A Bandit And A Heartbreaker

Judee Sill “Jesus Was A Cross Maker”

“Jesus Was A Cross Maker” is an incredibly elegant bit of songwriting, with a gorgeous melody that rolls out gently over an arrangement that borrows from folk, gospel, and classical music without neatly fitting into any of those categories. The song has been covered many times over, and it’s funny to me how the most notable versions I’ve heard have trouble capturing the simple grace of Judee Sill’s original – Cass Elliot, The Hollies, and Warren Zevon all mess with the structure and lightly mangle the melody to highlight their particular vocal styles, while Frida Hyvönen‘s is faithful to the melody but pushes into a softer, sentimental tone that sacrifices the sober, clear-eyed quality that makes the Sill recordings so compelling.

There’s a lot of emotion in the song, but it’s presented in hindsight, with Sill reflecting on depression and an abusive relationship. The key feeling here is regret, but it’s more about a larger self-destructive tendency than anything in particular – she seems to be putting less blame on this guy, and more on herself for being so easily seduced. The “Jesus was a cross maker” line is brilliant, particularly in how she draws a comparison from this irony to her complicity in her own misery. Was Christ aware that he was building the very thing that would be used to execute him? Did it ever cross his mind that he could end up on one of these things as he made them? Sill has said that she wrote this song while entertaining thoughts of suicide, and died of a drug overdose eight years later. She seemed very aware of the cross she was making for herself.

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