‘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…