Jason Molina, who has died aged 39 after a period of illness, was a singer-songwriter of singular grace. Everything he created had a beautiful handmade feel, from the music he made as Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co – wherein he stitched classic rock with alt-country, laced with the loneliness of the American frontier – to the dozens of scribbled-over cassette tapes he sent to his label boss, Secretly Canadian's Chris Swanson, in the months before his death.
"He was an enigma in many ways," says Swanson. "He yearned for older times, pre-computer technology. To people alive in this age, he could be a mystery. He was there to remind you of the past. His journey was similar to [the 18th-century American pioneer] Daniel Boone's – Jason was considered an artist and a songwriter, but really he belonged to a much older generation, a generation of adventurers. He was doing something more dangerous."
There was a magic about Molina's music – simple, direct, plaintive – as his songs conjured up cold moonlight, the guitar picking out gentle beauty amid the red sky's forked lightning; burnt out shipbuilding and the distant clatter of busy steel forges; and the drifting of aimless youth.
Molina began making music under the Songs: Ohia name in 1996, with the release of the seven-inch Soul on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's label, Palace Records. After Swanson heard Soul in a record shop in Bloomington, Indiana, he formed Secretly Canadian to release Molina's music.
Molina made music as Songs: Ohia for several years – the band was basically him and a rotating roster of musicians. After Didn't It Rain (2002), he became Magnolia Electric Co with the release of their eponymous album in 2003 produced by Steve Albini. As he said at the time: "Something has changed fundamentally. I can't put my finger on it."
As Swanson says: "The work that he did, in many ways it was indie rock but it was truly transcendent, and as he got older his records became richer and richer, and wiser and wiser."
Three albums followed Magnolia Electric Co's debut, as well as many concerts worldwide. A boxset, Sojourner (2007), was followed two years later by the album Josephine and Molina's collaboration with Centro-matic's Will Johnson. However, alcohol-related problems increasingly began to threaten Molina's health and limited his public appearances from 2009 onwards.
Molina was born in Oberlin, Ohio, and studied art at Oberlin College, graduating in 1996. His father was a professor, but Molina came from firmly working-class roots. His childhood was split between small towns in Ohio and West Virginia. He was proud of his heritage – that much was clear from listening to the song Captain Badass on the 1999 album Axxess & Ace.
"What made Jason so endearing was his lack of pretence," wrote his close friend Henry Owings in Chunklet magazine. "For as intense as he wrote, he was a goofball. But maybe, just maybe, his music was alluding to what was fighting inside him. The demons. The ghosts. The pain. The disease."
In 2011 Molina's family posted a plea on the Magnolia Electric Co website for donations to his medical bills. In that statement, his family said he had been in and out of rehab for two years, that he did not have health insurance, and that he had been convalescing on a farm in West Virginia.
Molina is survived by his wife, Darcie; a brother and a sister; and his father.