Judee Sill, Weyes Blood, and the Ghosts of Laurel Canyon
Judee Sill’s Cosmic Americana
AT THE END OF THE DOCUMENTARY Lost Angel, we see a ghostly Judee Sill singing one of her most affecting songs, “Lopin’ Along Thru the Cosmos.” She recorded it in 1971, eight years before an overdose or suicide silenced her. Sill’s face blurs in the Super 8 footage. They didn’t give her enough exposure or light. She looks pleased, but it’s hard to make out. Even here, captured on film, she remains elusive. And we still don’t see her. Not really.
Some artists have a hermetic imagination. Their allusions are so opaque that their work forms a kind of private cosmos. Judee Sill, the seventies singer-songwriter, was one of them. She made music so arcane, so suffused with personal fantasy and sentiment, that it became a puzzle box for critics if it caught their interest at all. She gained notice with the song “Lady-O,” which the Turtles recorded in the late sixties, and was the first artist David Geffen signed to his record label Asylum. But she never found the audience that flocked to other songwriters warbling around Laurel Canyon at the turn of the decade.
Fifty years on, given the inchoate spiritual longing of our “post-truth” era, her music becomes more relevant by the day. Her influence is apparent in a new generation of songwriters, such as Natalie Mering, who performs as Weyes Blood, and Sill shares her mythic register with “freak folk” artists like Joanna Newsom. This layered and expressive music seems to speak to our condition. Like Sill, we’re still struggling to recover the coherence and meaning we had lost by the seventies.
Her generation experienced an ever-darkening cultural and religious consciousness that began with the erosion of trust in political and religious institutions in the sixties. The assassinations of King and Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, violent protests, racial unrest, and new silos of identity made social cohesion more a memory than an expectation. Edenic cults coalesced around figures that exploited this need for connection, like the Children of God and, most infamously, the Manson Family. These shadows have only deepened with the advent of new media. We still need whatever light we can get.
And Sill had a singular brightness. If originality were the only standard for canonization, she would have long been on the year-end lists that sprout like chickweed every December. But only recently, with new performances of her music and the documentary Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill, have critics begun to reevaluate her work. It’s evocative music, rich in symbolism and allegory animated by Jungian thought. If her style is a puzzle, it has been left unsolved.
She was something of a canyon troubadour, a composer of music she dubbed “country-cult-baroque.” In her songs, she invents a novel American cosmology, blending Jungian archetypes, gospel mysticism, and midcentury Americana into something greater than its mismatched parts would suggest. She sings of pioneers traveling with angels, dying mystic roses, magic rings, and ex-boyfriends she likens to Christ. What sounds like camp in print becomes, for the patient listener, an unassuming, almost Blakean fantasy. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it can be moving.
We hear this strangeness as early as her first single, “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” released late in 1971. Articulated strings swell behind gospel piano riffs, and her voice drops when she sings of angels flying low over the sea, as if she were tone-painting the line like Josquin. The Christ story becomes a trope for forgiveness in a breakup, showing her tendency to use religious imagery regardless of the subject:
But when I turned he was gone
Blindin’ me, his song remains remindin’ me,
He’s a bandit and a heartbreaker,
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker.
As critic Grover Lewis points out, Sill borrows the image of Jesus as a cross maker from Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ. She compares Jesus with her unnamed heartbreaker, which becomes the means to forgive him. If even Jesus, Sill reasons, made crosses for the Romans, how could she condemn her ex for breaking her heart? Her lyric is arresting not for its unorthodox theology but its use of a religious image to dramatize a difficult relationship. For her, it was also a way to recover. In an interview in Rolling Stone, she said, “I really liked that guy who’d entered into my heart, but he wasn’t fair to me romantically…. And I gained a new kind of strength from [“Jesus Was a Cross Maker”], from that combination of forgiveness and creation.” Sill mythologizes her failed romance, making it universal. It is a primary imaginative act: to populate the mind with images and metaphorical connections to give meaning to our lives. A single image may be an airy nothing, but when multiplied, it becomes substantial. For Sill, attaching a breakup to the Christ story deepened the experience.
To an audience at Boston Music Hall, Sill said, “I wanted to write a song about this principle: The lower down you go to gain your momentum, the higher up it will propel you.” It is a paradox found in Jungian psychology. On her two Asylum records, Sill fixates on various ideas borrowed from Jung’s writings. In the BBC radio documentary The Lost Genius of Judee Sill, J.D. Souther mentions Jung among her preoccupations: “She loved the Sons of the Pioneers, and she loved all those kinds of [imitates woodblock sound] ‘Happy Trails’ Hollywood cowboy music. And somehow, it all got into this bizarre literary interest in rebirth and these strange Jungian archetypes and then this mystical Christ legend.”
