I've been listening a great deal to Judee Sill recently. Personally, I find it extraordinary how my response to this music has changed over the last five or so years since I first acquired her two albums. When I first heard her music, what I heard was just another early Seventies singer-songwriter with very little to distinguish her from her contemporaries and certainly one that appeared to be inferior to Joni Mitchell. So, after my first listen, I put the CD aside. I - initially dutifully - returned to it over the following few months and gradually, very gradually, it all began to make sense. What I found over time was an accretion of layers of a very pure and personal emotion seeping out of the music and into my heart. Sill's music is the perfect epitome of an apparently artless music, bereft of artifice but built on a foundational bedrock of a kind of sincerity that is guileless and utterly unself-conscious. It is personal music intended, I believe, as a vehicle for Sill's most private thoughts. The more I listen, the more I hear a creative dialogue between self and soul, desperately trying to articulate a very real sense of angst. The concept of angst is misunderstood generally and is usually presented in a pretentious and self-aware context, and intended to emotionally manipulate the emotions of the listener in a premeditated and artistically shallow way. With Sill, angst is real and ever-present in her heart and the process of articulating this profound despair was, I am sure, simultaneously cathartic and utterly draining. It is emblematic of Sill's command of her artistry that she manages to instil this primal emotion into her songs in a very subtle way. To quote one of her interviews: "A few years ago I became interested in the alchemy of music and the value of subtlety. I started understanding that to make a bush grow you prune it. To teach somebody something, drape it in a veil of secrecy and tantalize them into learning. Entice them.” Her melodies are simple, but never simplistic. Her words are uncomplicated, but manage, in tandem with her melodies, to convey her thoughts in a very distilled and concentrated way. The cumulative effect, over time, proved quite devastating for me. What you hear is a perfectly formed emotional picture of a young woman trying desperately to make sense out of her present circumstances, whilst utterly traumatised by the emotional scars of her past. Her defining concept of music was that of salvation, a way of expiating past sins and a prayer for redemption for this most troubled of souls.
One song that strikes me as being absolutely integral to Sill's life is The Pearl, her most directly autobiographical song, which refers explicitly to her battles with drug addiction - "I've been looking for someone/Who sells truth by the pound/Then I saw the dealer and his friend/Arrive, but their gifts looked grim". The pearl of the title of this song is a reference to a sense of life's possibilities dawning on a young woman caught in the mire of her everyday life. This pearl is always something intangible and - frustratingly - just out of reach, but it is in that elusive something that "mysteries unfurl and become so clear/When I feel you near". She sees drugs, and specifically heroin, as a "way outside myself/To make my spirit climb", and this image of her spirit soaring is beautifully encapsulated in an image of a rope heading up to heaven, but, in time, she sees that this "rope was made of wind". There is a strong, but indirect, reference here to the formative time in her late teens when she was arrested and thrown into a dirty jail cell for 3 months. During that time, she was forced to re-evaluate her life as she spent her days and nights in a cold sweat ("puking her guts out" as she told it to a Rolling Stone reporter in 1971), trying desperately to beat her heroin addiction. "I saw what I’d do for heroin; there was no limit. And I did it with gusto because I wanted to escape my torment and misery, I had three months of incarceration while I was kicking, and sometimes it seemed to be a fight against insurmountable odds. " It was during that time, I believe, that the pearl of her love of music glimmered deep inside her and she clung to it desperately as a way out of this life she had found herself trapped in. "When my backyard weeds grew high/I hoped that they would hide me" is a heartwrenching image of a self lost to crime and drugs as a means of creating a "stronger" sense of identity that would shield her against the outside world. It also looks ahead to Judee's wilderness years after she dropped out of sight and retreated from the world, ensconced in the dark peace of heroin. It is significant that she uses the words, "hoped that they would hide me", because it creates a powerful image of an emotionally fragile young woman almost wishing to be lost from this world, out of sight and out of mind. Whenever she spoke about heroin to music journalists, she always took care to refer to it in the most fearful and respectful terms. “I see why people got hooked: the opiates afford an exclusive type of relief for people who have a certain quality in their unhappiness. It’s a kind of horror of air on your flesh. " That uncomfortable reference to a "horror of air on your flesh" looks directly ahead to the years following her retreat from music and return to heroin, a time when friends either deserted her or she drove them away, to simply exist in a state of emotional numbness without fear of external judgements.
