The 1970s was the decade of the singer-songwriter: a golden age in which anyone with passable guitar skills, decent vocal ability and a handful of good songs could land a recording contract. But just as in every other era in popular music, the most original artists tended to be largely ignored in favor of easily digestible, crowd-pleasing pap. In a decade in which Joni Mitchell and James Taylor were selling out football stadiums, an artist like Judee Sill had no chance.
Sure, Judee had the same MOR production values and soulful twang as a Carole King or a Carly Simon. She had the same ability to pen honest, heartfelt lyrics that spoke to the universal human condition. Sure, her debut album was produced by Graham Nash and Bob Harris (her ex-husband and the producer of Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon). And yes, she was discovered by David Geffen and signed to the Asylum label, home to Mitchell and scores of other successful singer-songwriters. However, she also had a penchant for complex occult religious symbolism and a melancholy streak that could become downright depressing. She also struggled with a lifelong heroin addiction, a fact she never shied away from in her lyrics. Her songs were about yearning, romantic or spiritual, often both in one song. Judee navigated a wholly unique lyrical world full of angels and prophets in the shape of children, messiahs and demons in the shape of ex-lovers, and God and Satan as ever-present influences in her life. On her solitary radio hit "Jesus Was a Cross Maker," she resurrects a familiar Gnostic idea, comparing Jesus to Satan and vice-versa, pointing out the essentially enigmatic nature of both good and evil, and the hedonistic call of both. It's frankly not surprising that Judee Sill's music never caught on with a bigger audience, considering lyrics like these: "Once I heard a serpent remark/'If you try to evoke the spark/You can fly through the dark/With a red midnight raven/To rule the battleground'/So I drew my sword and got ready/But the lamb ran away with the crown." All of this coexisting with seemingly innocuous 70s folk production: warmly resonant nylon strings, gentle orchestral fills and the odd flourish of flute or clarinet. Adding to the strangeness, Judee's voice is almost always heavily filtered, fed through several doublers, triplers and harmonizers, lending an oddly psychedelic plasticity to her deceptively pastoral songs. Judee Sill is an incredible debut album, one that deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation of listeners. For years, it's been impossible to find this album or it's follow-up Heart Food outside of expensive Japanese bootlegs of questionable pedigree, or the super-expensive Rhino Handmade CD editions that came out earlier this year. Thankfully, 4 Men With Beards, a specialty vinyl reissue label out of San Francisco, has rectified this situation with a pair of reasonably priced vinyl reissues presented exactly as the original albums were upon their initial release, right down to Judee's personal message to the listener: "May you savor each word like a raspberry."
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