Judee Sill: Dreams Come True

A California folkie who trafficked in Bach and Rosicrucian spirituality, Judee Sill glimmered a bit in the '70s, before a heroin overdose consigned her memory to a select group of friends and record-collecting aficionados. Her story is both tragic and serene: After a fitful youth marked by drugs and prostitution, Sill settled into a musical incarnation in which she sounds unerringly at peace. Her voice was big and plain, yawping yet almost inhumanly delicate. Her guitar-playing was elaborate but breezy. She created the kind of mellow, mindful folk that gets filed alongside Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Laura Nyro; it's also the kind of music worth clearing a whole shelf for.

Sill died in the midst of making her third album, Dreams Come True, for David Geffen's epochal Los Angeles label Asylum Records. She never finished, but bootlegs of the sessions found homes in the hands of searchers. One of them, indie producer Jim O'Rourke, was tapped to mix the tracks into something like a finished work—packaged with a 68-page booklet and a bonus disc of demos, lost songs, and video footage. Sill's songs have a way of sounding like they're never entirely finished, though. That's partly due to her strange songwriting logic, which rises and falls through trilled bridges and unsettling key changes that keep everything on edge. The other part comes from the mystical yearning wound through her lyrics and her voice, which evokes flaxen threads embroidered on the robes of post-hippies wandering with bare feet and heads in the clouds. In "That's The Spirit," Sill sings over a restless mix of piano, guitar, and drums, reconciling her fate "To sleep enraptured, waking up captured / Chills me to the bone."

That's typical of an album on which Sill sounds like she's hardly at home on Earth, and consumed by resurrection (not to mention Resurrection). Songs like "I'm Over," "The Apocalypse Express," and "The Living End" point eerily toward her end, but Sill's darkness sounds more curious than morose. In "The Last Resort," she lays her voice over glowing piano, singing wistfully of eternal hope and reminding herself that "Every way beauty is slain, it's seen."