1971: Judee Sill, Judee Sill
BY THOMAS BEDENBAUGH
I’m hopin’ so hard for a kiss from God
I missed the sweet love of the air
Judee Sill, “Lopin’ Along Thru the Cosmos”
Growing up, I lived and went to school in a small city in South Carolina. When I was 10, my family started going to a Catholic church in Augusta, Georgia, just across the Savannah River, and soon after I transferred from the local public elementary school to the preparatory school attached to our new church. This part of the city is essentially a town within a town; it’s nestled within a neighborhood that’s about 5 square miles in size and populated with families who’ve led comfortable, upper middle-class lives here for generations. A predominantly Roman and Irish Catholic neighborhood, it is inevitable that faith and the parish church influenced all of the details of life in the community.
Every summer growing up, my church’s youth group sponsored a trip to a nationwide conference for Catholic youth. I usually went to get away from suburban South Carolina for a few days and see exotic lands like Alabama or Tennessee with 50 other kids my age. During one such trip years ago, on the way back from Ohio, our student ministry leader stood at the front of the bus and invited us to share something that we had experienced over the weekend, whether mundane or revelatory, with the rest of the group.
Several students volunteered and spun yarns about basking in the light of God’s love during the previous night’s benediction service, where thousands of other high schoolers raised their hands and swayed their bodies to softly strummed e-major chords. I felt obligated to share, even though I was quiet and introverted. Maybe I needed to prove that the trip hadn’t been a waste of my parents’ money. At the front of the bus with microphone in hand, I stammered through a story about how during the benediction service I realized the pain of my first heartbreak was God’s way of showing me how He felt due to my lack of faith. For crushes beget lust and lust induces impure thoughts that lead one to wander from the path to salvation. We nervously performed our pain and hopes of redemption for classmates and chaperones at the front of the bus with an almost mechanical stiffness, as if we were reciting multiplication tables with our feet dangling over a cliff. I didn’t look up once while talking (a habit which I retain to this day) before walking back to my seat, my performance complete. But it wasn’t true.
I felt guilty for having lied, but, if I had to, I could argue that what I said was intuitively “true” to some degree if not actually true. Looking back, this intuition that heartbreak was a form of punishment for not paying enough attention in church or for going through puberty seems melodramatic, bordering on self-hating. But in the moment, my off-the-cuff connection of heartbreak and pain with religious revelation felt like I had finally figured out how to “talk” with God, something I could never wrap my head around when my teachers and the parish priests tried to explain it.
Catholicism in this community came to resemble a sheer curtain wrapped around a neighborhood that was bound together by exclusionary class interests and the sort of aloofness that can only come when you live in a neighborhood affectionately called “The Hill.” It was delicate and translucent enough to let light pass through it—but what was this light source, and why did it need to be covered in the first place? As a result, though I ostensibly practiced the same faith as those around me, I could never entirely divorce my faith from this place. Instead, faith and place became interlinked, constantly signifying the other in a dizzying back and forth. I gradually fell away from the Church, initially as an act of teenage rebellion packaged with young masculine rage. This rage gave way to something more ambiguous and difficult to explain when I’m asked about it; Catholicism isn’t something I practice but it follows me nonetheless.
I found refuge from this back and forth in music, with the Beatles being my first love. I didn’t discover Judee Sill’s music until I was in college, trying to find and listen to every record from obscure women singer/songwriters from the late 1960s and early 1970s that I could to distract myself from watching my first serious romantic relationship crumble. Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Sibyllie Baier, Bridget St. John, Buffy Sainte-Marie and others all made records that I cherish, but Sill’s work, especially her self-titled debut, struck me in a way that the others did not. The music is gorgeous and catchy on contact. But it is also shot through with intimations of pain and loss, and I found comfort in the album’s tales of phantom cowboys, thieving lambs, and enchanted flying machines.
Although much of Sill’s recorded output is loaded with images and symbology from Christianity, you won’t hear her songs played on your local devotional radio station or covered during youth services on Sunday nights. For one, she was just as fascinated with the occult as with Christianity. But her relationship with faith, however one wants to define it, was idiosyncratic and unique to her and her art. She sang longingly for something, anything, beyond the physical world, throwing open her arms to its chaotic uncertainty, ascribing holy meaning to everything—from being betrayed by a lover to seeking God—in her visions of ghosts that haunted early 1970s Los Angeles.
In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, she said that though her religion is “unspeakable, it’s not unsingable.” In other words, Sill’s belief in a higher power is intensely personal and intuitive. It might not make sense to others, but it doesn’t have to. Her eclectic religious and allegorical evocations allow her to peer through these impenetrable symbols and images that are as omnipresent and intangible as air to probe their human dimensions. But her music also revels in the beauty that arises from living in and with such uncertainty, a beauty which has taken years for me to appreciate. For it is most often in these moments of coming face to face with the uncertainty of the universe where I can most intensely experience that feeling of communing with God that I felt at the front of a charter bus from years ago. Only now it is a private performance of unknowing where I can work out how pain, place, and faith have fused together.
Sill’s own musical longing is deeply informed by the pain and hardship she faced throughout her life. Her 1971 self-titled debut revolves around themes of heartbreak, loneliness, and a sense of being lost. In that same Rolling Stone interview, she talks about the turbulence of her home life as a child and her struggle with addiction to heroin, a drug that, she says, seemed to offer relief from a more existential despair that’s analogous to feeling the “horror of air on your flesh.”
I’m not suggesting that struggling with addiction is in any way akin to transferring schools and feeling lonely within an upper middle class religious community. But there are overlaps on the Venn diagram of feeling on the outside of your faith, where you don't know what could save you, if anything can. Sill’s universe—her characters and narratives—emphasizes the isolation and pain that come from being born into a world that’s built on stories whose promises are not guaranteed. Her music allowed me the space and strength to pilfer the sights, sounds, and meanings of things that felt beyond my control; and to realize that harnessing these might allow for a recreation, a rebirth that is constant and ever-changing.
“Jesus Was A Crossmaker” is perhaps the most famous song from Sill’s debut; inspired by a recent breakup, the pain from that romance seems to hang in a space in between the human and the divine. The fickle lover is transmuted into a false prophet who does war with the devil and drives him from the windows of his home, but who nevertheless “keeps his door open wide.” To maintain his illusion of divinity and perpetuate his holy crusade, the lover-turned-prophet must leave his house susceptible to the devil to keep his holy flame alive.
But the chorus to Sill’s song suggests that there is hope for redemption. She sings: “Binding me, his song remains reminding me / He’s a bandit and a heartbreaker / Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker.” Laboring as a carpenter, Jesus built the instruments that would one day be used to crucify him, an act that in Catholicism is represented as the supreme expression of God’s love and forgiveness. It’s as if Sill recognizes the pain and irony of heartbreak, of being betrayed by someone who loves you, with a defiant shrug. This hope for redemption is fleshed out on the album’s closing track, “Abracadabra,” whose simple opening guitar melody gives way to lush orchestration that puts one in the headspace to receive a revelation. Sill frames the song as a tribute to someone who “forgot his way home,” who “silently narrates the confusion of his fight,” and who “hides his own darkness” for fear of what the light might reveal. The song is a life-affirming offertory where bread and wine are swapped out with the more generalized “keys to the kingdom,” as if Sill is inviting herself, her characters, and her listeners to cast off the dark voices leading you toward dangerous shores. It is an intimate invitation to draw solace and strength from sorrow, one that as a child I refused to acknowledge for fear of being punished. By whom, I’m not sure: priests, teachers, peers, or their parents in the community—any authority that felt larger than me.
Sill’s paean allows me to reconcile the past with the present, at least momentarily. Though I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, I can feel the shadows of saints, priests and principals peering over my shoulder whenever I wake up on Sunday mornings to tolling bells from the church a couple of blocks from my apartment. However, the light that I’ve carried with me for almost two decades, formed from that strange fusion of faith and place, grows more malleable as that sheer curtain falls day by day. And it falls softly, often in spontaneous moments of communion with loved ones or my surroundings – on walks at night when the glow from streetlights plays in puddles on the road or when I talk to my sister, my parents, or my grandmother. Connecting the past with my present came to resemble, for me, a form of prayer. It is an attempt to reach beyond myself to (re)construct my life, a project that is and will remain utterly incomplete, yet wholly invigorating.
Thomas Bedenbaugh is a writer and editor currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He primarily writes about music and books, and his writing has been featured in PopMatters, Slant Magazine, and Spectrum Culture.