![]() His father, William, taught science to junior high students and his mom, Karen, was a bookkeeper.Īs a child, he split his time between Lake Erie’s coast and the coal-mining towns of West Virginia, where he and his two younger siblings, Aaron and Ashley, spent summers with their grandmother. Many residents of the tired blue-collar town, roughly 30 miles west of Cleveland, relied on the former Ford Motor Company assembly plant and U.S. Molina grew up the oldest of three children in a trailer park on the outskirts of Lorain, Ohio. It was such a beautiful use of dynamics-so much silence and so much crashing thunder.” Then every once in a while he’d strum fully and this noise would come. “You’d still hear tone and the chord changes. “He would crank his electric, but he would barely touch the strings,” visual artist Will Schaff recalls. And though he struggled with his own fragility-and ultimately couldn’t find his way out of the darkness-his music artfully explored the tension between the calm and the chaotic. Once he learned to control his commanding voice and found his way around the six-string guitar, Molina used his songs to confront the darker side of humanity. “ was large and multitudinous: commensurately inspiring and frustrating, goofy and gloomy, spontaneous and studied, generous and self-absorbed, loyal and flaky, wise and naive, trusting and paranoid, outgoing and reserved, honest and totally full of shit, and every blessed and profane thing in between,” his former bandmate, Max Winter, wrote after his death. He was the first widely recognized artist to sign with bootstrapped Indiana record label Secretly Canadian, and he helped transform the tiny independent upstart into an internationally recognized collective with a distribution group that’s been home to Antony and the Johnsons, Bon Iver, Dinosaur Jr., Okkervil River, Phosphorescent, and Sharon Van Etten. While his overall sales failed to reflect his work’s importance-he sold an estimated 200,000 albums worldwide-the cult songwriter inspired a broad swath of musicians, some of whom would transcend his accomplishments. Molina was legendarily prolific, releasing 19 LPs in 15 years, but he never saw mainstream recognition. His penmanship appeared smooth and fluid-an indication of at least a brief period of sobriety. He’d set up a small recording space in one corner with a few guitars, a propped-up microphone, and a basic tape recorder. front man-who hadn’t played a show in three years-had visited a nearby Sam Ash weeks earlier to purchase a new guitar. A receipt later found in the apartment revealed that the 39-year-old Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. These were the trappings of a life that came to an abrupt end, but there also were little clues that Molina, at the time of his death, had been hopeful about a new beginning. ![]() ![]() A friend stopped by and found the door unlocked but chained from the inside. A half-filled bottle of cheap vodka lay in the freezer. Guitar-magazine cutouts plastered his empty fridge’s door. A skillet’s worth of spinach and garbanzo beans sat on the stove. ![]() ![]() On the day he died, a chilly Saturday in March 2013, Jason Molina was alone inside his two-story apartment on Indianapolis’s Musket Street.
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