After rehab attempts in London, Chicago, Indianapolis, and West Virginia—with a surprise stopover in New Orleans—Jason Molina returned to Indiana’s capitol, finally willing to do the work. He checked in under the care of Fairbanks in April 2012. He settled into a shared apartment on the northeast side of the city in Castleton neighborhood, an upper-middle-class enclave dotted with shopping malls and Starbucks. He described the program as “a supportive recovery project that is half hospital nut house and half safe house.”1
Shortly after arriving he wrote to Jason Groth on April 11, “It is crazy to wake up everyday and be on tour but not on tour. For the first time in my life I am voluntarily leaving behind my guitar, so you know when I get out I’ll need an acoustic. Think of me. Not the bad me. Not the sick me, but the simple against all odds me.”2
After starting the new program at Fairbanks, Molina was stable. He was poor—“butt poor,” as Molina would say—but receiving assistance through food stamps and the remaining funds from the donations he’d received. Pete Schreiner visited Molina in Indianapolis shortly after he began rehab. The two friends commiserated over coffee at a Starbucks, and the mood was largely positive. He explained to Schreiner that his group rehab was helping him, though he was frustrated with the shared living situation, which required him to play a mentor role to some of the other guys in the program. The same day, the pair drove south to Bloomington to visit Jason Groth and Mark Rice from Magnolia, and a few other Bloomington friends.
Groth, Rice, Schreiner, and Molina then headed back north to Indianapolis and broke bread at Molina’s favorite deli, Shapiro’s. Even though it was a happy and heartfelt reunion, Molina turned down the offer to catch the Coke Dares that evening in Indianapolis, for fear he might relapse. He knew his limitations, and being in a room full of people drinking was one them.
Soon after Schreiner’s visit, Molina penned his first message to his fans since being confined at Brian’s Safehouse in West Virginia. It was posted to Secretly Canadian’s website on May 5.
Dear friends and family.
It has been a long hospital year. You all have done so much and given so much to further my cause on this planet that I feel compelled to give you a little note. The response towards my medical fund and other support has been better than I could have ever imagined. I spent my time on the farm which was more like the opposite of a tour of duty, but it was good in its way. I have been moved around quite a bit too, Chicago, England, Indiana, West Virginia and back and forth to each. For the time being I am doing well, still in recovery and still in treatment until probably the summer does its thing. I’ve been writing a lot of music and eagerly anticipate the new 10” with Will Schaff’s book, word is that end of May we might finally get them. It is slow going, but it is going. I did write about 500 letters to many of you who sent me good wishes and more, oddly the facility I was in decided to keep them all instead of sending them. I’ll start re-collecting post box information when I am in a place for any length of time. Treatment is good, getting to deal with a lot of things that even the music didn’t want to. I have not given up because you, my friends have not given up on me. I do still need your support however that takes shape, good vibes are worth more than you might think. Finally, there are actually some musical projects on the distant radar screen, but for those who understand, I am taking this in much smaller steps than I’m used to. Keep the lamps trimmed and burning!
JM
5 May 2012
Indianapolis
Much like his trajectory in Chicago, where he stayed sober better under constant watch, Molina’s rehab progress pedaled backward when he moved out of the shared living facility associated with the Fairbanks program. Over the summer of 2012, he got his own studio apartment at 7871 Musket Street, a stone’s throw from Community Hospital North in Indianapolis. There, he began drinking again and hanging out with people he probably shouldn’t have been, guys who were battling their own addictions and weren’t a very good influence. Molina sent a few e-mails to Darcie regretfully explaining as much, but reassured her that he was doing his best to write songs. Before Molina was ever sick, he told Darcie on many occasions that if there was ever a time that he couldn’t write songs or play music, he would die, and not in a metaphorical sense. He said that writing songs was the only thing that kept him alive. And even in his worst states, his songwriting wheels continuously spun, even if his limited dexterity could not keep up. “It was never a hobby, and it wasn’t something he did because he didn’t want a real job,” Darcie explained. “It was in his DNA.”
