hen Judee Sill died of a drug overdose in 1979 at the age of 35, no obituary was published. Many of her earliest friends in the music business only learned of her death when a CD collection of her unreleased songs hit the market more than 25 years later. Listening to Intervention Records masterly vinyl reissue of Sill’s first two albums serves to underscore how much she accomplished in her short, creative life.

Sill is most famous for being the first artist media mogul David Geffen signed to his new Asylum record label in 1971. Copies of that eponymous debut LP quickly garnered praise from movers and shakers in the Laurel Canyon folk-rock scene. Sill’s intricate yet low-key music falls somewhere between the cynical melancholy of Joni Mitchell and the classically influenced folk of Judy Collins.

While the only song from Sill’s first album to get any radio play was "Jesus Was a Cross Maker," produced by one of her biggest fans, Graham Nash, the album itself inspired a host of confessional folk musicians and became a deep influence for the likes of Shawn Colvin, Andy Partridge and Liz Phair (whose voice sounds remarkably like Sill’s). Original vinyl pressings of the debut album and its follow-up, Heart Food, have been collector's items among music nerds for years.

I have a near-mint copy of Sill’s debut, so I was eager to assess how successfully Intervention Records managed this project. I’ve seen and heard my share of good reissues, but nothing prepared me for the package that arrived. Label founder Shane Buettner works meticulously with Stoughton Printing in California for all jacket art, and he clearly understands the concept of fetish objects. When I opened up the first album’s luxuriously glossy gatefold at our kitchen table, my wife asked, "Ooh! Can I hold it?" Both albums, but especially Heart Food, are the very definition of bespoke packaging. You’ll want to browse and admire these beautiful albums whenever you play them.

How does the sound stack up? Intervention’s 45rpm reissue of Sill’s debut is a stunning achievement. Only a few people like Buettner know what the actual master tape sounds like, but I’d wager that these LPs are as close as the rest of us will ever get to hearing it. The utter clarity of Sill’s voice and rich warm, acoustic glow of her debut album are revealed in a way that remind me of the restoration of a painting: I suddenly realized that the art is even better than I thought it was.

One example of the difference careful restoration makes is how thin, toy-like and warbly Sill’s acoustic guitar fingerpicking sounds on the original albums and how much more those passages sound as if they are coming from a resonant steel-stringed dreadnought on the reissues. Another measure of quality is how richly layered Sill’s contrapuntal multi-tracked vocals sound on the reissues, as opposed to the more homogenized, sometimes murky quality of the originals.

Of course a good restoration can also reveal flaws. Sill took a more prominent role in the production of Heart Food, and this remaster underscores that something also changed in the production chain after her first album. On most of the cuts, Sill’s overdubs sound a bit shrill and brittle in places, something that never occurred on the debut. That said, the lushness of Sill’s string orchestrations and the enormous soundstage of the second album are given more room to breathe on the Intervention reissue. The improved dynamics on cuts like "There’s a Rugged Road" and "The Phoenix" lend new force to these strong compositions.