Jason Molina grew up in a trailer in the working-class city of Lorain, Ohio. The city’s skyline once flickered with blue flames and a warm orange glow emanated from clattering steel mills, but by Molina’s teenage years, Lorain was in a tailspin. “Things were really on the economic decline,” says Tommy Nickoloff, Molina’s childhood friend and director of a new documentary: You Fuckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story. “Nobody had any money and we were encouraged to get out. It’s a place where the American dream was born and died. And we watched it die.”
Molina did indeed get out: the singer-songwriter released almost 20 studio albums and numerous EPs, primarily under the monikers Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, spanning lo-fi to slowcore via polished Americana and alt-country. By 2009, he estimated he had written thousands of songs. But he died in 2013, aged 39, after years of alcoholism.
The documentary is a warm and intimate look back on Molina’s early life and how his rust belt upbringing, along with notions of home, place and landscape, became recurring themes in his bountiful songs. The audience for them has kept growing after his death: there’s been a biography, cover albums, a touring tribute band titled Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co made up of ex-bandmates, and he’s got a new generation of fans in Phoebe Bridgers, MJ Lenderman, Clairo, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee and hyped young singer-songwriters such as Greg Freeman. “You have a moment with a handful of artists in your life where you hear their music and it clicks and you immediately fall in love,” says Freeman. “That happened with Jason’s music.”
But this wasn’t always the case. “It still shocks me how few people are aware of Jason and his legacy, especially around home,” says Nickoloff, recalling a 2006 show in nearby Cleveland that drew just 70 people.
When Songs: Ohia started in the mid-1990s, it was via lo-fi skeletal songs recorded to tape that were tender yet raw and delivered with a quivering high tenor reminiscent of Neil Young and soon-to-be collaborator Will Oldham. As grunge and alt-rock boomed, Molina went against the grain. “There was nothing less cool than a ukulele in 1994,” laughs his former bandmate Max Winter in the film. “Holy shit, he may as well have been playing bagpipes.”
But Molina was unique from a young age. A voracious reader as a child, he consumed everything from instruction manuals to foreign language poetry. His teenage years were spent as a metalhead and by the time he was at college, his fervent, enthusiastic – sometimes annoying – energy earned him the nickname “sparky”. Now writing a song a day, he would sometimes play impromptu 5am shows on a roof or porch to show them off. “I’ve never met anyone like him,” says Nickoloff. “He’s like a 20-sided die in Dungeons and Dragons. Most people are lucky if they have six sides.”
Chris Swanson, co-founder of record label Secretly Canadian, heard Molina’s first single, Nor Cease Thou Never Now, and was besotted. “We obsessively played it and drove 19 hours to New York to go see him,” he says. Songs: Ohia was the label’s second ever signing and a lifelong relationship began. “Without him there would be no us – plain and simple,” the label said after his death. A pattern of releasing at least an album a year followed, including 2000’s The Lioness, in which he decamped to Scotland to work with Alasdair Roberts and members of Arab Strap on a ghostly yet beautiful record of post-rock-folk-blues.
Emma Niblett, who performs as Scout Niblett, was a friend, collaborator and touring partner of Molina’s. “He had this electrical charge around him, which matched his nickname,” she recalls. “And he had this ability to bring myth and magic to everyday life as a master of storytelling. You never quite knew if his stories were true or fantasy or a bit of both.”
The late producer Steve Albini, who worked with Molina, also recalled this blurring of truths. “He was a big bullshitter,” Albini said in 2014. “A lot of the things that he said were fantastic and it seemed like he wanted things to be magical and awesome, and that he needed to create fables for himself to inhabit in order to do that.” Swanson describes this unusual quirk as “the elephant in every room with Jason”, adding: “He was just a consummate storyteller and if that meant him saying he was bitten by a tarantula which ended up quasi-paralysing him, then that’s the story.”