The paradox of reconciling high and low is crucial to Jung’s work after his break from Freud. It’s an unsettling proposition that Sill must have found appealing, given her troubled history before signing with Geffen. She had been a prostitute, a heroin addict, and once robbed several liquor stores. In her interview for Rolling Stone, she said, “I carried a .38. I would rehearse the holdups with it in front of a mirror, try different ways to see which seemed the most treacherous. You heard about that nervous armed robber who said, ‘Okay, mothersticker, this is a fuckup’? Well, that was me.”
For Jung, psychological development—what he called individuation—required coming to terms with the “shadow,” a part of the unconscious we deny because it is disquieting or contradictory. Jung felt we needed to confront this occluded self to balance our psyche. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, he writes, “What is inferior or worthless belongs to me as my shadow and gives me substance and mass…. I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” He continues, “The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naïveté, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really ‘final’ truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.”
“Down Where the Valleys Are Low,” a song on the album Heart Food, captures this idea of spiritual wholeness found in opposition:
Down where the valleys are low, there’s a refuge so high
And down where the coldest winds blow, there the warmest winds hide
And deep in the forest of woe, sweet deliverance is nigh
And deep in the heart there’s a rose that a glimmer keeps guidin’
She reveals the song’s multivalence in several performances on Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973. Speaking to the audience, she says, “It’s about the place where romantic love and divine love meet and the holy fires begin to burn…. It’s kind of like a romantic gospel song.” It is Sill’s gospel-inflected Song of Songs. In another performance, she presents it as a traditional Christian narrative of salvation amid suffering: “‘Down Where the Valleys are Low,’ that’s about sometimes when you’re in a real low point, somehow a miraculous stroke of grace comes, and it seems real unexpected, and that’s what this is about—the most remote hope.”
One of her most intimately expressive songs, “The Kiss,” shares this theme of spiritual reconciliation. Its strings, gentle patterns on the piano, and breathless suspensions make it sound reverent, but more like a cathedral than the roadside chapel of “Down Where the Valleys Are Low.” In a performance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, she says it is “about the union of opposites that we all have, and the kiss is a symbol of the union.” Again, as in “Down Where the Valleys Are Low,” we understand the religious symbolism as a trope in a love song. We can read “The Kiss”—with its “crystal choir,” “communion,” “sparkling hosts,” and eschatological “dying is done”—as a religious inflation of a love affair or as spiritual striving. For Sill, it was both.
Another idea that accompanies this theme of reconciliation is the archetype—the personification of an instinct—one of Jung’s most enduring contributions to psychology. In Sill’s music, the archetype appears as an idealized figure: Christ or another numinous presence, or she fashions them into soldiers, cowboys, vigilantes, and other figures drawn from midcentury fantasies about the Wild West. In “The Archetypal Man” she bends the concept to satirize masculinity. In each case, she forms the images in her idiosyncratic way. Her archetype is as likely to be a gunslinger as an angel, and both roam the sun-blanched canyons and trails of her imaginary West.
Critic Barney Hoskyns observes that, to Sill, Christ is often a “vision of her animus”—a personification of the soul and an “eternal” picture of the opposite sex. It is Sill’s “Archetypal Man” without the irony. In dreams, Jung says, we may see the anima or animus as a divine figure, guide, or “dream lover.” Several of her songs imagine a savior, either as Christ—as in “When the Bridegroom Comes” or “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown”—or as a cowboy or pioneer—in “Ridge Rider” and “The Vigilante.” These folksy pictures of the American West become symbols of spiritual struggle: of self-reliance and “lonesome” strength.
In “Soldier of the Heart,” the animus is a savior amid battle, pulling the wounded narrator from the field. In “The Vigilante,” he’s a guide:
I see the vigilante watchin’ in the deep o’ the night
I always find him where his heart is, he’s fightin’ the good fight
He smells the scent of trouble and prepares to leave
He’s got his eyes on the horizon, reachin’ higher
He’s got his eyes on the horizon, and his boots on his feet.
