Judee Sill

Its really great - there is loads of brilliant archive chat with Judee, some brilliant footage , plenty of scurrilous gossip. they do the annoying animation thing but it is based on her own illustrations so they get away with it. It packs a real emotional wallop. Think its the only time i have ever cried in a cinema.

Just finished watching. Animations, "handless" handwriting, relevant talking heads—all the music doc tropes of the last howevermany years—but I found it a pretty rich experience because the details of Judee's story were all kind of a blur in my mind, having read or picked up some things here and there over the years. It was nice to have it all in one place, crafted with love.

I had learned most of the major points of her biography from the 2021 Rolling Stone article, so I knew this would be a tough watch in some ways. This filled in some missing detail, and the bits of footage were great to see, as well as the extensive written quotations (whether just from letters or if there was also a diary, it wasn't clear to me). Definitely worth a watch.

i feel like there used to be a personal site belonging to a childhood neighbour of judee sill where she recounted stories from when they hitchhiked together but i'm starting to wonder if i invented it.

I've never heard of that, but it does sound like something she might have done. Certainly not any weirder than her more well-documented youthful hijinx like armed robbery.

yah it was v sweet iirc and jarred with the 'troubled' version of her omnipresent in descriptions you read

this doc was v sad, i knew 90% of the fucked up shit but the gaps turned out to be very dark. some boilerplate talking head crap and rote animation to fill in narrative gaps but overall better than vast majority of rock doc imo. they kind of glossed over how such a woman with a hardscrabble upbringing could have such a great musical education to do the notation/arranging that she did but then they mentioned the well-to-do stepdad(?) who was also an abuser maybe(?) who was affluent and provided music lessons. Weirdly I ordered a Heart Food vinyl reissue just before I saw this, sounds so great. They had a good radio interview with her to intersperse within the doc but there were (AI?) fake voiceovers too, right - I get confused about what is "kosher" in docs these days?

I don't think it was AI. There was a voice actor reading her diary stuff. Whoever it was did a pretty good job of imitating her voice.