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- The Retrographer, Issue 99 (February, 2 0 2 3)
The Retrographer, Issue 99 (February, 2 0 2 3)
Julian Lage, Scree, Lana Del Rey, Water From Your Eyes, Young Fathers, Indigo De Souza, Caroline Polachek, Jake Shears, The Hold Steady, Feist, Judee Sill, and more!
The Retrographer, Issue 99 (February, 2 0 2 3)
Bulletins
“The Layers”, Julian Lage (Spotify / YouTube) – The guitar virtuoso’s excellent View With A Room showed off the magic he can make with a telecaster. Now he returns to an earlier mode with the acoustic, layering latticed lines over ambling bass and drums, wandering but not lost.
“Beautiful Days”, Scree (Spotify / YouTube) – The third single from Ryan El-Solh, Carmen Rothwell, and Jason Burger is accompanied by Mahmoud Darwish’s short paean to defiance for Palestine.
“A&W”, Lana Del Rey (Spotify / YouTube) – Once Lana sang, “Calling from beyond the grave, I just wanna say, ‘Hi, Dad’”; Now she sings, “I haven't seen my mother in a long, long time.” She is far from home, lost and losing it, disappearing into an American maelstrom of trash.
“Barley”, Water From Your Eyes (Spotify / YouTube) – Loops turn and spin, like Ezekiel’s gyre, passing over one another endlessly and glinting through their convergences. Chaotic unstoppable, churning toward Babylon.
“Geronimo”, Young Fathers (Spotify / YouTube) – The song structure is heavenward. Parts may repeat or they may not, but they collectively ascend, lifting from the earth over twinkling piano, then mounting synths, then a chorale that gains density before being called - “get up!” - to something higher.
“Younger & Dumber”, Indigo De Souza (Spotify / YouTube) – De Souza could be onstage in front of tens of thousands, or alone in a bare room, her belongings already moved out. Either way, her pain and deliverance fills the space she’s in, even though she “gets so tired of filling the space all around me.”
“Billions”, Caroline Polachek (Spotify / YouTube) – The epic imminence of this song, the immaculate clarity of Polachek’s voice, and the immensity of the arrangement, swelling high above the song like ozone, lay the perfect foundation for its stunning closing coda, which fades sounding like it could go on forever.
“Too Much Music”, Jake Shears (Spotify / YouTube) – The former face of Scissor Sisters has lost precisely none of his mastery of and delight for disco. Every drop of Cerrone and Donna Summer pulse in his veins. His clarion call begins a new chapter of a career that has always found the joy in his medium.
“Sideways Skull”, The Hold Steady (Spotify / YouTube) – Craig Finn’s palette is defined and he need not deviate to conjure greatness: Beers, cigarettes, dangerous lovers, hard drugs, bleary mornings, Franz Nicolay’s twinkling keys, Tad Kubler’s screaming leads, rock and roll.
One Album for February, 2 0 2 3
Opening her eponymous debut album, Judee Sill sings:
Crayon angel songs are slightly out of tune
But I'm sure I'm not to blame
Nothing's happened, but I think it will soon
So I sit here waiting for God and a train
To the astral plane
Sill’s world is laden with Christian imagery, suffused with science fiction, smeared by psychedelia, shadowed by the end-times, and ultimately marked with a benediction of forgiveness. As she explained:
“Most of my songs, I always try to write them to try to make people feel better. But I thought one day when I was real depressed - you know when you’re real depressed, you see everything comes to nothing - I thought, maybe I ought to take a different approach and write a song, instead of directed at people, that would somehow musically induce God into giving us all a break. Cause I was getting a little fed up at this point. Since that time I decided that I shouldn’t get any more breaks because I already squandered them in weird places.”
The weird places Sill refers to are her father’s dive bar, Bud’s, where she learned piano as a child; the violent rooms that her mother and stepfather, Tom and Jerry animator Kenneth Muse, overturned after they married; the liquor stores she robbed a teen; the reform school she was sent to set her straight; the streets she walked as a prostitute in her early 20s; the places on her arms where she shot heroin; the ‘55 Cadillac she slept in shifts in with four other people before finding the Turtles’ Jim Pons, who started buying and performing her songs, opening the door to a life in music that burned blindingly bright before extinguishing itself just as it had started.
Depression hadn’t always led her to enlightenment. She studied music at Valley College while a student in reformatory school, but couldn’t shake a deep sadness. Rather than seek to settle her troubled soul, she looked to someone who evaded pain by lacking the capacity to feel it. As she said:
“[O]ne day I called up this friend – the guy who ran guns to Cuba? He was extremely psychopathic, had no conscience at all. His eyes were always at half-mast, and he didn’t care about anything. I admired that in him – I thought it was an attractive quality, because he didn’t seem to feel anything, he was impervious to it all. I said, ‘Spencer, I’d like to be involved in a crime of some kind, so why don’t you fix something up and call me back.’ I was thinking along the lines of stealing tires or somethin’, but Spencer introduced me to an armed robber. The idea kind of attracted me…I don’t know. I can’t explain the hopelessness and helplessness I felt in the air, but, uh, it seemed like the thing to do, the right thing.”
At this time, after the untimely deaths of her father and, soon thereafter, her mother, the turbulent home that drove her to the street, life seemed bereft of meaning. She had no sense of right and wrong. “I was very numb. I didn’t care one way or the other,” she recalled to Rolling Stone. “That’s why I was doing those robberies, I guess – because my heart was reaching out, trying to get me to care about something.” She may have suffered from a deeper ailment. Her school’s psychologist helped her come to the understanding that, to leave, “I would have to develop a conscience. So I tried,” she remembered. “I don’t know to this day whether I was really doing it, or just faking it to get out.”
Whether Sill’s concept of morality was authentic or simply a useful ruse to help her get out of “the joint”, she possessed a shapeshifting ability to simulate a conscience as easily as she had been able to shed it in her life as a stickup artist. Much of the language that she learned to express her newfound piety came from her time as the school’s church organist. “I learned a lot of gospel lyrics, and that was really good for me.”
Mastering a language of morality helped secure an early release from reformatory school, but Sill’s dissociation had only begun. Working in a piano bar she drank and constantly took uppers, then met an acid dealer and tripped every day for months on end. She was lost in the world. Things got even worse when she met Bob Harris, who would become her husband and the man who got her addicted to heroin. Soon she got into prostitution to feed her habit and could not beat it until an overdose nearly killed her. A cold turkey stint in a cell gave her two gifts: an opening to sobriety, and a sudden dream to become a songwriter.
“I got into reading real deep books, books about religion and the occult. And I could see that I was gonna have to write songs that were about those things, you know? At first, I didn’t have the psychic defenses to put it all in the right places, but I felt that if I kept going in that direction as hard as I could, it might all work out. And I came to some important inner realizations, trying to make the laws of nature work for me instead of against me. I felt instinctively that it was my duty to throw myself into it all the way, so I did.”
One day she drew a huge bird on a lover’s wall and jokingly told him that if he rubbed its beak and made a wish, it would come true. Later on, alone in the apartment, she fell under her own spell and wished to become the world’s best songwriter. Her life changed.
Sill had lived many lives, and more than her 27 years when Judee Sill came out in 1971. The songs in this debut do seem blessed by the talismanic beak of a magical cartoon bird. The depths of her despair were now reflected in impossible highs. The universe reveals classical architecture in her music: Everything means something. She invokes Bach’s divine composition, finds Jesus in space, stages the eternal battle between God and the devil, and leaves no room for the unexplainable, only the ineffable. “She had a vision for herself as a homo superior (that’s the word she used to use),” an old lover remembered. “‘the first inclination of the next evolution of the human race.’”
Judee Sill’s lyrics imply an imagination that can be disorientingly disinterested in commonly-experienced reality. Her lyrics commonly reach the firmament: Her stories are full of “moon mirage”, “silver filigree”, and “mercury ripples of sky.” They are never firmly in the temporal plane. She can sneak up on the listener. Take “Ridge Rider”, which begins as a clopping tale of a cowboy, musically torn from Howdy Doody and at first as sweetly symbolic as a Sunday School teacher’s homily. But to open the second verse, Sill’s imagination slides easily into the great beyond: “He comes from under the cryptosphere / where the great sadness begins.” It’s the moment that comes, sooner or later, in all of her songs, when the listener realizes that Sill may not be talking about what she seemed to be, but something stranger and more profound. A spiritual existence that’s both omnipresent and unstable when exposed to the air; Truths we somehow share yet can’t quite say without sounding a little insane.
Sill sounds the most enlightened when she sees the universe in a sort of holy horology, every piece apparent, moving logically and intentionally with the others. But her experience with God could sometimes seem disturbing and confusing when describing the moments where, as she had put it, “everything comes to nothing”. As she sang, “Phony prophets stole the only light I knew, and the darkness softly screamed / Holy visions disappeared from my view, but the angels came back and laugh in my dreams, I wonder what it means.” She describes, on “The Lamb Ran Away With the Crown”, an epic battle with her own darkness rendered as the final battle between God and Satan: “Once a demon lived in my brow, I screamed and wailed and I cursed out loud, and I sailed through the clouds on ten crested cardinals to guard my battleground.” And then, in a moment of profound emotional dissonance, “But I laughed so hard I cried and the lamb ran away with the crown.” Her use of Christian metaphor compounds upon itself to scramble its frame of reference: Is this a parable for Jesus, a description of a panic attack, or a gorgeous collage of references from her days as the reformatory organist? Nothing is revealed.
