An intimate portrait of a one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter from 1970s Los Angeles, the documentary charts the life of Judee Sill from a troubled adolescence that included armed robbery and prison through her meteoric rise in the music world and tragic early death. In just over two years, Judee went from living in a car to a deal with Asylum Records and the cover of Rolling Stone. As told by Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, David Geffen, and JD Souther -- along with Judee herself -- the film explores Judee’s unique musical style and the inspiring recent rediscovery of her singular music by a new generation of musicians including Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek of Big Thief, Shawn Colvin and Weyes Blood.
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MusicTranscript
00:00 There are quite a few stories about your background.
00:04 Um, okay. Would you like some of the wilder ones?
00:07 [Music]
00:11 Geffen said, "You gotta go see this girl, Judy Sewell."
00:14 I said, "What's she like?" And he said, "She's like nobody else."
00:17 She was the first artist signed to Asylum Records, and Geffen had tremendous belief in her.
00:22 He said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "I wanted to be the greatest living songwriter in the world."
00:26 I heard the song, and it was very intriguing, because I thought it could be a hit.
00:31 We liked each other's songs. You know, like, I love Jackson's songs that he wrote, and I love JD's songs.
00:35 But everybody seemed to think that Judy had something special.
00:38 When I met her, she told me she was a heroin addict, that she'd been a prostitute, and that she'd been in jail.
00:43 So, that's a lot of information.
00:45 She had pointed the gun at the guy and said, "Okay, Mother Sticker, this is a fuck-up."
00:50 I knew that I had to clean up or else go back to jail. So I got a tattoo on my arm to remind me forever.
00:55 And then I started formulating exactly what my mission would be.
00:58 This is "The Kiss" by Judy Sill.
01:01 I had never heard a song about that. It just felt like a bottomless well.
01:06 Love rising from the mist
01:14 Promise me this and only this
01:21 Holy
01:23 It's like a level of desperation and vulnerability that totally transcends a lot of the real personal songwriting that was going on at the time.
01:29 There just wasn't and won't be anybody that writes like that.
01:32 I've never heard anything that's made me go, "Oh, that sounds like Judy Sill."
01:36 I want to inspire people and uplift them without them knowing it.
01:40 That's what I want to do.
01:42 "The Kiss" is available on iTunes, Apple Music, and Spotify.