This seeped into his songwriting too: Molina’s obsession with ghosts and hauntings added an otherworldly element to his work. “The songs belong in his own secret world,” says Freeman. “There’s an internal logic and language to his songwriting, the way motifs reappear and build this imaginary psychic place. Like he’s painting a dream.” Niblett describes him as “a magician”, “incomparable” and “a one-off, playing in a major league by himself”.
In 2003, Molina released his magnum opus, Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co (confusingly, the name of the album then became the name of the band afterwards). Mike Brenner’s stunning, shimmering lap steel is all over the record. “When I was sent the demos, I was stunned by how much of a quantum leap it was,” he says of the progress from the previous record. “It sounded like a whole different game.” Swanson felt similarly. “You can hear it in the demos but when they made the album, it just became effervescent,” he says. “The songs had stepped up by a full magnitude of order and they just sounded timeless. It was like, holy shit! These are all-time country songs.”
Produced by Albini, with a full band, it was a lightning in a bottle moment for all involved. “The most otherworldly experience I’ve ever had in a studio,” says Niblett. “It felt like some supernatural powers were present. His writing felt like pure channelling. It was so clear, vulnerable, yet insightful, and undeniable. We all knew that something special was occurring.”
However, changing your name halfway through your career is not an ideal scenario to help boost your profile. “It was very tricky,” says Swanson. “And this was also during the era when he’d go on tour and not play any songs from the album he’d just released, and only play ones that no one’s heard before.” Molina was driven, prolific, and at times stubborn and impatient: “He wasn’t super interested in doing things twice,” says Brenner.
He was also capricious, says Brenner, which Swanson also recalls. “Very generous, sometimes to his own detriment,” he says. “He’d be like, ‘I just gave away our guarantee [fee] for the show to someone on the street who looked hungry.’ He would do very irrational things out of a generous impulse.”
Molina continued to release albums and EPs at a remarkable pace but by the end of the 2000s things slowed down. “The later it got in the story, the more stressful and darker the touring became,” says Brenner. “It became less enjoyable and I don’t think the quality of the shows were at the forefront of his mind.” Niblett recalls seeing a change when watching him perform. “He seemed to slowly disappear,” she says. “Although he was present on stage, his presence diminished. He started leaning on the band to take the weight, so his powerful, unique, and nuanced way of carrying a song was fading. I could hear and see he had lost himself. He was literally hiding behind his band in the later years.”
Unbeknown to many, Molina had begun to drink heavily. “He was a very light drinker in his 20s,” says Swanson. “But in his 30s, he went whole hog.” This eventually led to debilitating alcoholism that meant he retreated and stopped releasing music in 2009. The last four years of his life are described by his family as “pure chaos” in the documentary. For those who knew the young Molina, “it was unbelievable,” says Nickoloff. “It made zero sense. To the degree it was like: I don’t know anybody else named Jason Molina but they have to be talking about that person.”
Swanson recalls visiting him a few months before his death in Indianapolis. “He had given away all his belongings, which was something he would do routinely,” he says. “So he was living in a shell. We made the decision to move him to Bloomington, where he had more of a community, as his community was with street people in Indianapolis around the projects he was living in.”
But a week after that decision was made, Molina died of organ failure related to his alcoholism. “I honestly wouldn’t have believed it if you’d have told me years earlier that’s how his life would end,” says Niblett. “I don’t think the shock ever leaves.”
Despite being a heartache of enormous magnitude, for Nickoloff it ended up changing his life in numerous ways. “Jason’s death saved my life,” he says. “I was in a terrible spot emotionally and psychologically. He’d always been this beacon for me, and then he’s gone. But as a kid he was the only voice that was encouraging and believed in me to do something. So, in that spirit, we made this film and what a tremendous pleasure it is to be a small vehicle in helping make people more familiar with him, his work and his life. He was my homeboy.”
• You Fuckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story premieres 25 October (Rio Cinema) and 8 November (ICA) at London’s Doc’n Roll film festival
