Over the past few weeks I've been listening to Dreams May Come, a 2005 release of Judee Sill's final songs for a projected third album. The first thing that strikes me about these songs - eight of them, barely 25 minutes' worth and recorded in a single day - is the overwhelming feeling of joy that suffuses these recordings. That, to me, is incredible given the emotional trauma of the past year. Following a European tour during which she made an unwise comment in an unguarded moment referring to David Geffen's homosexuality - a comment undoubtedly born out of frustration at what she felt was her abandonment by Geffen in favour of other, more profitable, acts on his roster like The Eagles and Jackson Browne - she found herself back home in LA to find that Geffen had cancelled her contract (as well as all promotional spend on her second album, Heart Food) and cut all lines of communication with her. She repeatedly tried to apologise to him, but to no avail. Following this, she was involved in a car accident which ruptured her spine. The succeeding operation on her back was only the first in a series of botched operations which would cause her daily pain for the rest of her life. The next few months saw her bed-bound and trying to make sense of things. The songs on Dreams May Come directly reference a spiritual rebirth during this time, which on one hand was inspiring, yet taken in the context of the rejections that would follow these recordings, would prove to be ultimately destructive.
The songs on Dreams May Come are rooted in the gospel soul of Ray Charles, the biggest musical influence on her life (aside from Bach). They reflect her mastery of the songwriting craft and, in particular, a real pop sensibility (which makes me think how much money she could have made from writing songs for other artists, had she been so inclined). The despair at the heart of a song like The Donor is, for the most part, nowhere to be found, and is, instead, modulated into an intensity of joyful hope. These songs also reflect a progression from her previous albums - musical arrangements are stripped down and lyrical content is more direct. At no time, however, is there a dilution of her artistic sensibility.
There are brief flashes of the despair that she found herself in at that time. In The Living End, she contemplates "a quiet goodbye from a heart bound and tied, tempered and fired and tried", and on The Last Resort, she sings of being "home, sick and broke, and I'm down on my knees". But out of the pit she emerges, phoenix-like, to sing the gloriously uplifting music which effectively hymned her spiritual rebirth. Key to the rebirth is the song, Dreams Come True, one of her greatest achievements. It's a simple piano ballad, barely three minutes in length, but not a note, word or breath is wasted. The gentle intimacy of Sill's singing is something that always makes me catch my breath and this might just be her quietest, most intimate vocal performance. She sings the opening lines - "Lean your head over and have no fear/Hope springs eternal to all ears that hear/Lay down your longing and cry your tears/Your spark shall be honoured, your heart's being steered" - in a way that makes me think of somebody whispering gently in your ear, sympathising, commiserating and offering words of support. The way she gently stretches the word "hope" is significant, a subconscious vocal inflexion. In the second verse, she begins by painting a picture of her recent predicament - "Every way beauty is slain, it's seen/Though no word is uttered, a grave silence rings/Underfoot innocents on the scene/While humble hearts shudder" - before referencing a dream "where the dark, by the spark, is redeemed/While milk through the firmament streams/Over all we do". This dream prompts her spiritual rebirth, giving her life a sense of purpose once more. This song is a wonderful example of Judee's gift of sublimating the sorrowful emotion of her soul into song.
Lyrically, the one song that makes me think of her previous albums is the The Good Ship Omega, in which she sees herself as one of "poor sailors who have foundered here so long", waiting for somebody that can "burn out all the sin and pain", whilst yearning for "the cool balm of Gilead that can heal the sickest soul". These are revealing and crucial lines. In her life, Sill saw herself as a grievous sinner for the armed robberies, heroin addiction and prostitution that were the hallmarks of her earlier life, and she saw music and songwriting as her way to expiate these sins from her soul. What I find truly compelling about Sill is the sense that she had staked everything in her life on her music. It is worth remembering that this was a woman who had beaten heroin addiction "puking her guts out in a jail cell" (as she told it in a matter-of-fact way to a Rolling Stone reporter in 1972) whilst coming to the realisation that music would be her salvation. Her songwriting progress was swift because she believed that the alternative would be a return to crime and heroin addiction.
However, the spiritual rebirth turned out to be short-lived. It is not recorded what happened next, but it is known that she also designed an album cover for Dreams Come True, on which she prominently displayed the Asylum logo, so she evidently hoped that Geffen would relent and take her back. This was obviously extremely naive, but something significant must have happened - either in a meeting with Geffen, or simply the cumulative crushing force of repeated rejections from representatives from other labels - over the coming weeks and months that devastated her completely and which accounts for the systematic way in which she would, over the next few years, sever all ties with the musical world and re-embrace the "dark peace" of heroin. It is a measure of the distance which she put between herself and the world around her that, on hearing of her death in 1979, Graham Nash commented that he thought she had passed away in 1974.
When I think of the final years of Judee Sill's life, nothing comes to my mind more vividly than one of Dylan's latterday masterpieces, Not Dark Yet, and in particular, the following lines:
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal
Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain
I've been down on the bottom of the world full of lies
I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear
It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there.
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there.
In Barney Hoskyns' excellent article on Sill's life, The Lost Child, he comments that "it's strange how few people appear to have any recall of Judee Sill" and he wonders whether "there was any lingering guilt over her fate - a conspiracy of silence around the fact that she had more talent than many of the Asylum artists that did make it". As Tom Waits (who was also on the Asylum roster in the Seventies) remarked to Hoskyns, "The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened aren't talking and the people who don't ... well, you can't shut them up".
Beyond the sad realities of her life, the music is imperishable and will endure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gThm6vHwCQ