In e-mails, Molina explained that he’d been watching that summer’s Olympic Games, broadcast from London, and had dyed his hair to look like David Bowie. Reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants reignited his interest in comedy, and he began working on a comedy album while in his rehab program. During his stay, he recorded a few short a capella songs about food. In a Svengoolie-esque voice, he also sang a capella a song he called “Another Crappy Christmas Is Here.” In it he replaced the traditional days of Christmas with things like “taking off my pants,” “sleeping at the mall,” and “PANCAKES!” Chris Swanson from Secretly Canadian thought that at the time of the recording Molina didn’t have the dexterity to play guitar. He added that Molina speaking in voices was nothing new, and to his mind it wasn’t a by-product of mental illness. “There wasn’t a car ride or hang with him where he wouldn’t take the Elmo voice to new heights,” Swanson said. “The humor was consistent with the Jason I knew.”
In late June, Jason wrote again to Jeff Panall, former Songs: Ohia drummer, explaining that now that he had finished treatment, he had plenty of time to reflect. “I am slowly getting enough together to look now at myself and my current life,” he said. “It is so hard being alone, I’ve not really been single in about 15 years, so I get too much time thinking about how fucked up I have been, but that is all over now. I’m playing of all things: a ukulele again. Got a really good one cheap and it just feels right and good.”3
Chris Swanson visited Molina in July, and they listened to the comedy album he’d recorded. They called it The Hospital Record. After playing its eleven minutes, Molina pressed Swanson about what he wanted to do with it, as if it was another album in the can that SC should release. “It was funny and weird and definitely part of the story,” Swanson explained. “But it was tough because it was a man who was definitely compromised.”
In the conversation, Swanson tried to remain positive and explained to Molina that it was really unique but that it might be heavily scrutinized—something he might not be ready for in his somewhat fragile state. Swanson was concerned that the press might view it as exploitative, or peg Molina with a Daniel Johnston or Roky Erickson–type mental illness narrative. In an effort to defuse Molina’s drive to release The Hospital Record, Swanson suggested they release it on cassette, like the old DIY days of the ’90s. At first Molina took to the idea and began crafting hundreds of hand-drawn covers, traced from a credit card and adorned with sketchy abstract drawings done in crayon.
During the visit with Swanson, Molina drank a mixture of Gatorade, Coke, and whiskey. Despite the singer’s inebriated state, it was the last positive visit Swanson recalled having with his flagship artist. Molina even gave him a copy of Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia, a generous act that signaled the old Molina still lived inside the frail man before him. When Swanson left, Molina asked when he’d visit again and if he’d send more friends to hang out with. Swanson left promising to return soon with furniture, as Molina’s apartment was bare.
A few days later Swanson and Mikey Kapinus from Magnolia Electric Co. reappeared with a mattress, books, comics, CDs, DVDs, and a chair. Molina had just gotten out of the hospital after breaking his foot and was hobbling around his bare-bones apartment. He was disheveled and, in general, seemed in a bad state. The pair took him to Olive Garden for lunch and then to CVS where Molina bought a six-pack of beer. Before they left, Molina attempted to give Kapinus his nicest tape recorder, which he’d been using sporadically to record new songs. At first moved by Molina’s unwavering generosity, Kapinus soon thought better of it, knowing Molina could use the distraction from drinking.
About a month later, Molina contacted Swanson and said he didn’t want to release The Hospital Record. He’d been working on other material with his home recording setup.
Though he was drinking, in his apartment Molina worked on songs with his ukulele and an acoustic guitar Jeff Panall had mailed to him from Chicago. In notebooks he wrote out the lyrics and chords to “Hickory Wind” by Gram Parsons, “Wild Horses” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and “Stardust” by Hoagy Carmichael, its lyrics a clear testament to his mourning the loss of his marriage.
Figure 12.1. One of Molina’s last notebooks. Notebook courtesy of Aaron Molina
Molina also wrote out lists of artists and albums. Among them were Randy Newman, Leon Russell, Nick Lowe, Dr. John, Leon Redbone, Harry Nilsson, Gerry Rafferty, Skip Spence’s Oar, Colin Blunstone, Love’s Forever Changes, Television, Patti Smith, CAN, Silver Apples, and the Vaselines. In a separate notebook, he mentioned Steve Earle and Tom Waits, two heralded and famously alcoholic songwriters.
The words of poets, including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Roethke, and John Berryman, appeared handwritten in his notebooks’ pages, as did passages of famed occultists, mostly French, including Jules Bois, Jacques Collin de Plancy, and Louis-Claude de Saint Martin. He listed the ingredients of essential oil tinctures and herbal concoctions for spell casting.
