Rolling, Tumbling New Day Coming
Exploring Judee Sill's symphonic sound worlds and mystic visions.
The great songwriter Judee Sill would have turned 80 on October 7th. Born in 1944, Sill died on November 23, 1979, leaving behind two finished albums of magnificent orchestral pop, fueled by her spiritual fervor and symphonic inner ear. To commemorate her birthday, I’m reposting an updated and edited reflection I originally shared here in 2022, along with links to two different audio pieces in which I speak more broadly about the “marriage of heaven and hell” embodied by Sill’s songs. I hope you enjoy.
Judee Sill makes me laugh but she’s scary too. That’s how it is being a prophet: her presence vibrates the air around her. When I first heard her in the early 2000s, I listened through a twee filter, dazzled by the ornamentation coming out of the speakers, filling up that green room behind the old doctors’ office. Now, it’s the mystery and terror that gets me most. “The angels come back and laugh in my dreams, I wonder what it means,” Sill sings.
Judee sings about the coming apocalypse. She drops UFOs, the Holy Spirit, and celestial alignments into her baroque folk pop, which earned her the first spot on David Geffen’s Asylum label, though she never sold many copies and eventually turned on Geffen. She wanted an audience, badly, and she chided herself for not achieving more. But her aim was deeper than that. Her songs were just as informed by her own bad times, her own tough breaks. With her songs, she sought to “musically induce God into giving us all a break,” a little peace amidst all the chaos.
“The lower down you go to gain your momentum from, the higher up it’ll propel you,” she says, introducing “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” a song that saved her life after a wipeout romance with the late JD Souther broke her heart. Judee knew burnout. She’d grown up rough in California, learning to play piano at her father’s bar. Later, she scourged around the underbelly of Las Vegas, returning back to the golden coast to scam and sell sex. Lots of her fellow Asylum singers played down and out; Judee had actually been to jail.
Adopting a life of music hadn’t completely satisfied her, either. She found herself frustrated by audiences set to “boogie in the lower levels, not the higher levels.” Judee identified with the ascendent. “The phoenix is a mythical bird that is consumed by its own flames and rises out of its own ashes, you know,” she says. Once, her house caught on fire and pages from her collected writings of Madame Blavatsky took flight on the wind, freed from their book binding by the heat.
But Judee sings for the garbage too, where Philip K. Dick said "the symbols of the divine initially show up.” Trash and trash people, the betrayers, criminals, the destitute. Redemption is possible for them all in Judee’s multi-verse. Not even the dirtbag who broke her heart was too far gone. “I knew, that even that wretched bastard was not beyond redemption. It’s true. It’s true. I swear.”
They ruled her death in 1979 a suicide, citing a note her friends suggested could have been a future song or diary entry, “a meditation on rapture, the hereafter and the innate mystery of life.” I think about “The Living End,” a song from 1974 sessions at Michael Nesmith of The Monkees’ studio with Emitt Rhodes engineering, finally finished decades later by Jim O’Rourke on Dreams Come True. I like the song best in its roughshod demo version: unfinished, in progress, on the way, the way our lives feel, the way we wonder, at the close of each day, what comes next:
“Fire of heaven, it's sink or swim
By lightning riven, by grace we're in, I just wonder when
There's gonna be a rolling, tumbling new day coming
It'll be the living end”
Cited: Judee Sill, Songs Of Rapture And Redemption: Rarities & Live | Judee Sill, Dreams Come True (Hi • I Love You Right Heartily Here • New Songs) | Judee Sill, Live In London: The BBC Recordings 1972-1973 | Judee Sill: Soldier of the Heart (Grover Lewis, Rolling Stone) | The Many Lives of Judee Sill (Angie Martoccio, Rolling Stone) | Overlooked No More: Judee Sill, Singer Whose Life Was Cut Short (By Minju Pak, New York Times) | A Brief Life, an Enduring Musical Impression Rhino Reissue Sings the Praises of Judee Sill (By Tim Page, Washington Post)
Revolutions Per Movie: The Genius of Judee Sill
This past summer, I was a guest on Chris Slusarenko’s (Eyelids, Guided By Voices) great music movies podcast, alongside filmmakers Brian Lindstrom and Andy Brown, the people behind Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill. Sill’s relationship to music was profoundly gnostic, and it was a real treat to get to speak with these great folks about it. It’s a hoot, listen and be sure to subscribe to Revolutions Per Movie.
What Is Musical Sainthood?
More recently, my friend Lauren Gilger of Phoenix’s NPR station KJZZ had me on to discuss my concept of musical saints. Alongside fellow heroes like Sun Ra, Madonna, Sinéad O'Connor, and John and Alice Coltrane, I spotlighted Judee’s song “Lopin’ Along Through the Cosmos.”
She's a perfect example of a saint who is far from saintly on paper, but when you listen to her songs, I think she just understood some sort of William Blake-style marriage of heaven and hell. Like pain and pleasure, high and low, transcendence and damnation. For her, they're all in the mix, and they're always happening.
There's just a lyric in this that, were I to come up with my own religion, I would keep this as like one of the main commandments. The lyric is, "So keep on moving / Or stay by my side, either way / I'll tell you a secret / I've never revealed / however we are is okay."
Take a listen, and drop your favorite Judee songs down in the comments. I’d love to hear more about what draws you to her work.
The only one of her songs I know of is "Lady-O", and that in a cover by the Turtles rather than her original. But I'm very intrigued by what she accomplished...