Songs of Rapture and Redemption: Rarities & Live

There are two contradictory ways to look at Judee Sill’s life and music — and they’re both true. One is through the lens of tragedy: a misfit and a mis-shape, for all her compositional genius and uniqueness, she never escaped her troubles, never found the audience she wanted, never cut it as a scenester despite the patronage of the likes of David Geffen, The Turtles and David Crosby and Graham Nash, and died almost completely unknown. But at the same time, even the fact that she made two albums without ever compromising her ornery nature and searing mystical vision is a huge triumph. And this collection of solo performances and demos, by bringing you right up close to her, also gives the greatest sense of the certainty she had in that vision and the joy she took from it. To be a William Blake will always be a lonely path, and Sill knew that; nonetheless she took the path and relished it, pain, sacrifice and all.