Judith Hill has lived there long enough to know that “she’s so Hollywood” is not usually a compliment. She was born there, to musician parents who took her to parties where Little Richard or Billy Preston would leap up and tickle the ivories without fuss or fanfare.
“Sometimes you feel you have to apologise because it can be a pretentious place. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, all that,” says the singer-composer preparing to headline her first Australian show for the Sydney Festival.
“I wanted to take the idea of Hollywood and flip it on its head, almost personify it as a place that everyone has all these expectations for, that sort of lets you down.”
Hence the title of her latest album, Baby, I’m Hollywood! Exclamation mark and all, “It was symbolic of where my life has been,” she says. “I’ve had so many chapters; people coming in and out of my life, so I was basically just owning that story and celebrating these chapters, but also acknowledging that it’s been a bit unstable.”
Judith Hill wants to reclaim her story, and understand her own identity.Credit:
Some of the people she refers to, you’ve heard of. In the 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, which shines a light on great backing singers labouring in the shadows of fame, Hill is the young singer Michael Jackson handpicked for an intimate duet in his blockbuster show-that-never-was, This Is It!
There’s footage of Hill rehearsing with Jackson just before his death: one of many instances in the film where big breaks turn to broken dreams. She’d already studied composition at college, been a contender on The Voice and toured with Stevie Wonder (including Sydney’s Star City in 2011) but in 2009, a call from the King of Pop was beyond her most Hollywood expectations.
“With Michael, I just always remember how his music made me feel,” she says. “Clearly, his intention was to bring power and hope and inspiration to the music, and he certainly did. His music [had] this warfare mentality… Everything from Beat It to Man In the Mirror, all of it is about overcoming forces of darkness.
“For me, it’s almost like an allegory to life. It’s so symbolic. That’s what I take away when I think about Michael. Today, I don’t hear that kind of intention in music. He was one of the very few people that did that.”
She doesn’t pretend they were besties. “I just saw him at rehearsals, so I had no way of knowing what he was going through personally,” she says of Jackson’s fraught final days of failing health and addiction compounded by ongoing trials by media.
