Broken wings
A tender, fun and sad documentary explores the wild life of an astonishing ’70s talent.
By Grayson Haver Currin.
Heavenly being: Lost Angel is an unapologetic love letter to the music of Judee Sill.
Greenwich Entertainment (2)
Lost Angel: The Genius Of Judee Sill
★★★★
Dir. Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. C/S
AT THE START of the 1970s, Los Angeles songwriter Judee Sill made two of that fertile scene’s most affecting and poignant albums, her self-titled debut and Heart Food setting the vagaries of love and the mysteries of God to a baroque interpretation of folk rock. Sill, after all, was the first person David Geffen signed to Asylum. But her idiosyncratic considerations of the cosmos never turned mainstream, with modest sales compounded by her reluctance to play industry games or adulterate her vision. Impoverished and nearly anonymous, Sill overdosed in 1979 at the age of 35, her life a black box of questions for the generations that steadily discovered her music’s power and charm over the next half-century. Were those stories about her early days – hard drugs, bank robberies, desperate measures – real? How did she become relegated to a historical footnote? And where did she go after she made Heart Food?