Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment
Though filmmakers Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom’s star-studded documentary Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill about tortured and lesser-known songwriter Sill originally dropped in 2022, it finally makes its way to a Santa Fe theater courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Arts, and should be considered mandatory viewing for anyone with a penchant for singer-songwriters.
Of course, you’d be forgiven for not knowing Sill, even if she released two albums via David Geffen’s Asylum Records in the ‘70s (1971′s Judee Sill and 1973′s Heart Food). To better explain why she’s worth an entire movie, then, Brown and Lindstrom roll out a cavalcade of talking heads alongside former collaborators, friends and lovers, all of whom say they loved Sill and don’t get why she languished in obscurity. We’re talking Jackson Browne, JD Souther, Shawn Colvin, Natalie Laura Mering, Linda Ronstadt and even freaking Geffen himself, among others.
In fact, the film posits, the 1970s found Sill within a hair’s breadth from fame, though her nothing-else-like-it brand of songwriting seemingly worked best in clearing the way for her contemporaries to remain more notable, be they Ronstadt or Joni Mitchell or David Crosby or Graham Nash—the latter of whom even produced the track “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” the closest Sill ever came to a hit.
Even so, her story is far more gripping than those who rose around her, and it comes in the form of dead dads, creepy stepfathers, heroin addiction and songwriting duties for bands like The Turtles, not to mention a brief time spent robbing gas stations and liquor stores while living in a car with five other people (Sill reportedly told a clerk, “This is a fuck-up, mothersticker!” during one such robbery). Then come the songs in a dizzying array of folk sensibilities meshed with baroque musicality. Sill never grasped for commercialistic predictability, we learn, but rather pursued a sort of spirituality through ruminations on God, or at least her version of a creator. This made her more of a songwriter’s songwriter, and even heroic to some, but only later did she catch the attention of artists like Colvin or Big Thief singer Adrianne Lenker or, as Lost Angel’s opening -moments of concert footage prove, Fleet Foxes. Each of those acts performs or has recorded a Sill song, btw.
Sill herself even makes appearances in the film through diary entries and old footage, though she died from an overdose in 1979 at the age of 35. Perhaps this proves the best songwriters are the types with deep trauma. Music often saves the listener as it chips away at its creators; or, to paraphrase High Fidelity, did Sill write music to soothe the soul because she was fucked up herself, or was she fucked up because she wrote that music? Lost Angel doesn’t have an answer—how could it? What it does manage, however, is to elevate Sill into the pantheon of musicians who deserved more attention alongside Sixto Rodriguez and Blaze Foley.
7
+You’ll wish you’d heard the songs before; cool animation moments
-Some interviewees have very little to say
Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill
Directed by Brown and Lindstrom
Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 91 min.
