Post by petrolino on Jul 27, 2019 21:39:07 GMT
Judee Sill
Judee Sill was born in Studio City, California, on October 7, 1944 and raised in the Oakland area. Her father assisted the movie industry in finding rare lifeforms and exotic animals. He also owned a bar in Oakland where his daughter learned to play piano. Following his death in 1952, Sill's mother took her and her brother to Los Angeles. Sill recalled her family life from this point on as being frequently violent and fraught with danger. She dated criminals during her teenage years and her relationship with an armed robber led to a stint in reform school where she served as church organist. This is where her love of gospel kicked in and it never left her, though a sad sense of irony characterised her own religious compositions.
"My contention is this: had she been male and as pretty as Nick Drake, Sill would now be as big a cult figure as St. Nick himself. Songs such as 'The Pearl', 'The Phoenix' and 'Soldier of the Heart' are as beautiful as Drake's but far more schooled and complex. Classically trained, she combined her love of Bach and other composers with her taste for the mellow sound of Seventies California, melding them into a style she termed 'country-cult-baroque'.
If her songs share a complex delicacy with Joni Mitchell's, the two really sound nothing like each other. In fact, Judee Sill sounds nothing like anybody except Judee Sill, though echoes of her peculiar melodicism can be heard in the songs of Liz Phair.
'Judee was so different from everybody,' says Bill Straw. 'Everybody was writing oblique lyrics back then, but her oblique lyrics had a character of their own.' Sill's songs suggest a hippie update of the cosmic epiphanies of William Blake or the metaphysical ecstasies of Henry Vaughan. Tracks such as 'The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown' and 'When the Bridegroom Comes' are explicitly religious, though one could hardly describe them as Christian rock. Judee wouldn't have. For her, Christ was a symbol of the elusive, yearned-for lover - 'my vision of my animus', as she put it."
If her songs share a complex delicacy with Joni Mitchell's, the two really sound nothing like each other. In fact, Judee Sill sounds nothing like anybody except Judee Sill, though echoes of her peculiar melodicism can be heard in the songs of Liz Phair.
'Judee was so different from everybody,' says Bill Straw. 'Everybody was writing oblique lyrics back then, but her oblique lyrics had a character of their own.' Sill's songs suggest a hippie update of the cosmic epiphanies of William Blake or the metaphysical ecstasies of Henry Vaughan. Tracks such as 'The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown' and 'When the Bridegroom Comes' are explicitly religious, though one could hardly describe them as Christian rock. Judee wouldn't have. For her, Christ was a symbol of the elusive, yearned-for lover - 'my vision of my animus', as she put it."
- Barney Hoskyns, The Guardian
"I knew very little about Judee. But I do know that she was a very bright, talented, funny lady. She kept to herself a great deal. It was so sad to hear of her death."
- Graham Nash, 'The Lost Child'
"She was light years ahead of most of us. I thought Jackson Browne was the furthest along at having learnt songwriting, but then I met Judee and thought, "F*ck, man, she's school for all of us."
- JD Souther, 'The Lost Child'
Judee Sill
'The Kiss' - Judee Sill
Sill played piano in local bars. When her mother died in 1964, Sill rapidly accelerated her use of hard drugs which served as painkillers. Her jazz improvisations during this period were noted for their hallucinatory qualities and she found a footing in the psychedelic scene of the mid-1960s. Her marriage to pianist Bob Harris led to an uneasy musical arrangement that couldn't sustain a steady income and Sill's continued criminal activities landed her in prison (she divorced Harris in 1972). Following the death of her brother, and with nobody left around her, she broke out alone.
"Openly Christian (she was the church organist at the reform school), she definitely cut a figure through the music scene, but entirely in her own style. Where others wanted to rock out, Judee was insisting on lyrical reflection, romantic longing tinged with religious fervor, and intricate arrangement for strings. Just try trashing a hotel room to her songs—you’ll probably end up weeping with your head firmly lodged in the mini trashcan. From Judee Sill’s first track, “Crayon Angels,” to “Lady-O” (both of which were purportedly originally written as part of a $35-a-week writing gig for the Turtles), it’s clear there was something special happening.
In the first few lines of “Crayon Angels,” agnostics and atheists alike might get squirmy: “Nothing’s happened, but I think it will soon / So I sit here waiting for God and a train / To the Astral plane.”
- Paige Katherine Bradley, VICE
"Not a confessional songwriter by any stretch of the imagination, Sill’s stock-in-trade was a kind of astrally projected Americana, full of death-defying melodies and spiralling chord changes; music by Brian Wilson, lyrics by Kahlil Gibran. She would assert – perhaps with a certain sneery twinkle – that her two greatest influences were Bach and Pythagoras, and was sufficiently proud of her classically literate horn arrangements to sing them while on stage in Boston.
However, if the mood is rhapsodic, the delivery is always mathematically precise. Few this side of Karen Carpenter could deliver startling lines with such chilling restraint. Sill’s most famous song, “Jesus Was A Crossmaker”, is full of awkward melodic twists, but on the demo and live versions (available on 'Songs Of Rapture And Redemption'), there are no unplaned edges, no wandering notes and no emotional signposting. Moreover, these stunningly intricate pieces seemingly came fully formed; “The Donor”, a huge, multi-layered fandango in its final Heart Food incarnation, is perfectly mapped out in miniature on the demo, Sill slathering on her own geometrically perfect harmonies. There is no room for improvement."
However, if the mood is rhapsodic, the delivery is always mathematically precise. Few this side of Karen Carpenter could deliver startling lines with such chilling restraint. Sill’s most famous song, “Jesus Was A Crossmaker”, is full of awkward melodic twists, but on the demo and live versions (available on 'Songs Of Rapture And Redemption'), there are no unplaned edges, no wandering notes and no emotional signposting. Moreover, these stunningly intricate pieces seemingly came fully formed; “The Donor”, a huge, multi-layered fandango in its final Heart Food incarnation, is perfectly mapped out in miniature on the demo, Sill slathering on her own geometrically perfect harmonies. There is no room for improvement."
- Jim Wirth, Uncut
"Judee Sill's life would make an amazing biopic: violence, reform school, heroin addiction and prostitution. Although she eventually traded heroin's "dark peace" for LSD's "light peace", her songs were created on the cusp of inner torment and her quest for redemption. That creative spark reflects soul music's struggle between sex and God and is equally explosive, her pure vocals undaunted by lyrics about "the dealer" and glimpsing her spirit "flying."
- Dave Simpson, The Guardian
"Not musically but emotional, constructively, the modern Judee Sill is Liz Phair. Listen to the Phair demo girlysongs: both artists perform very arranged acoustic ballads. Both are loners -writing alone, recording alone… And though thematically there is no connect, they both sound oddly damaged and very confused. And both are searching for salvation in the ir own way…"
- Anonymous, Rock NYC
JD Souther & Jackson Browne
'Apocalypse Express' - Judee Sill