After fighting writer’s block for four years, Drive-By Truckers singer/guitarist Mike Cooley is now back to work. English Oceans (ATO) is Cooley’s return to full-on songwriting—splitting the tracklist right down the middle after letting bandmate Patterson Hood steer the ship for the two albums prior—and is a return to form for the group as a whole. While DBT has never been a band to slack on the road or in the studio, English Oceans has the vigor and exuberance that made it one of America’s best rock groups. Cooley, Hood, bassist Matt Patton and multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Drive-By Truckers feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0feFedDW_iQ
Gonzalez: I first heard Judee Sill‘s sublime song in a radio interview with Jim O’ Rourke, and his opinion always got my attention. A previous interview with the multi-instrumentalist/producer had turned me on to John Fahey, and he had once called Wings’ “Let ‘Em In” (one of the first songs I remember hearing as a child) an “underacknowledged minimalist masterpiece.” I knew I had to find the album that “The Kiss” was on.
Sill’s story was a sad and turbulent one. Her parents died when she was young, and she learned to play Bach on the organ at a reform school after being busted for a liquor store heist. She sold a song to the Turtles and became David Geffen’s first signing to Asylum Records.
She gets lumped in with Joni Mitchell and other Laurel Canyon ladies, but her songs are intricately arranged epics, often having Christian and/or occult themes lyrically and often sporting Sill’s amazing orchestral arrangements.
“The Kiss,” the crown jewel of 1973 album Heart Food, is a case in point. It slowly builds from just a piano figure and her beautifully double-tracked, vibrato-free voice, adding soaring strings in the B section, and then at 2:35, the french horns enter, beginning with a simple descending line, then breaking off into chill inducing counterpoint.
“Love, rising from the mists/Promise me this, and only this/Holy breath touching me like a wind song/Sweet communion of a kiss.”
Delivered the wrong way, that line could be a little much. But Sill’s phrasing of the gauzy melody—singing in the aural equivalent of slo-mo, with the elegant descending bass line underneath and the absolute conviction in her voice—makes “The Kiss” a transcendent, almost religious experience.