Most importantly, he wrote songs again. There were guitar-and-voice compositions, a return to form for Molina. Two subjects that appeared throughout his last notebooks are something he called the Harper Doe, as well as a woman’s name, Mirabel. He also dove back into some of his favorite symbols: the moon, the number 8 train, wolves, ghosts, and owls. He also wrote of someone he called an Anchoress.
In his last notebooks live pages of short songs traversing these themes, a couple with the word Master written above them, meaning he’d recorded them to tape and sent them to Secretly Canadian. “Mirabel” acts as a sort of lament of his mistakes and the loss of his marriage. In the song he addresses Darcie directly by using the name Josephine and worries that she now hates him. “The Harper Doe” is similarly shorter in length and sorrowful in tone. In it he explains that no one can keep his heart, in between recounting experiences with wolves, anchors, and the conductor of the number 8 train. “Hawk and Buckle” and “Anne Biahayha” again reference his sorrow, the moon, and a woman named Anne. Whether the reference is to Anne Grady remains unknown.
Molina provided a series of tapes to Secretly Canadian with intent to release them as two sides of a 7” single under a new name, Magnolia Engine Works. This proposal was particularly touching to the band Magnolia, as to them it meant that “Magnolia” held special significance to Molina. To them it meant that their bond really meant something, enough for Molina to carry it through to new works.
Though he was convening with his notepads and guitar again and creating work in line with his past successes, Molina continued to drink, and in excess. What he didn’t realize was that the drinking would very soon catch up to him. His body couldn’t take much more.
On March 16, 2013, at 7:12 p.m., a fifty-five-year-old man named Michael Pettijohn called the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department to report finding Jason Molina dead. Pettijohn, who as of March 2016 lived at the Street Reach homeless shelter in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, told the police he was a friend of Molina’s and had spoken to him the day before. None of Molina’s friends or family members know Pettijohn, who told the police that he occasionally stayed with Molina when he was in Indianapolis. When Pettijohn showed up to Molina’s place that evening, the door was unlocked but latched from the inside. Upon arrival the coroner declared Molina’s death due to natural causes.
Mikey Kapinus recalled that Molina was out of communication with his friends for the last months of his life, oscillating between turned off cell service and turned off Internet service. Molina’s brother Aaron had spoken to him two days prior to his death after conducting a wellness check with the police. In the last weeks of Molina’s life, Aaron often called the Indianapolis police when Molina wouldn’t answer the phone. He described the two-hour waiting period, from the time he called the police to the time he was asked to call back after they’d checked on Molina, as thoroughly harrowing. He added that he knew Molina was in a bad place, as was his tendency when he’d become noncommunicative, but he never expected that his body was ready to give out. That spring, knowing Molina’s declined state and sporadic communication, Chris Swanson had been putting a plan in place to move him back to Bloomington, as life alone in his apartment in Indianapolis clearly wasn’t working. Molina had been bucking between it and the emergency room at nearby Community Hospital North all winter.
The coroner in Indianapolis contacted Molina’s grandmother in West Virginia after finding her phone number in Molina’s cell phone. This of course doesn’t account for the lists of friend and family phone numbers Molina had written in notebooks, as his Luddite tendencies often prevented him from learning or wanting to learn new technology, such as entering phone numbers into cell phones. The frequency with which he lost and misplaced cell phones often prevented him from spending too much time on their setup as well.
After the police reached Molina’s grandmother Mary, word spread to Molina’s aunt and sister Ashley, then to Darcie, his father Bill, Jason Groth, Jonathan Cargill, Chris Swanson, and the rest of the members of the Magnolia Electric Co. The plan for publicly releasing the information was to have Secretly Canadian issue an official statement so that details of Molina’s death would not be misreported or misconstrued. But first, Jason Groth and Darcie worked together to compile a list of names of friends and family members they wanted to contact in person to make sure they heard the news from them directly, before it reached the Internet. During each call they explained the situation and asked each person not to share the information until they were sure all of Molina’s family and close friends had been made aware. They explained that they had been working with the label to draft an official statement to the public, and to not write anything or post anything on the Internet until the statement came out.
The last person to make Darcie and Jason Groth’s list was Henry Owings, the friend of Molina’s who had designed the cover of the Magnolia Electric Co. compilation album Fading Trails and who sang onstage with Magnolia Electric Co. during his wedding celebration in 2004. Darcie remembered that Owings and Molina were friends and asked Jason Groth to call him with the information they had been passing on. Jason Groth remembered that when he relayed the news, he and Owings both broke down in tears. Owings asked why the authorities called Molina’s grandmother. “I said I think that was the only number he had in his cell phone,” Groth explained. “To me that wasn’t a surprise because Jason lost so many cell phones, and Henry knew that.” He remembered asking Owings not to do anything with the information and not to write anything about it. He offered to text him as soon as Secretly Canadian made the announcement.
