Juana Molina's 'Homemade' Sound

Musical exposure started early for Juana Molina. When she was 5 years old, her father — himself a musician — bought her a guitar and taught her to play. A few months on, they recorded a song together for Molina's mother for Mother's Day. The Argentinian songsmith might've started being a musician in earnest that early, if it weren't for a performative hitch that stuck with her. "I couldn't play and sing at the same time," she laughs. "I was playing and when I opened my mouth to sing, the fingers stopped. But what really paralyzed me was the fact of having an 'audience'. I never could sing nor play in front of anyone until a few years ago. I think that's why it took so long."

What "took so long" is Molina making the transition from at-home dabbler to well-known performer. She'd become well known, in her home country, for entirely different reasons, becoming, first, a popular comedian, and then a sitcom star in Argentina. She'd been making music all along, making homemade improvisations with her harp-playing sister, but grew convinced that her music "had to be as every other music."

"I remember one day a musician — a real one, a professional one! — came to our home and asked me to play one of my songs," Molina recalls. "I just couldn't play the song all the way through. I kept stopping every single measure to tell him that chord could be a different one, and the lyrics are not yet definite; things like that."

It was when she first bought a four-track recorder that Molina's aesthetic started to take shape, her improvisations naturally forming into compositions. On the strength of a self-recorded, all-instruments-played-herself demo, Molina's debut album, Rara, was released in 1996. But, after having a producer dictate things to her, having other musicians interpret her songs, and having her celebrity exploited by the music biz, she grew dissatisfied with her experience. So, Molina left Argentina and holed up, anonymously, in Los Angeles. By then, she'd discovered computers, whose infinite self-recording capabilities cultivated her home-made aesthetic.

Her second album, Segundo, was initially issued in her home country in 2000, and re-released by Domino earlier this year. An impossibly intimate disc, it finds the songsmith authoring soft songs whose sound — flickering programming, narcotic keytone, gentle acoustic-guitars, Molina's languorous Spanish singing — creates a dreamlike environment. It's not surprising to learn that, often, Molina recorded these late-night lullabies deep into the night, in a "half-asleep" state.

"It wasn't something I did on purpose; I was very, very into the recordings and just didn't want to stop. By the end of the day I was really, really tired but I was so soaked in the music that I had the feeling of losing something if I went to bed," she offers. "The most important thing I discovered, recording like this, was the greatness of mistakes. And, also, the fact that my subconscious started to play a great role. Self-consciousness and filters went far away, back, behind."

It was, in many senses, the culmination of all that she'd been working at for her lifetime; the conclusion of those early forays into spontaneous childhood composition. A record that she "loved very much," Segundo ended up Molina's musical introduction to the world at large. Which meant, for the perpetually shy songsmith, that following it up was no easy task. Tres Cosas, her recently released third longplayer, presents Molina's defined aesthetic with fewer opaque layers draped on top.

The artist calls it a "more naked" presentation of her sound, and it's an idea that extends to the songs themselves. Recording when the tunes were still half-formed, in basic structure, Molina often kept things open-ended. "Sometimes I have an idea, I run to the computer to record it, but once I'm there, the idea is almost gone, and what I do is something totally different," she says. She's also, again, working with a lyrical repetition that works well within her music. "My lyrics have to be capable of transmitting the mood and sense of the song even if the listener doesn't understand the language." Luckily, for Molina, music as beautiful as hers knows no such cultural barriers. — Anthony Carew [Tuesday, December 21, 2004]