Songs for broken hearts, no. 21

Thinking about David Ackles yesterday, my mind turned to Judee Sill, who, like Ackles, seemed to have too many things working against her to ever become a huge star. There's her weird accent, for one, which is hard to pin down. The word that comes to mind is 'flat', with a distinctly old-California timbre. Then there's the songs that are lovely but were never quite poppy enough to dominate the airwaves. Throw in her lack of physical appeal, along with the the troubled, self-destructive life she led, and the only conclusion you can come to is that it just wasn't meant to be for poor Judee Sill. She grew up in Studio City and, in spite of running away from home as a young teenager and becoming a street junkie - apparently robbing liquor stores and turning tricks to feed her habit - she had incredible talent and her debut album was the first to come out on David Geffen's Asylum label in 1972. But the record had the misfortune of being released directly in front of debuts from the Eagles and Jackson Browne, and the house hippies at Asylum spent most of their energy promoting these much more marketable talents. Sill got lost in the shuffle and never really recovered, garnering only cult status among a relatively small group of devotees. She died alone of an overdose in 1979, six years after her second and last complete album, Heart Food, appeared and just as quickly disappeared in record shops. Tonight's offering is from her eponymous first album and is about her ill-fated relationship with J.D. Souther. He's a bandit and a heartbreaker, but jesus was a crossmaker... I'm not gonna lie to you and say that I reach for Judee Sill with any kind of regularity, but she does heartbreak with the best of 'em...