Judee Sill spent much of her adolescence in the Oakland area[4] Her father, Milford "Bun" Sill, an importer of exotic animals for use in films, owned a bar, which is where Sill spent a lot of her childhood and learnt to play the piano[4] When her father died of pneumonia in 1952, her mother moved Judee and her brother Dennis to Los Angeles, where the former Mrs Sill took up and married Tom and Jerry animator Kenneth Muse[4] in 1952 After her mother died in 1963, Judee bounced around from high school to high school Her experimentation with drugs led her to fall in with a thief She managed a few successful liquor store heists before being caught at a gas station and sent to a reform school in Ventura[4] After doing a brief stint in reform school (where a spell as a church organist taught her many of the "gospel licks" that would later surface in her music), Judee attempted a return to collegiate studies and took a job working long hours in a piano bar She started doing LSD and promptly moved in with an acid dealer and began exploring some of the psychedelic depths that would inform her later lyrical leanings She and a friend rented a house from the dealer and formed a jazz trio with a third girl[4] On 27 April 1966, Sill married pianist Robert Maurice "Bob" Harris in Clark County, Nevada[5] Within months both had succumbed to crippling heroin addictions and made their way as musicians in Vegas for a time When she moved back to California, she resorted to prostitution for a spell to support her massive habit A string of narcotics and forgery offenses sent her to jail When she got out, she immediately set to work as a song composer[4] Sill encountered Graham Nash and David Crosby and toured with them for a time as their opening act After some initial interest from Atlantic Records[6] David Geffen offered her a contract with his new Asylum label She sold her song "Lady-O" to the Turtles She was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone Bob Harris worked on her first album and was also involved with the Turtles[6] Graham Nash produced the first single for her first album, "Jesus was a Cross Maker", which was released to radio on October 1, 1971 The album Judee Sill soon followed in October 1971 The album featured Sill's voice in multiple overdubs, often in a four-part chorale or fugue She worked with engineer Henry Lewy Sill recorded her second and last album, Heart Food Sill took over orchestrating and arranging Heart Food which included "The Donor" Following a series of car accidents and failed surgery to rectify a painful back injury,[7] Sill struggled with drug addiction and dropped out of the music scene, finally dying of a drug overdose, or "acute cocaine and codeine intoxication," on November 23, 1979, at her apartment on Morrison Street in North Hollywood Sill's ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean following a ceremony organised by a few close friends at the Self-Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades