Welcome to SDA Reader Tips. Tonight’s musical accompaniment comes in the form of a song by the late Judee Sill, a remarkably talented but largely unheralded musician whose beautiful voice and spiritual, baroque pop songs are so beautiful, gentle and clear-headed as to be hard to reconcile with her dark and troubled life.
Tim Page, in the Washington Post:
Tom King’s “The Operator,” a 650-page biography of David Geffen, who founded Asylum and signed Sill as the first artist to record on his new label, devotes only one sentence to her, calling her “a former prostitute and reformed junkie.” King might have added “stick-up artist,” “drug dealer” and “street hustler” to his capsule biography, for Sill led a troubled and unsettled life. And yet…she was also an artist of extraordinary gifts, one whose best songs are suffused with a radiant, prayerful and excruciatingly tender innocence, all the more affecting because it must have been so hard-won.
The immediate temptation is to classify her with some of her more famous contemporaries — Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Carole King — and, indeed, the similarities are there. Yet Sill’s body of work is both more limited and more perfect. Virtually all of her songs are intensely devotional; along with J.S. Bach and Mahalia Jackson (two of her acknowledged influences), Sill believed that the purpose of music was the glorification of God. Instead of sharply etched social vignettes or cosmopolitan evocations of modern life and love, she wrote her own sort of hymns — guileless, urgent, naked, absolutely personal.
Here, for your Sunday evening pleasure, is the late Judee Sill’s 1971 release Jesus Was a Cross Maker.
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