Wild Life, Brilliant Talent: The Genius of Singer-songwriter Judee Sill is Honored in the Documentary “Lost Angel”.

Singer-songwriter Judee Sill has packed a lot of life into her 35 years, much of it hard. Drugs, reform school, losing her father when she was just 8 years old. She said of her mother: “She was mean and stupid.”

In her late teens, in the early 1960s, in Southern California, she became involved with an evil man who committed several armed robberies. In one incident, she reportedly said to a man behind the counter of a liquor store, “Okay, mother sticker, that’s a bummer!” She had no shortage of humor.

As a child, Sill learned piano at a piano in a saloon owned by her father. She was proficient in other instruments, including bass and guitar. She played the organ in the juvenile detention center where she was sent after being arrested for check forgery. Somehow, from the cracks in the unpolished concrete of a troubled youth, a blossoming talent emerged. She could draw, she could sing, and she could write remarkable songs that synthesized rock, classical, country, and gospel.

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill, which just debuted on major VOD platforms, examines the life and difficult times of an artist who almost, but never quite, achieved star status. The Greenwich Entertainment film, directed by Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom, hit theaters last month.

“It took about 10 years to make,” Brown said during a recent question-and-answer session in Los Angeles. He discovered Sill’s music long after her death in 1979 from a drug overdose. “When YouTube started, that was it Old Gray Whistle Test “A version of Judy playing ‘The Kiss’ came out and it had a very strong effect on me,” he noted, “and I assumed it would have an effect on Brian too, and I showed it to him perhaps a year later, and she did.”

The documentary traces Sill’s turbulent childhood in Northern and Southern California and what could be described as an improvised existence. She married at 19 and began using heroin with her husband (the marriage was later annulled). To finance her drug addiction, she occasionally did sex work. For a while, she lived in a Cadillac with five other people and slept in shifts. Sill developed a passionate thirst for fame, perhaps to compensate for the lack of attention from her mother and stepfather, who spent their days fighting and drinking. The way up and out was through songwriting.

Her first hit was “Lady-O”, recorded by the Turtles in 1969. Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, who share their memories of Sill in the documentary, became aware of Judee’s outsized gift; Browne asked David Geffen, who was then founding Asylum Records, to take a look at Sill. The aspiring record mogul signed her as the first artist to his label. Shortly thereafter, Browne, Linda Ronstadt, JD Souther, The Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits joined Sill at the Asylum.

Sill’s song “Jesus Was a Crossmaker” was partly inspired by a romantic relationship with Souther (he also appears in the documentary). The lyric “He’s a bandit and a heart breaker” may sound vindictive, but Sill transforms it into a healing, almost ethereal experience that touches on the pain but makes room for the divine.

Lost angel features rare appearances by Sill in concert, some recorded using early Portapak equipment, a portable video recording system introduced in 1967. The directors were also given access to Sill’s notebooks with diary entries, song lyrics and drawings.

“We knew we wanted to kind of do a first-person film with Judee as our tour guide through her life,” Lindstrom explained during the question-and-answer session. “We didn’t know how we were going to achieve this. Four years into the project, we were very fortunate to track down an LA Free Press journalist named Chris Van Ness, who had done a great interview with Judee in 1972 and kept the tape. And at that point, Chris was living in Connecticut. He was confined to a wheelchair. He said, ‘I have the tape in the attic, but I can’t physically reach it.'”

Brown drove from New York to Connecticut to retrieve the recording. While Van Ness showed him where to look, Brown rummaged around in the attic of the journalist’s house.

“There it was, a cassette tape labeled ‘Interview with Judee Sill 1972,'” Brown remembers. “We didn’t know if there would be anything on it. We digitized it and there was Judee’s voice, telling her life story up until 1972.”

The filmmakers received additional materials from Judee’s survivors. “All of her worldly possessions were in a box at her cousin’s house, and that’s where her diaries and her drawings were,” Brown said. “The drawings in the magazines became the basis of the [film’s] Animation style.”

Joni Mitchell, the blonde beauty from Canada with the jazzy phrasing, may have been easier to market to a music audience than her contemporary Sill. Judee, with a voice of Mitchell’s range – albeit with more twang – performed in fringe spectacles, unaffected, seemingly without regard for the imperatives of “image.” Attempts to dress her up, like a photo shoot to make Sill look like a winning bride, failed.

“There are photos in there [the film] “I see her in a wedding dress that Henry Diltz, the great photographer, took, and she looks very uncomfortable in these photos,” Brown noted. “She didn’t want to look like that. So there was a certain level of not playing that game.”

Their music was not easy to categorize – neither the sound nor the themes. She wrote in terms that could have been celestial, of ecstatic forms of spirituality and sensual urges. In “Crayon Angels” she wrote: “I’m sitting here waiting for God and a train/to the astral plane.“The Lamb Ran Away from the Crown” contains these lines:

“Even though the beast in me is a liar

He gave me a strange desire

And I rode on the fire

With a blue sacred opal to bless the battlefield.”

She never had success on a large scale. Asylum Records dropped them after Sill’s second album. Heart foodfailed to catch on, although it produced songs that are popular today, including “There’s a Rugged Road,” “The Pearl” and “The Kiss.”

“One thing this experience has given me is simply a need to question what it means to ‘make it,'” Lindstrom commented. “How can you listen to ‘The Kiss’ and think that Judee has done anything other than make it a hundred times over? And perhaps the very things that prevented her from reaching superstardom 40 years ago are why she is now being rediscovered by a whole new generation. And it’s bigger than ever.”

When Sill died in 1979, she was forgotten. The New York Times did not acknowledge her death, nor did other major publications, although the Times made up for it with a delayed obituary in 2020 as part of its “Overlooked No More” series. Those who knew and loved her – friends, family and co-workers Browne, Nash, Souther and Tommy Peltier – never let her memory go.

“Everyone talked about what a light she was and how much fun she was,” Lindstrom said. “They really wanted to make sure we told her whole story and reduced her to this monotonous Wikipedia thing about the ‘tragic artist.’ And it was like, no, that wasn’t Judee. And so we really wanted to show her all her fullness.”