Wild Life, Brilliant Talent: Genius Of Singer-Songwriter Judee Sill Honored In Documentary ‘Lost Angel’
05.05.2024 - 19:53
/ deadline.com
Singer-songwriter Judee Sill packed a lot of living into her 35 years, much of it hard. Drugs, reform school, losing her father when she was just 8. Of her mother she said, “She was mean on top of being dumb.”
In her late teens, in the early 1960s, she got involved with a bad hombre in Southern California and they pulled off a few armed robberies. In one incident, she reportedly told a guy behind a liquor store counter, “Okay, mother sticker, this is a fuck up!” Humor she did not lack.
As a child Sill learned piano at an upright in a saloon owned by her dad. She mastered other instruments, including bass and guitar. In juvenile hall – where she was sent after an arrest for forging checks – she played the organ. Somehow, through cracks in the unpolished concrete of a difficult youth, a flowering 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 troubled times of a performer who almost, but never quite, gained star status. The film from Greenwich Entertainment, directed by Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom, appeared in theaters last month.
“It took about 10 years to make,” Brown said at a recent Q&A in Los Angeles. He discovered Sill’s music long after her death in 1979 from a drug overdose. “When YouTube started, the Old Grey Whistle Test version of Judy performing ‘The Kiss’ appeared and it had a very strong effect on me,” he noted, “and I figured it would also have on Brian and I showed to him maybe a year afterwards, and it did.”
The documentary retraces Sill’s turbulent upbringing in Northern and Southern California and what