Judee Sill: Songs From So Deep 4 comments

By Joel Hartse

It’s an old story—an old, stupid, tragic, useless story—and we hardly even notice to mourn any more when a long-dead artist is dredged up from the cut-out bins of out-of-print obscurity. We fetishize rather than mourn—look how unbelievably tragic this life was, the wheelchair, the drugs, the ex-wives, but at least before he cut his wrists or jumped off the Golden Gate bridge or passed out in a gutter, he made a really interesting psychedelic punk-funk record for an unknown vanity label from northern Canada. The tragedy is just part of the one-sheet from the record company, along with the press clips.

Judy (later Judee) Lynn Sill was born on October 7, 1944, and from there the details get a little sketchy. Her biography remains vague—she was never quite famous enough to warrant scrutiny during her lifetime, and was given to exaggeration in interviews. Did her first husband really die after shooting some rapids in a rubber raft on LSD? Was she really the church organist in reform school? Did she really dabble in occult religious practices and weird sex, as some who knew her claimed?

Two men have attempted biographies of Sill: the first, Bob Claster, a former DJ on Los Angeles’ KCRW, says he did about ten years of research for a radio documentary on Sill; what he found so disheartened him—a talented artist who spent most of her time pursuing unhealthy drugs, people, and other hobbies that dragged her down—that he shut Sill’s life up in a cupboard, deciding her story ought not to be told. He has in some ways appointed himself the guardian of her life.

Sill’s other would-be biographer is Patrick Roques, who has supervised the rerelease of her archival recordings during the past five years. He says he’s to be working on a book biography and a movie screenplay, and compares his relationship with Sill (whom he, like Claster, never met) to a “love affair.” (This to me seems a bit more heartening—I just hope the story is told, one way or another. My own proposal for a book Sill was rejected last year.)

An artist’s biography, strictly speaking, doesn’t need to be dragged in to an evaluation of their body of work, but we must note the stark contrast between the deliberately orchestrated melodic songs Sill recorded and her short, brutish, and nasty life, which ended at age 35 due to a cocaine and codeine overdose (the word “suicide” appears on her death certificate, though that’s doubtful). It seems Judee Sill achieved in her music what she could not in her life: some degree of symmetry, of control, of peace, of communion with God.

In some ways, Sill is the archetypal seeker-hippie-folkie of the mid-1970s, but something about her music transcends the musical and spiritual clichés of that time. The recent renaissance of interest in her work, which saw reissues of her studio records, an unfinished double album, and a collection of live BBC recordings, has reached its inevitable conclusion in Crayon Angel: A Tribute to the Music of Judee Sill, released last week by American Dust.

The collection is notable in that it features a number of contemporary indie-rock luminaries (Frida Hyvönen, Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, Bill Callahan of Smog, and others) reverently remaking Sill’s songs, but also because every song retains Sill’s essentially hopeful, religious spark, from Meg Baird’s straightforward pop-baroque “When the Bridegroom Comes” to Final Fantasy’s ambitious deconstructing of Sill’s devotional masterpiece, “The Donor,” which she said was written “to musically induce God into giving us all a break.”

Which, I think, is something we will never not need.

I came of age during what I audaciously think of as the Golden Age of Christian rock, the 1990s, and since then I have been always on the lookout for musicians and bands of a certain stripe: those who can write about God, or faith, without trapping themselves in consumerist genres, without coming across as pious and preachy, with simple humility and honesty and grace.

It’s comforting to know that Judee Sill was making gorgeously sacramental music before all this, before “Contemporary Christian Music” existed, before Christian rock exploded, before those of us raised on it had our various crises of faith and left it behind. It’s also comforting to know that thirty years after her death, there are still those with ears to hear, and guitars to play, Sill’s quietly brilliant songs of love and devotion.