It’s about 8:30 on a rainy Brooklyn night. How much beauty have I surrounded myself with just to get through? I shared beauty with my students. I gave them Dylan and Joni. I gave it all I had. Did I get through to them? Were they converted? It’s a new semester. They still have time to be blown away. You can’t have too much beauty, right?
Or can you? I’m listening to Judee Sill singing “The Kiss,” and I can’t talk too much about her because I am already writing about her elsewhere. There is a documentary by Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom that is still looking for a distributor, which is baffling to me, because Soldier of the Heart is exactly the documentary she deserved, as devastating and brilliant as its subject. Sill was, at times, living in a car, a sex worker, a junkie, and somehow possessed with the spirit of Bach and Pythagoras and Jesus and sounded like an angel. I have never been, nor will ever be, a Christian, but I have accepted Judee Sill into my heart. These songs of devotion are as close to St. Matthew’s Passion as anything I know from a singer-songwriter. Was her work too beautiful? Andy Partridge said so. Andy Partridge, if you are not familiar, was the dominant singer and songwriter for the British pop group XTC, and if you don’t know XTC, wonders await you from your streaming service. Whenever you hear Andy singing a long and strange line, it’s a tribute to Judee. XTC is best known for “Dear God,” a song of blasphemy that is also drop dead gorgeous. Every chord, every line is a beatitude, almost evidence of the divine in spite of the lyrics. People thought he came from Brian Wilson, but he really emanated from Judee, a little secret, since her work was out of print the whole time XTC existed. It’s on your streaming service now, as if the availability of Judee Sill was normal. Nothing about her was normal. Her cause of death was suicide, at age 35, though she might have od’d. She only recently got an obituary in The New York Times. When the great Tim Page wrote a belated obituary in The Washington Post, it was the first time her name appeared in the paper. David Geffen signed her to Asylum in 1971, and after two extraordinary albums, he dropped her, maybe because she didn’t sell or maybe because she was outing him from the stage. (This is the legend, but in the documentary, he says he didn’t know about it, which is hard to believe, because this was a well-trod story.) I don’t even know why he agreed to be in the documentary, though I’m glad he did. He’s a “get.”
Andy was not available for the documentary, and he was not available recently when I had an assignment to talk to him, and he wrote to tell me that he had nothing to say. People who know him have been worried about him for a long time, and I’ve never met him, but I’m worried about him, too, and this brings me to why we’re here. A BBC interviewer, Ruth Barnes, on a dogged quest for “The Lost Genius of Judee Sill,” went to Patridge’s home. “I think ‘The Kiss’ is possibly the most beautiful song ever recorded,” he said. It was music that was so close to his fragile being, and it might have been years since he had listened. But it was part of him. Every note. All of her weirdness was tethered to his. He, best known for a numinous atheist anthem, clung to this with all he had. But when he got to “The Kiss,” he had to turn it off. It was too much. Now he tried to put it on again. “That beautiful tracked voice with the swelling…”
Love rising from the mists,
Promise me this and only this,
Holy breath touching me, like a wind song
Sweet communion of a kiss
“Ok,” he continues, “I’m going a bit now… And that, oh, the climbing piano there, the notes climbing under her voice…”
Sun sifting through the grey
Enter in, reach me with a…
And then he stops. “Sorry, I can’t do it,” he says. He is in tears. “It’s just too beautiful.”
When Judee Sill performed “The Kiss” on the Old Grey Whistle Test, she said it was about the union of opposites we all share. Yes, we do, but do we? Judee Sill is and is not like us. I’m listening to it now, in full awareness of its mysteries, its power to lift you. Poor Judee Sill was unable to lift herself, yet she lifts us. What is it in the universe that allowed Judee Sill to happen? God, or whomever or whatever, spoke through this reform school organist, this woman who was robbing liquor stores and scoring junk and selling her body, and, with that double tracked vocal and the orchestra she conducted herself, gives us a direct trip to nirvana. A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.
But I am listening and not unable to complete the track. I am in full awareness of its powers, but I am not losing it. Should I be? Is Andy listening to it the right way? I am not normal, and I give myself to this music, but what does it mean to be too beautiful? What if the song that is truly too beautiful hasn’t been written yet? What if it comes along and completely destabilizes the order? What if it causes nervous breakdowns and it inspires something like Paris in ’68, when everyone walked out of their jobs in search of revolution and De Gaulle had to call the national guard? Judee Sill is amazing, but what if records—I mean this in both senses—were made to be broken?
I thought of Andy Partridge in tears when I wrote this song, “Almost Divine.” I used it as the finale for my musical, Mensch, with a book co-written by Matthew Gasda, of Dimes Square fame. On the recording, you hear Athena, played by Stephanie Garofalo, at wit’s end. A graduate student in musicology, she has been tasked with lifting a thousand year old curse, and the answer is in a secret chord.
