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. A skillet’s worth of spinach and garbanzo beans sat on the stove. Guitar-magazine cutouts plastered his empty fridge’s door. A half-filled bottle of cheap vodka lay in the freezer. Cigarette butts littered the floor. A friend stopped by and found the door unlocked but chained from the inside.
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. 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.
At age 11, Molina commandeered his father’s high-end Pioneer turntable and impressive record collection. He gravitated toward hard rock (Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin) and classic country (George Jones, Willie Nelson). Patti Smith and Hank Williams were among the earliest artists who inspired him to learn to play music.
During his college years, Molina earned the nickname “Sparky” for his hyperactive energy. He often seemed on edge to his friends, unable to relax as he darted from one conversation to the next. His friends recall him drawing elaborate art inside the back covers of library books, playing sad Civil War-themed songs on the ukulele at house parties, and attempting to memorize the entire Carter Family songbook. He began to move away from his metal roots into the world of folk, blues, and alt-country.
Secretly Canadian cofounder Chris Swanson, then an undergrad at Indiana University, first stumbled upon the vinyl release at Bloomington’s oldest independent record store, TD’s LPs and CDs. “Anything Oldham-related I would snatch up real quick,” Swanson says. “I had this crappy little record player in my dorm room and listened over and over. It felt a little more vulnerable than Palace. Oldham was this gladiator of sad rock, and Molina was this young poet. It was beautiful.”
Molina distrusted outsiders making decisions about his career and dismissed the idea of hiring a manager. When he did make money, he often overlooked his personal gain to make sure his touring members were fairly compensated. He worked multiple jobs between tours to pay his rent. One of those was at Roscoe’s, a Bloomington coffee shop that sold records, where he met his future wife, Darcie Schoenman.
