It’s a hard book to sit with.
Starting off… like many others who’ve probably read it, I came to this book as a fan of Jason Molina. He’s been one of the most important artists in my life: my most listened-to, and the one I’ve felt most understood by. His music has carried me through the worst times and stayed with me in the quiet, better ones.
What draws me to Molina, beyond the raw emotional power of his work, is how his path mirrors my life. He started out in the punk scene, all noise and defiance, but over time his music settled into something quieter and heavier. He turned toward home: toward the land he came from, the lives of working people, the ghosts of the industrial Midwest. His songs became rooted in place, in memory, in loss.
I know that feeling well. Like Molina, I spent years hating where I came from. I grew up in a small town about three hours south of Baltimore, but for a long time I lied to people saying that I was from Baltimore (or somewhere cooler...). I felt a shame attached to my hometown.
But after I left, I started to feel this strange kind of longing. Not exactly homesickness, but something more complicated… a pull toward the landscapes and silences I thought I had escaped. I found myself picking up albums of Hank Williams and Doc Watson, drawn to songs that reminded me of home in ways I couldn’t fully explain. Slowly, I stopped trying to reject the place I came from. I started to carry it with me instead.
There’s a kind of putrid nostalgia that runs through a lot of Midwestern and Southern art. That mourning for a place you hate but can’t stop loving. You hear it in Southern literature and music — that romanticized version of the “Old South” as a lost paradise, ignoring the injustice and violence it was built on. That kind of nostalgia dresses itself up with decaying porches, slow summers, weeping willows… but underneath, it’s hiding rot.
A lot of great country and folk artists, especially from earlier generations, captured this kind of American feeling. One shaped by boomer nostalgia, by small towns that still had something left, by a world that, while flawed, still felt whole. Their songs spoke to people who could say, “This is what we lost.” I found it hard to connect to — because for many of us now, there’s no clear memory of a better past. There’s just the aftermath.
Molina’s music doesn’t reach backward. It speaks to what it feels like to grow up in the wreckage. To inherit the ruins. His work lives in that space where the American dream has rusted out, and all you can do is try to make something meaningful from what’s left. That’s what makes his music feel so immediate, so grounded. He doesn’t offer nostalgia. He offers presence.
His songs live in the forgotten corners of America. In the railroad towns no one talks about anymore. In the wide-open fields under empty skies, the shuttered factories, the flooded backroads. He doesn’t write about these places to glorify them. He writes about them because they’re part of him.
And that’s what I love about him. He doesn’t just reflect the rural American landscape: he is it. The quiet sadness, the stubbornness, the strange beauty in decay. He doesn’t offer comfort or escape. But he does offer a kind of truth. And that’s something I’ve come to need more than anything.
Back to the book…
To be honest, I don’t think it’s particularly well written. The author projects her own opinions a little too heavily, especially when it comes to Molina’s influences or the broader music scene at the time, and that got in the way for me more than once. There’s also a tendency to repeat information, to restate things that were already made clear a few chapters earlier, which made parts of it feel unfocused. And stylistically, I struggled with the writing. It felt overly descriptive, even when that detail didn’t add much.
But even with all that said, I can’t deny the value of the book. The sheer amount of fieldwork and first-hand accounts the author pulled together is remarkable. It’s probably the most complete record we’ll ever get of Molina’s life, at least from an outsider’s perspective.
What really surprised me, and stayed with me, was how much Molina’s actual life contradicted the stories he told in interviews. The most jarring one for me was the truth behind the origin of the name Songs: Ohia… Many of the things said in interviews were twisted versions of the truth…
Still, despite the book’s flaws, I’d highly recommend it to anyone who loves his music. It’s an imperfect portrait, but a necessary one.
And the last pages — when his world collapses into addiction, when he begins to lose the thread of his own story — broke me. There’s something devastating about watching someone so gifted slip through the cracks, and even more so when you realize how much of that slipping he was narrating all along, in his songs, in plain sight. I cried reading those final chapters.