ATHENA: Stop it! You are who you are. And maybe you can be saved by the secret chord in Juliana of Douchewich. Or maybe you can’t. But if we could be what we wanted… we would sing.
Some things are so beautiful
They make you want to cry
Some things are so beautiful
They almost make you want to die
Some things are so beautiful
They make you want to cry
Some things are so beautiful
Almost make you feel paradise
This world is so prosaic
Sometimes I just can’t take it
Things are so banal
After the fall
She lives around the corner
Near the library stacks
I love to hear her heart beat
I love to hear her laugh
I love to hear her thinking
In all her wishful drinking
I don’t need to own her
But I’d sure like to phone her
Some things are so beautiful
They make you want to cry
Some things are so beautiful
No need to ask why
Some things are so beautiful
They make you want to cry
Some things are so beautiful
I just can’t lie
Some things are so beautiful
I just can’t hide
She lives around the corner
Near the library stacks
And I just can’t wait
Til I can hear her laugh
She cries every morning
Just before she leaves
If she wants, she can wear
My heart on her sleeve
Some things are so beautiful
They make you want to cry
Some things are so beautiful
In my mind’s eye
Some things are so beautiful
numinous and sublime
Some things are so beautiful….
Almost divine
Almost divine
(And then a contrapuntal chorus begins)
Wake up, wake up, wake up, girl
Wake up wake up, to the real world, girl
A friend of mine, a film score composer, also steeped in the wonders of Andy Partridge and other shared passions, once said that “music is what things mean.” Before I met him, I had my Athena say, “If we could be what we wanted, we would sing.” And, if we could, we would sing something that was so beautiful, we would have to put a stop to the banality of the non-sublime moments. Like, I was on hold recently with a couple of insurance companies. It was unpleasant, but I had to get through it. You would not believe the music they were playing and the quality of the sound. We don’t have to go there. The point is, sometimes we are transported, and sometimes we have to go through the banal tasks, and I probably have less patience for them than most. But I do get through. But then maybe I just haven’t been struck by the right song yet. I could get so completely flattened, just bulldozed by the sublime, that I can’t function. And that would be better than good, better that fine. Nietzsche, suffering from syphilis, tried to stop a horse from being beaten, then never said or wrote another word. It would be like that. Thou art the thing itself, said Lear, getting there. It would be like Kafka’s “On Parables,” positing the idea of becoming the parable yourself. How attuned to beauty can you be and function? Here, on Earth, of all places. When most of it is working against the thing you know and feel. What would this song, this sound, even be? It would be too beautiful, and I wouldn’t be able to talk about it.
I love Sibylle Baier, in ways that I haven't even put to words but probably will. I love Colour Green, everything about it. And of course I love Denny and Nyro. I haven't put my feelings about Nyro into words yet, but of course she was a crucial figure adjacent to Joni. Geffen loved her first, then she went to Columbia, then he fixated on Joni, which Judee found irritating. (Joni visited the Heart Food sessions in 72. Graham Nash produced "Jesus was a Crossmaker" when he was living with Joni, then she opened for Crosby-Nash, so I'm sure she heard plenty about her.) Eli is especially powerful. I know Denny from Fairport Convention--of course, I love Fairport Convention, and I know she sang with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore," but I should investigate her solo work. When I first heard "Jesus Was a Crossmaker," I felt something welling up in me. It was so powerful. It is a song that has multiple climaxes, and most have just one if they have one at all. This is subjective, because if you don't feel it, it's just white noise, but I feel it every time I hear it, and I have shared her with others who have felt the same, but while I feel like quality is something I can identify, experience is still subjective.
I really like this piece, even more than I like Judee Sill, and I'm very thankful you imagined it and wrote it. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy her music very much, although I think it has been a bit inflated by being conflated with her "story" and the mythos that has grown up around that story over time. I appreciate her music as music; however, it certainly doesn't attain to Joni Mitchell. Actually, listening to Sill again made me appreciate how transcendently special other singer-songwriters of the time were. Everyone has their preferences, of course, but in my book she certainly doesn't approach the sublime status of a Sandy Denny or a Laura Nyro (a lot of what you expressed here perhaps reaches its peak in the songs on ELI AND THE THIRTEENTH CONFESSION, NEW YORK TENDABERRY, or CHRISTMAS AND THE BEADS OF SWEAT). I agree that "The Kiss" is a beautiful song. Absolutely. I'll listen to Sill, and I thank you for bringing her back into my mind and ears; however, I'll probably choose Vashti Bunyan more often; she, too, has her own story, but without the histrionics. In fact, there are a number of (particularly female) songwriters from that period who in a variety of ways had a similar "vibe", including Sibylle Baier, or even early Janis Ian (the Verve years, such as ALL THE SEASONS OF YOUR MIND or THE SECRET LIFE OF J. EDDY FINK). Of course, I'll go back and listen to Judee Sill's best songs and listen to them again and again for a certain purity of expression. Thank you for that!