“I could see that I was gonna have to write songs that were about those things,” she told Rolling Stone. “I came to some important inner realizations, tryin’ to make the laws of nature work for me instead of against me. I felt instinctively that it was my duty to throw myself into it all the way, so I did.”

She sold one of her songs, “Lady-O,” to the rock band the Turtles, which released it as a single; it made it onto the Billboard pop chart in 1969. She would record the song for her first album two years later.

It was around this time that David Geffen was starting his own label and looking for talent.

“She sent me the demo and a letter,” Geffen said in a phone interview. “It was unlike any letter, about prison, being a heroin addict, so I called her up, and she came up to see me, and she played me some of her demos.”

Her voice was strong, with a Southern California drawl, her intonation rising and falling on every word within a phrase.

“She was a unique songwriter, a wonderful singer, and had an unusual tale to tell about herself,” Geffen said.

He signed her in 1971, and later that year she released her first album, called simply “Judee Sill.”

From the first song, “Crayon Angels,” to the last, “Abracadabra,” her lyrics addressed the metaphysical. One song, “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” had its seeds in a devastating breakup with a fellow songwriter. Afterward, as a salve, Sill read Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1952 novel, “The Last Temptation of Christ.”