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Judee Sill, "Heart Food"
Released in 1972, Judee Sill's second album is very much in the same mold as her debut. However, for this, Sill took greater control over the production and orchestral arrangements as David Geffen granting her complete artistic control. The result is an album full of arrangements that are a closer match with her cosmic lyrics—celestial vocal harmonies, baroque horns and church organ, shades of gospel music and the ever-present vocal multitracking that is Judee's trademark.
More occult and religious imagery again, with a new thread of directness and honesty only hinted at in her first album: "I've been looking for someone/Who sells truth by the pound/Then I saw the dealer and his friend arrive/But their gifts looked grim/Now I'm tired of hanging on...Beautiful pearl, o when will you reappear?" The yearning for spiritual cleansing and reawakening is palpable throughout Heart Food, which despite its Chicken Soup for the Soul title, is nothing less than a cry to heaven from the darkest depths of hell. It's an absolutely remarkable album, and one that, if there were any justice in the world, would be mentioned at least as often as critically-acclaimed mediocrities like Carole King's Tapestry or Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. In "The Phoenix," Judee prays for salvation and rebirth in the midst of an eschatological nightmare: "On phosphorous wings the phoenix floated/The fires froze and the sea was hushed/And when I tried to speak, the sun imploded/And the ware will wait in my guts/Till the devil bites the dust." I don't think I'll ever get tired of the odd paradox of these songs, with lyrics worthy of David Tibet's most apocalyptic nightmares coexisting with muted easy listening-style arrangements for guitar, piano and strings. Heart Food's finest moment comes with the final track, the seven-minute "The Donor," in which Judee Sill builds a stunning choir of layered voices singing the Kyrie Eleison, transforming the liturgical hymn into a haunting, ritualistic call for mercy from a cruel and arbitrary God. After a long silence, the album oddly concludes with a brief Irish jig. Heart Food was Judee's swan song to the world, as the album again failed to ignite the interest of the public, and she dropped out of society, disappearing into an underworld of drugs and prostitution, only resurfacing with the news of her death from a heroin overdose in 1979.
