Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill Celebrates Songwriter Whose Legacy Was (Almost) Vanished
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
For the uninitiated, discovering American singer-songwriter Judee Sill must feel like what anthropologists felt at the discovery of the Cave of Altamira: sublime awe, and proof that something much greater was going on in a specific era than previously suspected.
Yet it’s almost unbelievable that a career marked in its day by both widespread acclaim and salacious sidebars has been largely forgotten in the four decades following Sill’s death in 1979, likely of an accidental overdose, though it was officially ruled a suicide. She was 35 and by then so far from the spotlight that no obituary was published. Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill dusts off Sill’s legacy while correcting a historical slight.
The new documentary — co-executive produced by actor Maya Hawke and author Cheryl Strayed, who know a good story when they see one — charts Sill’s life from childhood on up, framing her work in the context of the predominant soft-rock of 1970s California. She was the first artist signed by David Geffen to Asylum Records. She was covered by marquee artists like The Turtles, was a contemporary to David Crosby and Graham Nash with whom she toured, and was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Just two years prior, Sill had been living out of a car. She had served time as a teen for armed robbery, developed a heroin addiction — which she claimed was cultivated to allow her to withstand the pain in her fingers learning to play standup bass — did sex work, married a fellow musician to essay his piano playing, all while creating ethereal folk-pop influenced by the classical oeuvre and concerning themes of Christian redemption.
In one of many Sill interview clips used in Lost Angel, she recalls serving as church organist in reform school. She would later be jailed for other crimes supporting her addiction before focusing on music, but Christ was a recurring theme, peaking with the song “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” from Sill’s self-titled 1971 debut album, which was produced by Nash and, humorously, was assumed by separate paramours interviewed in the film to have been written about them.
Contemporary artists from Shawn Colvin to Fleet Foxes — who bookend Lost Angel with a performance of Sill’s heart-stopping ballad “The Kiss” — join Sill’s 70s-era contemporaries including Nash, the late Crosby, Jackson Browne, JD Souther, and an off-screen Linda Ronstadt in testifying to her unique compositional prowess, reminiscent in vibe and square-peg complexity to Laura Nyro, who was also shepherded by Geffen.
Despite this, Sill claimed she was made to feel lesser-than, dwelling in the shadow of more successful Asylum labelmate Joni Mitchell who Sill accused of getting more robust promotion (Geffen denies this). She also fell afoul of the then-closeted music mogul for allegedly making a derogatory remark publicly about his sexuality. In any event, after her second album Heart Food flopped despite critical support, she was dropped from the label. The downward spiral began in earnest.
Less openly discussed but alluded to throughout the film is depression, which seemed to settle on Sill like a pall when her father died in her childhood and enveloped her when her hard-drinking mother remarried an illustrator. Sill’s niece, Donna Disparti, suggests the stepfather molested her. Any viewer of Intervention knows that adult addictions are almost always linked to childhood trauma. Her towering talent notwithstanding, Sill’s demons seem maddeningly prosaic.
And the tragedies mounted: Her brother died suddenly and young, and then, nearer the end of her life, Sill suffered from a debilitating back injury for which she underwent surgeries but never really recovered. Her moment was seemingly over.
But her complex and elegiac music, despite its heavy themes and failure to capture the imagination of influential FM radio programmers, was mesmerizing. Lost Angel — with its engaging mix of animation, talking-head interviews, voiceovers, still photographs, and archival footage — ensures viewers understand the depth of her achievement over two albums released in her lifetime and a third issued posthumously.
It might finally bring Sill the fame she openly coveted in her short, hard, sad but creatively dynamic life.
Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill. Directed by Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom. With Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Fleet Foxes, David Geffen, JD Souther, Big Thief, Weyes Blood, and Tim Page. Available on demand at iTunes, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube April 12.