Always Chasing the Sun (The Tragic and Transcendent Genius of Judee Sill)

Judee Sill wrote forty perfect songs. She was a critical darling and remains a cult favorite. This is her story.

Judee Sill was signed as the first artist on David Geffen's Asylum Records, wrote songs radio couldn't classify, and died alone from a 1979 overdose before most of the world knew her name.

In Always Chasing the Sun: The Life and Legacy of Judee Sill, music journalist Brian Atkinson assembles an oral history of one of the most singular and least-known songwriters of the Laurel Canyon era, built from new interviews with the musicians who knew her work best. Structured around her small but dense catalog — the albums Judee Sill and Heart Food, plus the posthumous Dreams Come True — the book moves song by song through Sill's writing, each broken into lyric and music sections to accommodate the depth of analysis her songs demand. Interviewees include Shawn Colvin, Andy Partridge, and JD Souther, alongside dozens of songwriters, musicians, and industry figures who place Sill's fusion of Bach, gospel, and country-western songcraft in the context of the scene around her — Graham Nash, Glenn Frey, Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell all pass through her story.

Sill wrote and recorded only forty songs and many demos before her death at thirty-five, yet the interviews collected here describe a songwriter operating on a different plane than her more commercially successful Laurel Canyon peers — a "librarian plain" woman, as Andy Partridge puts it, whose orchestral, theologically strange love songs never had a chance in a marketplace built for Carole King or Carly Simon. Drawing on research and archival access from Sill's niece Donna Disparti and a wide network of scholars and collectors, Atkinson builds the first substantial account of a career that ended in obscurity and addiction but has spent the decades since gathering the kind of devoted, expert admiration usually reserved for composers, not pop songwriters.

For readers of Barney Hoskyns' Laurel Canyon histories and anyone who has ever fallen down a "Jesus Was a Crossmaker" rabbit hole at 2 a.m., Always Chasing the Sun finally gives Judee Sill the reckoning and recognition she deserves.