Perhaps what makes her music endure is its inherent sense of lightness which indicated a generosity of spirit. She wished to use her music as a means of helping others deal with their own private pains. I have always been haunted by the introduction to The Donor that appears on the Live In London CD: "I shouldn't get any more breaks because I already squandered them in weird places. But I'd like to sing this song for you and hope that you get a break." A shadow hangs over that performance, one of the very last concerts she ever gave. I believe that Sill knew that her career lay in tatters at that stage. And yet, she wills herself into giving an emotionally exhausting rendition of her most personal song, in the earnest hope that her audience find something in her song that would give them hope. In one of her first interviews, when asked about her intentions when making music, she simply said, "I want to write beautiful songs that touch people deeply". At the heart of this ambition lay a vocational approach to her songwriting. Quite simply, she laboured intently over her songs. “I need time to understand my songs, to learn them. I wrote a song called ‘The Vigilante’ a long time ago and I’ve just now been able to sing it. I need the time to be able to handle it in front of an audience — to be able to get the idea across without being at anyone’s mercy.” She needed her music to transcend life's defeats. One of her most popular songs, Jesus Was A Crossmaker, was written at one of her lowest ebbs, when the-then love of her life abandoned her for another woman. Utterly devastated, for a time she considered suicide but she gradually found herself able to transform these negative energies into the positive efforts of songwriting. The miracle of the song is that there is no vindictiveness to be found, but, rather, a profound sense of compassion. To recall Joni Mitchell, Sill's songs are like tattoos ("Ink on a pin/Underneath the skin/An empty space to fill in"), so permanent is their impact upon your soul. Of course, this sense of permanence is nothing more than a reflection of how just how strongly these emotions which lie at the heart of her songs are embedded in her psyche. The key for Sill was in the crystallisation of these emotional truths in her music in the most honest and sincere way. That takes time. Leonard Cohen has spoken quite candidly about the extended timeframes during which he writes his songs. One of his songs, Anthem, took a decade to write. He discarded 60 perfectly good verses in an effort to condense the energy of the song. He agonised over the vocal phrasing. He turned to anything that was available to him to plug into that creative mainline. What he was at pains to point out in his interview was his fear of appearing like a fraud. He had to believe each and every word he was agonising over. The slightest tear in the structural fabric would wreck the emotional truth he was trying to convey. He recorded it three times and discarded each version. The emotional cost involved was, he acknowledges, significant but the result was a song that simply made him feel justified. These comments make me think of Cohen's elegant meditation on the art of songwriting, Hallelujah, and, in particular, the reference to "a cold and broken Hallelujah". The writing of a great song is a purgatorial act, and its achievement should not signal a victory march of pride, but, rather, the well-earned right to stand before the Lord of Song and sing your song of songs.
It was 33 years ago yesterday that Judee Sill, aged just 35, took her own life, an act believed to be precipitated by a rape that she had recently endured and which proved to be one final devastation that her mind could not recover from. During the darkest periods of her life, her music had proved to be her saviour, a way to channel her redemptive dreams and her deepest fears, and - ultimately - a way to transcend her darkest implulses. "I've had music in my ears since I was born and I wanted to put my efforts into something positive. Music that uplifts the listener. I took all those insatiable hungers and made them pull me forward." When that outlet disappeared, she was bereft and she was plunged into despair and returned once and for all to what she referred to as her "dark peace", heroin. At the end of her life, all that remained was the darkness of her lonely cell and the apparent futility and hopelessness of her life. Her life's work, into which she had poured all of her hopes and dreams, languished forgotten in bargain bins at record shops. The tragic irony is that at the very heart of her songs lies a profoundly disturbing fear that it would all end this way. To recall My Man On Love, one of her most beautiful songs: "No sorrow is like yours my friend,/Though silence is your tomb./I'd take your every agony to/Save you from this doom." This woman remained traumatised and haunted by an acute sense of guilt over what she perceived to be her past transgressions that she feared could never be expiated. Ultimately, all we have left is the music (which, thankfully, was made available again in 2005 after 25 years of neglect), the once blank pages that she somehow managed to fill with some of the most sincere and emotionally affecting songs I have ever heard and which collectively represent a personal triumph over her life's struggles. Listen to her music and pray that her dreams did, indeed, come true.
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 honored, your heart's being steered
We were lost almost two thousand years
Thinking someday a sign might appear
While love through the cloven sky peers
Over all we do
'Til dreams come true
Every where beauty is slain, it's seen
Though no word is uttered, a grave silence rings
Underfoot innocents on the scene
With humble hearts shudder, assembling a dream
And in each one a manger is seen
Where the dark, by the spark, is redeemed
While milk through the firmament streams
Over all we do
'Til dreams come true
("'Til Dreams Come True", by Judee Sill, recorded for her unreleased third album in 1974 and released posthumously in 2005.)
