In 1963, Judee Sill was doing time in reform school for an armed robbery committed when she was 18. Five years later, in the middle of another stint for fraud and prostitution, she decided to follow a new vocation: singer-songwriter. From career criminal to would-be pop star to an early death in 1979 at the age of 35, Sill lived multiple lives in her brief allotted time. Directors Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom capture the essence of this complicated life in Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill. The film is at once a convincing argument for her distinct musical brilliance and a gripping battlefield report of personal demons that were never completely defeated.
Still, the plot is framed with what may be the filmmakers’ only misstep: a 2022 Fleet Foxes concert in which front man Robin Pecknold tries to convince a Boston crowd of Sill’s genius. In a 91-minute program filled with effective endorsements from Shawn Colvin and Adrianne Lenker, Pecknold’s “The Kiss” is the weakest cover. Fortunately, archival footage of Sill singing “The Kiss” cuts into the contemporary scene, and from there the story behind this lost angel unfolds.
Sill’s story is so compelling that the filmmakers could have put together a great doc with talking heads and archival footage alone. But Lost Angel goes beyond the standard m.o., weaving memories from Sill’s friends and surviving family with diary excerpts and animated renditions of her drawings. All these elements—as well as her music, of course—become part of a well-rounded portrait, and, crucially, much of her story is told in Sill’s own voice. In audio interviews recorded sometime in the ‘70s, Sill looks back on her life without flinching. The world-weary timbre of her speaking voice gives her stories a haunted air; she sounds much older than her years, as if she’s looking back at the end of a long life rather than unwittingly documenting the waning days of a short one.
With her sordid life and angelic voice, Sill is a fantastic subject, and as suits a figure who, with the evidence of her lyrics and her life, regularly conversed with angels and demons both, her muse was to some degree developed in juvenile court. She played church organ while she was in reform school, and that developed her taste for Bach which informed her songwriting and orchestral imagination. Among the interviews with peers like David Crosby and Jackson Browne, critic Tim Page plays something like the role Jonathan Richman played in Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground. He joyfully demonstrates the musicality behind his favorite track, “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown,” and Page is mystified over why it wasn’t a huge hit. Even if you’re new to her music, you will be too.
Yet as Crosby notes, Sill had a reputation for being “fierce”; she knew what she wanted in the studio and, in fact, conducted her own orchestrations. Linda Ronstadt explains that the only other musician during that era with similar musical chops was Brian Wilson. In a marriage of the scared and the profane, Sill informed her folk music with classical structure and beer-barrel boogie, with lyrics that were searching and religious. This outlaw was repentant; she reveled in her transgressions but was just as fervent about the possibility of redemption. She battled demons as deeply as she embraced them and considered it more courageous to fight them. She could play like the devil, and as Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, candidly points out, Sill was not conventionally attractive, but her music seemed to come out of some gorgeous fount.
The film does what the best music documentaries do: it captures a voice, conveyed not only in her music but the wisdom of the narration drawn from her interviews. That voice is visualized in animations that bring to life her artwork and sketches and sometimes even her handwriting, which in peak fervor flashes before the screen as we hear her work through the battle in her soul. Judee Sill immersed herself in sin and sought a higher plane, effectively writing about them both. Lost Angel tells that vivid, age-old battle with consistent conviction . . . except maybe when Fleet Foxes is on screen.
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
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