Owings remembered having a quick exchange with Jason Groth on the phone. “He just said, ‘Jason’s dead,’” Owings recalled. “I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something like ‘he did it’ or ‘it happened.’ You just dread those calls.” He then remembered hanging up, saying good-bye to his wife and young daughter as they headed out the door, and then sitting down and crying. He explained that he felt like he didn’t do enough. “In light of that, emotionally, I was really hot under the collar,” he said. “I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I remember just being really fucking angry. I remember thinking, ‘god damnit Jason,’ and I typed that into Twitter.” He then called a few local friends who knew Molina, like the owner of the 40 Watt Club in Athens, where Molina had played more shows than could be counted on two hands.
He then posted a eulogy to Molina on his website, chunklet.com. He explained that it was an avenue to allow everything that was in his head to flow out and added that he wanted the message to come from the heart and not a press release. On March 18 Owings wrote a blog post that included the following passage:
Even with all of his friends never leaving his side, he cashed out on Saturday night in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in his pocket with only his grandmother’s number on it. Of course, she was the first to be dealt the tragic news.
Jason leaves behind him an enviable body of work that will be continually rediscovered because what Jason wrote wasn’t fashion. It was his heart. It was his love. It was his demons. And ultimately, it brought his life to an end.
Music news outlets stretching from the United States to the UK almost immediately picked up on the post. Websites such as Pitchfork, NME, Paste Magazine, and the AV Club all recycled the line about the cell phone, and today the line, and Owings name, continue to live online in tandem with Molina’s death. “Was I thinking in terms of anything other than my emotions and the loss of a friend? No,” Owings explained. “In retrospect could I have done things differently? Sure.”
Jason Groth still lives with the guilt of having provided the misrepresented intel for the infamous line. “Sometimes when I’m showering in the morning and I’m thinking about this, because that happens, I feel so bad,” he lamented. “Because had I not called that dude, it would not have turned out that way . . . it would not have been the first thing that informed all of those other things.” Owings added that if he had in any way hurt Darcie or Molina’s family, he would apologize until his “heart bled.”
In response to the rapidly firing news of Molina’s death, Secretly Canadian hustled to post the following statement:
We are deeply saddened to announce that Jason Andrew Molina passed away in his home in Indianapolis this past Saturday, March 16th of natural causes at age 39. Jason was a world class musician, songwriter & recording artist. He was also a beloved friend. He first caught international attention in 1996 when he began releasing albums under the name Songs: Ohia. In 2003 he started the band Magnolia Electric Co. Between those two bands he released over a dozen critically-acclaimed albums and—starting in 1997—he toured the world every year until he had to stop in 2009 to deal with severe alcoholism. Jason was incredibly humbled by his fans’ support through the years and said that the two most important words he could ever say are “Thank you.”
This is especially hard for us to share. Jason is the cornerstone of Secretly Canadian. Without him there would be no us—plain and simple. His singular, stirring body of work is the foundation upon which all else has been constructed. After hearing and falling in love with the mysterious voice on his debut single “Soul” in early 1996, we approached him about releasing a single on our newly formed label. For some reason he said yes. We drove from Indiana to New York to meet him in person, and he handed us what would become the first of many JMo master tapes. And with the Songs: Ohia One Pronunciation of Glory 7” we were given a voice as a label. The subsequent self-titled debut was often referred to by fans as the Black Album. Each Songs: Ohia album to follow proved a new, haunting thesis statement from a prodigal songwriter whose voice and soul burned far beyond that of the average twenty-something. There was organ-laced, sepia-toned economica (1998’s Impala) and charred-hearted, free-form balladry (1999’s Axxess and Ace). There were the dark glacial make-out epics of 2000’s The Lioness and the jungle incantations of 2000’s Ghost Tropic. There was the career-defining agnostic’s gospel of 2002’s Didn’t It Rain, an album about setting roots that also seemed to offer solace to a world that had recently seen its bar on terror raised. It was followed in 2003 by a thrilling about-face, the instant classic Magnolia Electric Co., which took Jason’s songwriting to ’70s classic rock heights. The move was such a powerful moment for Molina that Magnolia Electric Co. became the new moniker under which he would perform until 2009. With Magnolia Electric Co., Jason found a brotherhood in his bandmates, with whom he built an incredible live experience and made a truly classic album in Josephine (2009).
