compared is that bearded, denim-clad bard of FM Middle America, Bob Seger. Does the Lake Erie native, whose music has always split the difference between rustic and Rust Belt, see himself as a poet for the Midwest? "I guess I do that for the area I live in," says Molina, who recently relocated from Chicago to Indianapolis, a place that’s "pretty much as maligned as Cleveland. They’re these places that aren’t well known for anything other than depressed economies, really. They’re not known for music scenes. Here in Indianapolis, the guys in the record stores are still talking about this band in ’82 that was great here."

And what about his band? Can the audience at T.T.’s expect bare-bones and baleful indie folk, or will they be like a hurricane? Molina says it’s "a real crap shoot. I basically tell the band they can do whatever they want. We don’t have a set list. I start off a song and see how things go. Some nights have been really sprawling and out of control, and kind of a freakout. Some nights have been really well constructed. You might get a lot of country elements, sort of ’70s-rock elements. Some Seger moments."

Songs: Ohia appear next Friday, November 7, at 9 p.m. at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square. Tickets are $10; call (617) 931-2000.