IT WAS Bernie Taupin who postulated the theory that "when all hope is gone, sad songs say so much" - a hypothesis confirmed when I was choosing the soundtrack for a gathering to commemorate the life of a friend's wife who died much, much too young.
It quickly became apparent that 90 per cent of the music I treasure most oscillates between sad-eyed and threnodic. The resulting playlist was assembled from the remaining 10 per cent and sidestepped anything I judged to be inappropriate.
But there are sad songs, and then there are songs which make you wish your heart were broken so you could savour every last morsel of melancholy within them. One of my current favourites among the former is I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same by Sun Kil Moon, in which singer Mark Kozelek unfurls a blazon of regret, death, childhood memory and fumbled friendship over a cyclical acoustic guitar figure. The effect is profoundly poignant. Compared to The Kiss by Judee Sill, pictured, the song is a nursery rhyme.
Judee Sill's is a story of squandered talent on a par with, if not greater than, that of her contemporaries Sandy Denny and Janis Joplin. The fuse for her troubles was lit as a child when her mother remarried, and before her teenage years were over she had committed armed robberies, embraced LSD and served time in reform school. In her early 20s she became addicted to heroin, a habit she funded through prostitution and crime, which led to a jail term. Only once freed did she become a songwriter.
David Geffen made Sill the first signing to his Asylum Records label, where she was joined by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and Tom Waits. Two albums followed in three years but Sill, a woman of gargantuan self-belief, thought herself undervalued by Geffen and an unbridgeable rift developed.
Six years later, aged 35, Sill was found dead in her North Hollywood home, her light extinguished by a combination of cocaine and codeine, a dependency on the latter having resulted from back injuries suffered in a series of car accidents. The only surprise from the coroner was that he judged Sill's death to be suicide.
In the Radio 4 programme The Lost Genius Of Judee Sill, which you can hear on the BBC iPlayer, Andy Partridge of XTC attempts to sum up The Kiss. "I'm sorry, I can't [listen to] it," he says, turning the song off midway through. He's choking up. "It's too beautiful. It's perfect."
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