She described her music as “country cult baroque,” and her work is a thrill in no small part because she experiences the supernatural in everything. But her particular experience of the supernatural is not the same as the psychedelia in vogue at the time. She was, to use the term of the time, a “Jesus freak”, an appellation that found significance starting in the 1960s with mainstream smashes like the musical Hair. Sill, for her part, proselytized a theology that appeared to absorb and reconcile mankind’s sudden ascendance to the stars. She, like Larry Norman after her, felt the answer to the question of “are we alone in the universe?” was a question not just about space travel or UFOs, but about God and eschatology. Aliens not only exist, according to her, but are the horsemen of the apocalypse. Her ride to the astral plane is not simply about getting to heaven, but to the heavens. Borrowing the name of the 1935 movie, “The Phantom Cowboy”, another Jesus, “sprints across the spatial streams”, and is “heading for a star that's not very far.” “Enchanted Sky Machines” pictures the rapture as alien abductions, an end-time she can’t wait to witness.
But the mistake would be to think Sill is simply a beautifully incoherent preacher lady. Just as often as she sought to describe her unknowable God, she displayed gimlet-eyed perspicacity to know the men in her midst, borrowing the words of the bible to cut them to the bone. On her breakup with songwriter J.D. Souther, who left her to date Linda Rondstadt, she found his deception in Romans of the bible:
“To console myself, I was reading a book by my favorite author, Nikos Kazantzakis, called The Last Temptation of Christ. In it, Jesus is portrayed as a cross-maker – he’s working as a carpenter, and they need a lot of crosses because the Roman soldiers are killing off all the political prisoners. And that’s where I got the idea for my song, ‘Jesus Was a Cross-maker.’ I really liked that guy who’d entered into my heart, you know, but he wasn’t fair to me romantically.”
“It saved me, this song,” she once said, choosing the ambiguity of the word saved carefully. “It was writing this song or suicide.”
“The Archetypal Man” describes the yearlong affair she had with a man named David, the lawyer who helped get her out of jail and into the treatment program which saved her life. She idolized him when he was her savior and she was “listening to his advice”, but as her lover he suddenly “looks like everyone I’ve ever known.” Her turn of phrase is exquisite: She describes the escapades of this man, who would sneak away from his wife and young family to be with her, as a “moon mirage”. “I wrote it about an ex-boy friend, a lawyer,” she explained, “who was dispassionate in every way except when he was being dishonest. Then he would show fervent passion.” “Through his veins flow a fool’s gold flood,” she sings. “But through the rose in his hand flows blood.” Just as exquisite is her gorgeous interpolation of Bach, sung acapella, rendering the foibles of the fallen in an otherworldly beauty.
Sill knew that the magic in her music wasn’t about the stories of the bible, or her autobiography. The incantation of her music endeavored to spellbind the highest power of them all; to, as she said, “musically induce God into giving us all a break.” From the cruel, faceless God of the Old Testament who tormented Job and instructed Abraham to kill Isaac, to the heroic God of the New Testament who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life – from that God, Sill demanded the end to suffering. From the enchanted beak of a cartoon bird, she asked to be granted just one wish: Immanentize the eschaton.
There’s a moment when it feels like she just might do it. On “Lopin’ Along Thru the Cosmos”, Sill sheds her vestments and touches, just briefly, universal truth. She realizes, almost in an act of apostasy, that the very idea of God is an abstraction that distracts from the blessed brevity of life. As she sings it, “I'm hoping so hard for a kiss from God, I missed the sweet love of the air.” She realizes that a lifelong fixation on reaching heaven obstructs sacrosanct life. As she sings it, “I'm looking so hard for a place to land, I almost forgot how to fly.” Her righteousness yields for simple grace as she leaves to a greater absolution, a new psalm of deliverance: “I'll tell you a secret I've never revealed: However we are is okay.”
Sill released another album, Heart Food, possessing its own wonders, many of which were intended for this first album. But as they had before, hard times lay ahead. A series of car wrecks, an injury from an abusive boyfriend, and an unsuccessful back surgery put her back onto pain pills. Her pain management drove her back into drug addiction, and she died of overdose at 35 in 1979 in such obscurity that no obituary was published. Her ashes were spread in the Pacific by the Self-Realization Fellowship following a funeral with 50 friends, and to dust she returned.
The middle stanza to “Crayon Angels” concerns the poisons of worldly desires:
Magic rings I made have turned my finger green,
And my mystic roses died
Guess reality is not as it seems
So I sit here hoping for truth, and a ride
To the other side
The temporal plane was cursed for Judee Sill: Her family frayed and descended into turmoil. Earthly temptations turned into agony. Lovers became bandits and heartbreakers. But each time she touched the spirit, she transcended. She could be the architect of her ascendance and her fall, swayed by darkness and light. But Jesus, too, was a crossmaker.
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