When I think about "teenage symphonies to God," I'm usually unmoved. Despite Brian Wilson's audacious-- even in an era remembered for its spiritual ambitions (and hang-ups)-- claim for Pet Sounds, his phrase has gone the way of most sound bites: It's become clichéd and almost meaningless. Yet, the music is hardly affected by this claim. If anything, it overshadows it; songs like "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" and "God Only Knows" seem so far beyond the realm of "teenage," I wonder if others who might have wanted to make sure Wilson's band always had a place on the radio influenced his characterization of his own stuff. In any case, he only sporadically approached the divine thereafter. In fact, few pop artists of any stripe have come as close to writing modern day hymns like Wilson's in the mid-1960s.
Judee Sill was a California girl. Like Wilson, she had a troubled family; the tragic death of her father while she was still a child, and the death of her brother soon afterward left her permanently scarred-- and her mother's alcoholism left Sill practically rootless. Rootless, that is, except for an almost feverish mystic-religious bent, inspiring the likewise artistically minded Sill to write several songs directly related to Christ-like figures or otherwise heavenly phenomena. After surviving a heroin addiction and a brief stint as a bank robber, Sill turned her rather intense passions to music. In the late-60s, after having been introduced to a fertile L.A. songwriter community by her then-husband (and future record producer) Bob Harris, she began writing songs for other acts, including penning the Turtles' single "Lady O". After up-and-coming record mogul David Geffen spotted her playing sets at various Hollywood clubs, he offered her a publishing deal, and eventually signed her to his own newly formed Asylum Records.
Sill's music was complex, elegantly crafted and yet completely devoid of pretension or overwrought melodrama. Often accompanying her clear, unmannered voice with just her acoustic guitar, Sill made music that seemed more suited to a small chapel than onstage at a club. Unfairly lumped in with other female, proto-adult contemporary songwriters like Joni Mitchell or Carole King, Sill was much closer in spirit to Brian Wilson, Nick Drake, or one her idols, J.S. Bach. She had a gift for making very complicated things sound simple, beautiful. Often, her arrangements took advantage of a chamber orchestra or layers of vocal harmonies, and rather than seeming pumped full of grandeur, they were tiny miracles of poetic efficiency. Her modest Southern drawl-- an affectation shared by many of her SoCal contemporaries-- is the only thing that dates her songs at all, and Water's reissue of her first two LPs (coming a year after Rhino's limited reissues) should find Sill ready acceptance by almost anyone into gentle, heart-lifting music.
1971's Judee Sill begins unobtrusively with Sill's buoyant, finger-picked guitar and her declaration that "nothing's happened, but I think it will soon/ So I sit here waiting for God and a train to the Astral plane." She was very fond of mystic imagery (not to mention astrology), but the simple beauty of her music tended to keep the songs from floating off into the ether. She further evokes the supernatural in "Lopin' Along Thru the Cosmos", "The Lamb Ran Away With the Crown", and the gospel-tinged "Enchanted Sky Machines", though the only song to actually namecheck a religious figure is curiously enough not a religious song at all. "Jesus Was a Cross Maker" was the hit that should have been. Produced by Graham Nash, and featuring one of Sill's best lyrics-- detailing her betrayal by a former partner (in fact, fellow L.A. songwriter J.D. Souther), and using the song's title as an indication that even the people we loved the most had the ability to let us down-- the song begins as understated piano ballad. The chord progressions would have made Wilson smile, and when the chorus hits-- female chorus of background harmonies and full band lifting things off the ground-- I'm hard pressed to think of a more uplifting piece of music.
And then I heard "The Kiss" from 1973's Heart Food. If ever there was a song that lived up to the glorious, simultaneous heartbreaking and mending I might expect from a symphony to God, it's this. Sill once again plays piano (and in fact did all the orchestral and vocal arrangements herself), using another unbelievably gorgeous chord progression, taking advantage of pedal notes and resolving cadences in much the same way as Bach did, and uses her lone, double-tracked vocal to deliver a melody that arrests me no matter how many times I hear it. A sampling of Sill's words-- "Promise me this and only this/ Holy breath touching me/ Like a wind song / Sweet communion of a kiss"-- reveal someone obviously enamored of the beyond, of the archetypical bridegroom who was at once the songwriter's savior and father, and abandoned husband. I might add that I'm not religious in the slightest, but think it would take an almost total lack of sprit not to be moved by this stuff.
Though it would be tough to top something like "The Kiss", the remainder of Heart Food is almost as good. Tracks like the up-tempo "Soldier of a Heart" (another hit that never was) or "The Pearl" demonstrate Sill's seeming proximity to people like Linda Rondstadt, though she could hardly have fit less comfortably into the pop-star's mold-- in fact, she refused to play live if forced to open for other acts, which meant she basically stopped playing live altogether. No matter, as her multi-layered, album-ending opus "The Donor" indicates, Sill shone plenty brightly in the studio. The comparatively epic-length of the track (just over eight minutes) is filled to the brim with vocal harmonies, including male voices in the distance, and a cyclical chord sequence shimmering via piano, bells and timpani. If you listen close, you can hear the voices chanting in Latin, and when they commiserate in unison at "kyrie eleison," I'm again stopped dead in my tracks.
Sill never released anything else. She'd begun recording another record (the unfortunately underwhelming results of which have been released on a 2xCD compilation Dreams Come True), but by the mid-70s had resumed her heroin habit and dropped almost completely off the music landscape. She died of an overdose in 1979 and such was the degree of her professional disappearance, it's rumored that it took a year for the news to filter to her onetime patron Geffen. Nevertheless, her gifts survived. As with the music of Wilson or Bach, it's hard to suppress the inner light of Sill's work. It shines.