We’re going to miss Jason. He was generous. He was a one of a kind. And he had a voice unlike any other.
A few days after Molina died, Jason Groth and Jonathan Cargill from Secretly Canadian traveled north to Indianapolis from Bloomington to clean out Molina’s apartment, where they found a sad room covered in blood, cigarette butts, and music magazine cuttings, but also a corner recording setup and a few new tapes. An old pot of old spinach and chickpeas sat on the stove, a sign of one of Molina’s many attempts to improve his health through avenues other than quitting drinking.
Today, Molina’s complete works, including live shows, master tapes, and unreleased material, lives in a massive collection at Secretly Canadian’s headquarters. It spans Molina’s earliest recordings with his high school bands the Spineriders, Green, and Bleem, very early Songs: Ohia demos, songs written for solo projects and Magnolia Electric Co., and material that runs all the way to his last days in Indianapolis. That Molina was famously prolific is no simple anecdote; it is estimated that the label has about one hundred tapes, containing masters for many unreleased demos, as well as studio material that was never released. One such demo project was something Molina called Lamb and Flag, which were songs he had written and intended to perform with Duluth, Minnesota–based indie-rock act Low. The unreleased Magnolia Engine Works project remains in the collection as well.
The hand-drawn and assembled paper materials that composed the covers of many of Jason’s albums live at SC headquarters, too, including the drawings provided by Molina’s friend William Schaff for the front and back covers of The Magnolia Electric Co., which were scaled for CD and LP. There’s the postcard of palm trees that graces the cover of The Lioness, as well as handwritten instructions from Molina for how he wanted the disc to appear. “S:O pretty large + my name rather large as well (for ego reasons),” he wrote in a sketch of the Lioness CD. The doily and the pin from the Josephine cover rests with its respective archive, as does the inspiration for the Sojourner box.
Molina’s body was cremated, and vessels for his remains were designed and produced by William Schaff at the request of Molina’s family. He crafted one wooden box for each of Jason’s siblings and one for Darcie. Each family member chose symbols for Schaff to draw, which illustrated their personal relationship with Molina—owls, moons, and the number 8 train, among them. On Darcie’s box is a drawing of the couple’s black-and-white tuxedo cat Bhaji, who died in April 2014, one year after his human father. She’s convinced that their cat child was therapeutic to Molina in his darkest hours, and she admits she wouldn’t have made it through all the tumult without him.
A memorial service for friends and family was held May 11, 2013, in Bloomington at the Buskirk Chumley Theater. Brothers Chris and Ben Swanson from Secretly Canadian spoke, as did Molina’s brother Aaron; Tom Colley from the Chicago-based, Oberlin-originated friend crew; and Darcie. At the service, members of Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs: Ohia performed covers of their favorite songs from Molina’s oeuvre, like “Blue Factory Flame,” “Dogwood Gap,” Tenskwatawa,” “The Big Game Is Every Night,” “Bowery,” “Just Be Simple,” “The Pyre,” “Whip-Poor-Will,” “Shenandoah,” and “Northstar Blues.” Versions of “Hold on Magnolia” bookended the service. Jonathan Cargill’s cover of “Soul” sent shockwaves through the room. Not many had heard Cargill sing before, and his vocal resemblance to Molina was uncanny. It was as if Jason was singing through his “Defender.” Max Winter from the Oberlin College friend group penned a tribute to his friend Sparky and posted it online. It stands out among friends and family as an astute characterization of Molina:
I think it’s fair to say that we all saw different sides of him. And, in turn, Jason, who was uncommonly perceptive, sensed this and showed each of us the side that we were already predisposed to see most clearly and respond to most honestly. He was as complex a man as I have ever known. “Just Be Simple”? Sure, it’s a great song, but, yeah, right. Sparky was about as far from simple as they come. He 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. And it’s all there in his music.
