Jason Molina can’t sit still.

He’s lived at the outskirts of Cleveland, in Chicago and moved to London. Fronting both Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company has afforded the guitarist and songwriter the ability to just pick up and go. It all sounds like some romanticized ideal of what a musician should be. It is.

Not just in the manner that Molina conducts his life and career, but in every aspect of his songwriting is a bit of that artistic perspective which only so rarely graces listeners of any music. Getting through his seemingly never ending catalog might seem daunting, but it’s also well worth it. Hearing about the places that he’s gone and the recollections that he has makes Molina one of the more important, if relatively unknown writers of our time.

Molina, though, describes it from his flat on the other side of the Atlantic as a day job: like being a plumber or a farmer.

Dave Cantor: Your website has a pretty extensive live archive of shows from the past. Was that your idea or did that come about from people taping you?

Jason Molina: Well, it goes back a very long time actually to when I was still playing in bands in Cleveland. In the mid to late ‘80s when we were just starting out, it was common practice for bands to tape their shows and take it to your friends. At the next show we would have a box of tapes. As I started to tour more and see familiar faces, I noticed people recording. But there was a level of courtesy. People would come two hours early to ask if it was o.k. to record. So, I really have no problem with it. To me, a live setting is a testing ground and there are a lot of songs that have only been played live. If someone’s interested in hearing something that they haven’t heard from Magnolia or Songs: Ohia, they can dig through the archive and find some pretty unique songs.

DC: I have an idea of the landscape that you grew up around. There are a lot of place names in your songs, or they’re related to landscapes in some way. Is that something you cultivate? Are you trying to write about setting as opposed to girls and cars?

JM: Well, girls and cars need a place to go, don’t they? I definitely concentrate on the idea of putting a place into a song. Just mentioning a word or a place doesn’t mean that, that’s what it’s about. It might be about a very specific sliver of time and it’s maybe about something that happened there or an impression that I got. If you pick it apart, I’m more firmly grounded in the songs, which are these intangible things and not connected to one specific place, because I’m always really on the move.

DC: You’re seen as a uniquely American figure. But, you’ve been taken out of your natural setting. Are you as comfortable in London as you were in Chicago?