I've been listening tonight to Judee Sill Live in London. This is a collection of performances recorded at live shows/radio shows during her travels to London in 1972 and 1973. Much is spoken about what a consummate artist she was in the studio, comparable in her perfectionism to Brian Wilson, but live and in person she was a compelling presence. There is a heightened sense of intimacy and vulnerability in these cherishable recordings. Best of all are three breathtaking performances of one of her greatest songs, The Kiss, and a chilling performance of her masterpiece, The Donor. The studio version of the latter on Heart Food is an intensely powerful experience with the layers of chanting voices intoning "Kyrie eleison" in a recording of unearthly dark power that I personally find extremely unsettling. The live version is simpler, just Judee on piano, even more sombre in tone, but just as chilling in intensity. It is preceded by a spoken introduction during which she briefly describes the genesis of the song and about how her intentions were to write a song that "would induce God into giving us all a break", but since then she decided that she doesn't deserve any more breaks because she "squandered them in weird places". Such a strange thing to say at the time but strangely prescient in the light of how her life would eventually play out. It always make me stop when I hear that spoken introduction, and the way she takes a breath, and then launches into the opening chords of the song. Many have commented about the religious themes that weave their way though Judee's songs but, to me, her songs were simply profoundly moving cries from the heart for some kind of redemption or salvation (which sadly eluded her all her life), and The Donor is her greatest expression of these sentiments and represents a summation of her life and art. This is a very personal song about being haunted by dreams in which voices hidden deep in her subconscious cry out, "Leave us not forsaken" and "Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy)". Two lines in particular never fail to break my heart. First of all, "So sad and so true, that even shadows come and hum the requiem, Kyrie eleison." When I hear the word, "shadows", I think of shades in Greek mythology, the spirits of dead people residing in the underworld crying out for redemption. Sill was realist enough to know that the heaven she yearned after would not be so easily attained, but, in this song at least, the thought of simply existing in limbo after her death was something she actively feared and had nightmares about. Secondly, the line, "sorrow's like an arrow, shooting straight and narrow, aiming true, its sting goes reaching to the marrow. Silence cried", speaks directly of this fear in a profoundly unsettling way.
When I hear The Donor, the concluding track on Judee's second album, I often think of the first track on her first album, Crayon Angels, and, in particular, the closing lines, "Phoney prophets stole the only light I knew and the darkness softly screamed. Holy visions disappeared from my view, but the angels come back and laugh in my dreams. I wonder what it means?" This is eerily prophetic. The "phoney prophet" is undoubtedly label boss David Geffen, who would summarily cancel her recording contract with Asylum in 1973, and the man in whom she had put all her faith and trust. The "darkness softly screaming" presages the "crying silence" to come and the mocking laugh of the angels looks ahead to the anguished voices in her dreams in The Donor, whose "voices come a-chiming, moaning and a-rhyming, warning me". I just wonder, sometimes, in the light of her religious beliefs, whether there was a self-destructive streak in Sill which prompted her, subconsciously, to see the rejections and disappointments she faced in life as somehow "inevitable" and that she just didn't deserve the success of, say, Joni Mitchell.
Ahead of her lay a gradual but sustained retreat to what she called the "dark peace" of heroin, which emotionally cocooned her from the world around her until her passing in 1979. So sad, so unspeakably sad, but what music she left behind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE4c3ZlCWmQ (live version of The Donor)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I61zfxc2 ... h_response (studio version of The Donor)