Sill’s vigilante is a spiritual searcher. He watches for “clouds of confusion” and “illusion”—any deception or falsehood; his “weapons are pure,” and his cause is righteous. Such spiritual conflict is a common theme in her songwriting. She implies Jung’s union of opposites when she sings, “He’s got his eyes on the horizon, reaching higher / He’s got his eyes on the horizon and his boots on his feet.” The lyrics present the dichotomies between the “dismal and gray” crossroads and the distant horizon. She fills her songs with binaries—high and low, dark and light—that hint at a vision of self-discovery. In “Ridge Rider,” we have still more explicit oppositions:
He rides the ridge between dark and light,
Without partners or friends
He’s courageous enough to be scared
But he’s too humble to win
In “Ridge Rider,” we’re no longer in the musical cathedral of “The Kiss” but at the edge of a parched canyon looking out. It is a parable of Jung’s principal therapeutic concept: the assimilation of the unconscious into the personality. To be psychologically whole, we must integrate our unconscious desires and our conscious, elected values without repressing either. Jung thought “good” and “evil” required delineation; we needed to know them to avoid their dangerous or limiting aspects. He wrote, “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.” The ridge in the song represents this narrow path between unconscious passion and selfhood. It is a picture of the long journey of individuation.
As Jung makes clear, the appearance of any archetype is personal. Our fantasies shape them. Sill’s images of masculinity are shaped by the radio and television serials of her youth. She draws her archetypes from the American West and supports these images with her music. Her tropes and instruments signify. They are metonymies in sound. To portray this idealized male figure in “The Vigilante,” she uses steel guitar, harmonica, and a loping eighth-note rhythm: sounds not meant to imitate Nashville but to evoke an image. She summons us to a mythic West, where her spiritual fables take place. It is not California, South Dakota, or Nevada as they ever really existed, but the deracinated fantasy of Gene Autry movies and Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.
In “The Vigilante” and “Ridge Rider,” her use of temple blocks to mimic the canter of a horse approaches pastiche, echoing Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite or Roy Rogers’s “Happy Trails.” The fiddle and humming steel guitar on “There’s a Rugged Road” sound like a movie ranch sunset, and the banjo arpeggiations running beneath “The Pearl” read as a trek west from the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Similar, too, are her baroque pop mannerisms. While the Beach Boys and the Zombies used orchestral instruments to fill out their records, Sill uses them to suggest the sacred music of Bach or Biber. She conveys meaning through instrumentation. Her multitracked use of the kyrie on “The Donor” represents Christian piety through counterpoint. She offers us a pictorial idea of the church. It’s not Bach’s kyrie from the B Minor Mass, but it places us in the atmosphere of his faith, among repentant sinners.
Introducing “The Donor” on Live in London, Sill explains her intentions to the audience: “Most of my songs I always try to write [to] make people feel better, or make them feel that their warm human spirit is affirmed. But I thought…maybe I’d better take a different approach and write a song…that would somehow musically induce God into giving us all a break…. Since that time, I’ve decided I shouldn’t get any more breaks, because I’ve already squandered them in weird places.” “The Donor” is her “teenage symphony to God”—transparent in its religious longing.
“The Donor” also reveals a Jungian “nekyia” in the narrator’s dreams. In ancient Greek culture, a nekyia was a kind of necromancy—a ritual to speak with the dead. It was also a journey to the underworld, like Orpheus’s attempt to rescue Eurydice. Jung borrowed the term for his own psychological explorations in dreams and imagination. To him, a nekyia was a way to speak to our own dead—our ancestry made manifest in unconscious drives and instincts. In “The Donor,” voices are “moanin’ and a-rhymin’,” and gathering shadows sing a requiem. In her liner notes, Sill places the line “Leave us not forsaken” in quotation marks, as if it comes from another voice, perhaps this chthonic choir. It’s an intimation of the dead crying out for mercy:
Dreams fall deep…
Hear ’em weep…
Songs from so deep
While I’m sleepin’
Seep in…
Sweepin’ over me
Still, the echo’s achin’
“Leave us not forsaken”
Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison
So sad and so true
That even shadows come
And hum the requiem…
This nekyia mirrors Jung’s Red Book and his Seven Sermons to the Dead, in which the dead cry out to him and his magician-guide Philemon. In Jung, they represent the multiple-voiced libido—inherited desires pleading with him in his visions. Given Sill’s preoccupation with Jung, her attempt to induce God into “giving us all a break” is also a conversation with her inner dead. It’s her appeal for mercy from the claims of an unruly unconscious—a prayer for relief from her imagination and its demands.
Sill’s art is an unusual imaginative act in that she attaches each sound to an image. It’s hearing ghosts in “The Donor” or waiting for “God and a train” in “Crayon Angels.” Almost everything refers to something else. One picture propagates another: a soldier is a lover in a gospel choir on an allegorical battlefield. Christ is a lamb, a cowboy, and the companion of a vigilante cantering through the desert.
