If you have read Mike Nessing’s post on Judee Sill trivia you may start getting the impression I have: Judee is a deep well of otherness.
Perhaps it goes to the old bad families good art conundrum. It seems you can set judde up a bit like this:
Loses dad in car accident
Step-dad beats her
Gets in trouble with law
Finds drugs
Gets arrested
Finds God
Plays organ for Church
Finds music.
Gets hurt in car accident
Damages her back
Finds drugs again
Dead at thirty-five.
It is a strange trajectory of a life but most lifes are strange trajectories -we hope they might be like short stories: thesis, anthesis, synthesis and new thesis. But the are more like thesis antithesis thesis, ever on to nowhere -a line from life to death but not a straight line – it zigs and zags, doubles back on itself to make a mockery of syncronicty and then stops. Just like that.
When I first listened to Judee I had her pegged as the Alex Chilton of folk: very arranged, very complex song construction so you are forced to work your way through her melodies: it’s as if, again like the Big Star star and perhaps a cult phenom for the same reason as Chilton is, she is in the process of withholding gratification till you’ve proven you’ve deserved it.
But I am not so sure any more.
I think her song construction goes back to faith. Not the gospel and blues undertones on both her piano and, more surprisingly, her guitar but the hidden nature of meaning in faith. Finding something hidden in life that proves for you a God exists and an afterlife, is often in the deeply written textures of everyday life: it is the way the sky turns to the same blue as your true loves eyes after rainfall on a summer afternoon. In order to transmogrify that faith into art it is necessary to hide the same details in your music.
That is precisely what Judee did in her music and in doing so she revealed the hidden hand of Christ.