‘He had this electrical charge’: the short life and long legacy of Jason Molina, master of Americana

As a documentary celebrates the late US musician, friends and collaborators describe an incomparable storyteller who brought ‘myth and magic to everyday life’ 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.

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