The same night the group from the private memorial convened with extended friends and fans at the Bluebird nightclub in Bloomington for a wider celebration of Jason’s life. Dave Doughman of Swearing at Motorists, Edith Frost, and members of Molina’s high school band the Spineriders, among others, took to the stage to perform their favorite Molina songs. The evening culminated in a four-song sweep from The Magnolia Electric Co., with members of Songs: Ohia who recorded the album at Electrical Audio, along with Jason Groth, Mark Rice, and Pete Schreiner from Magnolia, taking the stage. For the song “Farewell Transmission,” “Old Black Hen” singer Lawrence Peters stepped in for Molina behind the microphone, with backing assistance from Jennie Benford. “I don’t want it to end,” Benford said as the song concluded. Traditional funeral services for family members were held at Boyer & Cool Home for Funerals in Lorain, Ohio, on March 23.
In the wake of Molina’s death, innumerable online tributes spread in waves throughout the Internet, forming a sort of collective memorial tide pool, its many artists and writers and fans comprising a unique coterie of creature residents united under a love of Molina. Memorial albums sprang up, too, with friends and fans covering songs from Molina’s catalog. William Schaff worked with Graveface Records, the label that issued Jason’s Autumn Bird Songs with William’s art book, to produce Weary Engine Blues, a thirty-six-track album that includes covers by Alasdair Roberts, Scout Niblett, Damien Jurado, Will Johnson, and Mark Kozelek, who chose to cover Jason’s song “It’s Easier Now.” “My guess is that Jason was suffering badly,” Kozelek explained. “‘It’s Easier Now’ is probably how it is, when you’re suffering badly, and you finally go.” Will Oldham contributed “The Gypsy He-Witch,” a song he recorded during the Amalgamated Sons of Rest session in 2001, with Molina and Alasdair Roberts. With the release, William Schaff included an intricate hand-drawn map he’d made for Molina when he was alive and struggling, which never made it to Molina amid his rehabilitation journey. In a press release for the album, Schaff explained,
Figure 12.2. Jennie Benford and Lawrence Peters from the Magnolia Electric Co. session sing “Farewell Transmission” with backing by Dan MacAdam, Rob Sullivan, Pete Schreiner, and Jason Groth. Photo by Robert Loerzel
Back in January of this year [2013], I received a message from a friend of Jason’s, Tara Samaha. Like so many of us were, she was concerned. She was concerned for his safety, mental and physical health after receiving an alarming email. She felt he needed a map to help him through these troubled times and then asked that I make him one. I did. Sadly we were never able to land a concrete address for Jason, where we knew he would get the map. I know that he had lost things important to him over the past few years, for various reasons, so I wanted to be sure this got into his hands, and no one else. That said—sadly—the map was never delivered to him.
Upon learning of his death, the map sat in my studio; it felt cold, and now useless. A guide made for a friend who can no longer see it. Ryan Graveface and I thought of how, thanks to folks like you, we were able to raise a considerable amount of money for Jason’s medical bills through sales of the book, From Black Sheep Boys to Bill Collectors. We thought maybe there is still a way for this map to be useful. Not as it was originally intended, a map for one man, but as a tool to commemorate this man, and continue to help his family, especially in such dark times as these. 100% of the profits from this print will be going to Jason Molina’s family. We now have a chance to give back to the family that gave us Jason, who in turn gave us all so much.
Another tribute album, Farewell Transmission, features an electronic rendering of the album’s namesake by Louisville indie-rock band My Morning Jacket, who recorded a split EP with Molina, before they were selling out massive theaters and headlining Lollapalooza. “The Magnolia Electric Co. album is one of the greatest albums of all time, start to finish,” My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James said. “He has songs that I cherish and love from other works, but this album I hope becomes known in a broader way as time goes on.” James added that he often thinks of Jason being “reborn,” maybe with the same problems, but that in his next life, “the world may have evolved enough that he can get the help he needs, deal with and conquer his demons and live a long and happy life.”
The tribute album Through the Static and the Distance: The Songs of Jason Molina featured Molina’s friends Dan Sullivan, performing under his solo moniker Nad Navillus; Peter Hess; and Eoin Russell (who wore leather pants 666 days in a row in their Oberlin days) from the Black Album. Other tribute albums poured in from musicians stretching from Texas to the UK. Live tributes were played at clubs all over North America, from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Maine and all the way to Seattle. So much money was raised through commemorative efforts that Molina’s family was able to pay off all of Molina’s medical bills, legal fees related to his estate, and even the travel costs for his family members traveling to and from his funeral services. The Molina family received enough queries that Darcie began referring interested donors to charities like MusiCares, which provides financial assistance to musicians for medical bills and drug rehabilitation programs.
