A New Documentary Maps Jason Molina's Short Life and Long Shadow

Jason Molina wrote an estimated thousands of songs, released almost 20 studio albums, and died in 2013 at 39. A new documentary from his childhood friend, You Fuckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story, asks why so few people noticed while he was alive — and why so many do now.

Molina grew up in a trailer in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town whose skyline once glowed blue and orange from the mills. By his teens, the industry had collapsed. "Things were really on the economic decline," says Tommy Nickoloff, the film's director and Molina's friend since childhood. "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 got out through music, working under the monikers Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, moving from lo-fi (raw, home-recorded) tapes to slowcore and polished Americana. Rust belt decay, home, place and landscape became his recurring themes. The audience has grown steadily since his death: a biography, cover albums, a touring tribute band of ex-bandmates called Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co, and a new generation of devotees including Phoebe Bridgers, MJ Lenderman, Clairo, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee and 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."

Why didn't he break through?

The short answer: timing and stubbornness. Nickoloff still recalls a 2006 show in nearby Cleveland that drew just 70 people. "It still shocks me how few people are aware of Jason and his legacy, especially around home," he says.

Songs: Ohia began in the mid-1990s with skeletal songs on tape, delivered in a quivering high tenor reminiscent of Neil Young and Will Oldham, his future collaborator. It was a strange era for that sound. "There was nothing less cool than a ukulele in 1994," laughs former bandmate Max Winter in the film. "Holy shit, he may as well have been playing bagpipes."

The nickname "sparky" from his college years stuck for good reason. A voracious reader who consumed everything from instruction manuals to foreign-language poetry, Molina wrote a song a day and sometimes played impromptu 5am shows on a roof or porch. "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 Secretly Canadian, heard Molina's first single, Nor Cease Thou Never Now, and drove 19 hours to New York to see him play. Songs: Ohia became the label's second-ever signing. After his death, the label stated plainly: "Without him there would be no us – plain and simple."

What made his songs different?

Myth, mainly. Emma Niblett, the performer known as Scout Niblett, toured and recorded with him. "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, put it more bluntly in 2014: "He was a big bullshitter. 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 calls this "the elephant in every room with Jason," citing the tarantula bite that supposedly quasi-paralysed him.

It seeped into the writing. Molina's obsession with ghosts and hauntings gave his work an otherworldly cast. "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 calls him "a magician" and "a one-off, playing in a major league by himself."

Was The Magnolia Electric Co the peak?

By most accounts, yes. Molina released roughly an album a year, including 2000's The Lioness, recorded in Scotland with Alasdair Roberts and members of Arab Strap — a ghostly record of post-rock-folk-blues. Then came 2003's Songs: Ohia's The Magnolia Electric Co (the album's name later became the band's, confusingly). Mike Brenner's shimmering lap steel runs through it. "When I was sent the demos, I was stunned by how much of a quantum leap it was," Brenner says. "It sounded like a whole different game."

Swanson agreed. "The songs had stepped up by a full magnitude of order and they just sounded timeless," he says. "It was like, holy shit! These are all-time country songs." Albini produced, with a full band. Niblett remembers the sessions as "the most otherworldly experience I've ever had in a studio. It felt like some supernatural powers were present. His writing felt like pure channelling."

Then came the self-sabotage. Molina renamed his project mid-career and toured without playing songs from his new albums, favouring material nobody had heard. "He wasn't super interested in doing things twice," says Brenner. He was also, by Swanson's account, capriciously generous: "He'd be like, 'I just gave away our guarantee for the show to someone on the street who looked hungry.'"

How did it end?

Badly, then quietly. By the late 2000s the touring grew darker. "He seemed to slowly disappear," says Niblett. "He started leaning on the band to take the weight. I could hear and see he had lost himself." Molina, a light drinker in his 20s, "went whole hog" in his 30s, says Swanson. The resulting alcoholism forced him to retreat and stop releasing music in 2009. His family describes his final four years as "pure chaos." Swanson visited him in Indianapolis months before his death, found he had given away all his belongings, and arranged to move him to Bloomington for community support. A week later, 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."

For Nickoloff, the loss cut both ways. "Jason's death saved my life," he says. "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." The film now does for a wider audience what Molina once did for one kid in Lorain: it insists you listen.