Julee Cruise was an American singer and actress, known for her collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and film director David Lynch in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1985, Badalamenti was composing the score for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, as well as serving as the vocal coach for the film’s star, Isabella Rossellini. When it proved prohibitively expensive to obtain rights to use the Mortal Coil song ‘Song of the Siren’, it was suggested that Badalamenti compose a pop song in the same style, with lyrics written by Lynch. Because the song required a vocalist with a haunting, ethereal voice, Badalamenti recommended Cruise, who had sung in a New York theater workshop Badalamenti had produced. The result of their initial collaboration was “Mysteries of Love”, which figures prominently in Blue Velvet‘s closing scenes and gained a cult following.
Badalamenti and Lynch went on to write and produce additional songs for Cruise, most of which were featured in her debut album, Floating into the Night (1989). The album was released in September 1989, and charted on Billboard the following year. It also provided musical material for Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No.1, in which Cruise performed while “floating” from a harness dozens of feet above a stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The second, more significant project was the soundtrack to Lynch’s Twin Peaks, for which Badalamenti composed the original score. The song “Falling”, which became the orchestral theme for the television series, caused a minor sensation, winning a Grammy at the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards in 1991 for Best Pop Instrumental. The Twin Peaks soundtrack, featuring Cruise on the songs “Into the Night” and “The Nightingale” as well as on the vocal version of “Falling”, eventually went gold (500,000+ copies) in the U.S., a rare feat for a television soundtrack.
Cruise made a number of appearances on Twin Peaks as a singer at a local bar, and was prominently featured in both the show’s landmark pilot episode and the episode where Laura Palmer’s murderer is revealed, as well as in 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”, the second single from Floating into the Night, was released in 1990 and was also featured in an episode of Twin Peaks along with “The World Spins”; in the episode, several of the main female characters are shown lip-synching to “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”.
The following year, Cruise recorded a Lynch- and Badalamenti-produced cover of the Elvis Presley song “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears” for the soundtrack of Wim Wenders Until the End of the World. Afterward, Cruise maintained a relatively low profile until her second album, The Voice of Love, was released in 1993. Cruise’s long-delayed third album, The Aret of Being a Girl, was released in 2002. This was the first of her albums for which Badalamenti and Lynch did not produce or write any of the music for, with music and lyrics for each of the songs being written by Cruise herself (with the exception of an updated version of the single “Falling”). In 2011, Cruise released her fourth album My Secret Life. The album was a collaboration with DJ Dmitry and contained a cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” and a cover (technically) of Hydbrid’s “Fatal Beating” called “A Fatal Beating”.