Figure 12.3. The map drawn by William Schaff for Molina. Drawing courtesy of William Schaff
Surprise televised tributes were aired as well. Band of Horses played “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost” from Magnolia Electric Co. on the Jimmy Kimmel late-night show on April 20, 2013, proudly wearing black-and-white Magnolia Electric Co. T-shirts. Later, Glen Hansard rounded up the cast from his first-ever session at Electrical Audio for one of The Late Show icon David Letterman’s last broadcasts. On Tuesday March 17, 2015, Hansard, vocalist Jennie Benford, Dan Sullivan, his brother Rob Sullivan, drummer Jeff Panall, and Rob Bochnik from the Frames, who engineered Hansard’s first Electrical session, played “Being in Love” from The Lioness. It was to mark the release of Hansard’s Molina tribute album, It Was Triumph We Once Proposed . . . Songs of Jason Molina.
For the album, the same group convened at the Wilco recording loft in Chicago, where Jeff Tweedy volunteered engineering time to capture its five tracks as a tribute to Molina. By the time the album was released, Molina’s medical bills were squared away. As such, the Irish musician plans to donate the proceeds to build a Jason Molina memorial rehearsal space at Oberlin College, Molina’s alma mater.
In its tribute to Molina, the New York Times deemed Jason a “Balladeer of Heartbreak” and a trailblazer for acts such as Mumford & Sons, which he would have hated. Those who knew Molina, and those who knew him through his music, remember his song craft and its intrinsic work ethic as unique, undying, and inspiring as his spirit, which lives on among his friends and admirers who continue to speak his name and sing his songs. A seemingly endless trail of live recordings, handmade protection spells, drawings, and historical trinkets and ephemera that Molina left behind provide a constant source of sleuthing and story swapping for fans and family members alike, a sort of curated legacy meant to be continuously unlocked.
“I was just very caught off guard,” Mark Kozelek explained. “My memories of him are positive and uplifting. He was just so young, and such a nice person.” In response to the news, Kozelek wrote a song he titled “Sometimes I Can’t Stop.” It appeared on his collaborative album with indie-rock band Dessertshore, which was released August 20, 2013. In its lyrics Kozelek explained that he couldn’t understand why the world takes away the good ones and repeated his observation that Molina’s life was like the line from To Kill a Mockingbird, that Molina was innocent and only wanted to sing his heart.
Despite the downtrodden tag that was so often affixed to Molina, the real tragedy of Jason Molina lives not in his songs but in the length of his short life, which cut his songwriting time short. His only personal measure for success was in his continued ability to create, and only in the loss of that ability did he lose hope. Only then did he become “paralyzed by the emptiness,” as he sang in “Blue Factory Flame,” a song in which he also clearly laid out his last wishes:
When I die
Put my bones in an empty street
To remind me of how it used to be
Don’t write my name on a stone
Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio
Cleveland game and two fishing poles
And watch with me from the shore
Ghostly steel and iron ore ships coming home
No matter how far he’d come, or the extent to which he struggled, Jason Molina from Ohio remained proudly rooted in the trailer park shores of his childhood. Today, his spirit stands tall in its breezes. Near the facility where his mother Karen passed away, and a stone’s throw from where the fabled old man Mean Joe lived, the branches of a towering silver maple tree skitter in Lake Erie’s zephyr. It grew from a sapling the Molinas planted more than forty years ago, when young Jason scoured the shoreline for treasure and performed songs for anyone who’d listen. With his kid-sized shovel, Molina dug the hole that incubated the tree sapling, which germinated from a fallen helicopter seed near the Molina trailer.
Like the tree’s roots that burrow through the landscape of his youth, Molina’s body of work continues to take root in the collective consciousness of independent music fans and makers across the globe, its poetic themes of simplicity, love, loss, and hard work as relatable as they are mysterious, as forlorn as they are hopeful. “I built my life out of what was left of me / And a map of the old horizon,” Molina once sang. Though he’s gone, his catalog lives to be rediscovered, the songs animating his character—Molina via moons, stars, wolves, trains, and hard work—steered by plaintive tenor guitar and electrified country. What’s left of Molina is an alluring and tragic sonic map, filled with twists and turns, with triumphs and tribulations and every uplifting and sorrowful thing between them, from the heavy metal bass player to the many-sided man with the big voice.