Though some might dismiss her rococo imagination, she tempers it with folksiness. Her music is like the “Ridge Rider” himself, ambling between bathos and obscurity while transcending both. It invites poetic empathy and asks us to puzzle out her spiritual parables. Rather than seeming like a patchwork of styles, her music is animated by this surfeit of ideas. She brings together baroque stateliness with Southern Baptist gospel, without any concern for sounding “authentic.” She glosses these styles not to create a persona or take part in a tradition but to convey meaning.
But her style is strange. It is what Gram Parsons, the patron saint of country rock, called “cosmic American music”—a blend of blues, jazz, shape note, and gospel touched by whatever spirit floats down the Mississippi or makes its way West. It is closer to television serials and tent revivals than the songwriter introspection popular in the seventies—which may explain why Sill never quite made it. It is music to imagine as much as to hear—a mythos Sill pieced together from sources as diverse as Gene Autry and Jung’s closet gnosticism. Reviving her music is our nekyia too—a way to listen to the cultural shadows that emerged in the seventies and still haunt us. As in Jung, courting these shadows may be the only way to dispel them.
Weyes Blood’s Church of the Heart
Of course, this nekyia doesn’t end with Sill. She wasn’t the last to imbue her music with this kind of spiritual longing. The 1970s marked the beginning of a long disillusionment. As our faiths and institutions no longer seemed to keep what unsettles us at bay, many artists turned inward. Some composed their own symbolic worlds, like Sill. Others took forms from different cultures or eras, borrowing another’s vitality for their work. But all of them were striving for a coherence that had been lost.
One songwriter who shares this ethos is Natalie Mering, also known as Weyes Blood. She revisits the seventies, not to borrow, but to reflect on what went wrong, adopting its consciousness more than its sound. She channels the vulnerability of songwriters drifting around the canyons in the seventies, but in a contemporary mode. If anyone invokes the shade of Judee Sill, it’s Mering on her 2022 album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. She has spoken in interviews of being raised in a Pentecostal family and has what she calls the “architecture of Christianity” in her music. You hear of generational sin in “Children of the Empire” and pleas for transcendence in “A Given Thing.” She also follows Sill when she expresses ideas through religious motifs or myths, like the story of Narcissus in “God Turn Me into a Flower.”
Much of the connection to Sill is self-aware. The documentary filmmakers who made Lost Angel feature Mering, and I think Sill would have been pleased by Weyes Blood. Mering, too, attends Sill’s “church of the heart.” Mering wants her music to be a blessing, even if that blessing sometimes sounds like a warning. In an interview with The Guardian, she says she wants her music to be “a salve for people who are hurting,” which, to me, sounds much like Sill’s desire “to make people feel better, or make them feel that their warm human spirit is affirmed.”
Mering’s Christian “architecture” is everywhere in her songs. In the beatified lament “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” she sings:
Mercy is the only
Cure for being lonely
Has any time been more revealing
That the people are hurting.
The word mercy gives the song a religious valence. On the track, her voice is inti-mate, mixed as if she were singing to us rather than for us. She wraps us in billowy synth pads and voices, rolling harps, and an undulating piano with American Songbook harmonies—sounds of comfort, not loneliness. That is, mercy.
The first lines of “Grapevine” even show a Jungian slant: “If a man can’t see his shadow / oh, he can block your sun all day.” In a Bomb magazine interview, she mentions Jung, and in The Believer, she talks about the role of the subconscious in her music. That and her use of myth suggest depth psychology is an influence, as it was for Sill.
Perhaps the clearest parallel is their mythopoetic treatment of love. For Sill, a lover can be a soldier, a savior, or even Christ, and she sees little division between eros and Christian caritas. In the cosmic piano ballad “A Given Thing,” with its glassy organ tones and filtered noise, Mering sings,
It’s a given thing
Sometimes we confuse the dream
For one another
We’re just screaming to be closer
To infinity, to love everlasting
This reminds me of Charles Williams’s “Romantic religion”—his idea that erotic love was a spiritual gift, that the experience of falling in love was a way to approach God. It’s a faith we hear in both Sill and Weyes Blood, in the desire to be “closer to infinity.” In a book on the Romantic religion of Williams and others, R.J. Reilly writes, “The lover is awarded the power of seeing all things in caritas, in effect of seeing them as God sees them.” And this love was a gift of grace. It was to Williams, as to Sill and Mering, “a given thing.”
M.P. Kennedy is a writer and composer living in Pasadena, California.
Photo by Beverly Kimberly on Unsplash
