Blue Factory Flame — Songs: Ohia
#365Songs: January 5th
What happens when the jobs leave but the people remain, when the factories stand as ghosts empty, boarded, windows shattered, waiting for a purpose that won’t return? What happens when everything goes away but the broken dreams of generations who sit haunted by impossible expectations?
I grew up beside a burning river, within the crumbling facade of capitalism, alongside skilled workers who hadn’t reconciled with a world that no longer valued their skills. Coastal voters who can’t fathom MAGA have never stood outside a Cleveland diner on a bitter cold day, never conversed with uncles and aunts and neighbors over Thanksgiving dinner, never driven through these Midwestern ghost towns. Cleveland houses 350,000 people in a city built for two million.
I left; Jason Molina stayed. He wandered abandoned landscapes, stood wind-burned on the same rocky Lake Erie shores where I fished with my uncle, played sets in the same bars I drank underage. He voiced the abandoned souls, the empty landscapes. He served doses of melancholy with no condescension or expectation.
When I die
Put my bones in an empty street
To remind me how it used to be
Don’t write my name on stone
Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio
A Cleveland game and two fishing poles
And watch with me from the shore
Ghostly steel and iron ore
Ships coming home
My life is filled with literary heroes, characters closer to me than family, with songwriters who put sound to my internal life. Of all of them, it’s the Blue Collar voices that whisper to me, haunt me, follow me through life reminding me where I come from and how to stay true to the fortune of being anything at all. Molina was Ohio’s Springsteen, Carver, Bukowski. Molina is the perfect metaphor for Cleveland: skilled, loyal to a fault, drunk on the past, waiting to die on an empty street.
Where I am
Paralyzed by the emptiness
Paralyzed by the emptiness
Paralyzed by the emptiness
Paralyzed by the emptiness
When I go back, which is rare, I drive through Molina’s Cleveland. I sit with what happens when everything goes away but the broken dreams passed down through generations.
Clearly iron age beasts
You can tell by the rust and by the chains
By the oil that they bleed
A crew of crows fly the skulls and bones
They fly the colors of their homes
I fly the cross of the blue factory flame
Stitched with heavy sulfur thread
They ain’t proud colors but they’re true
Colors of my home
