Julee Cruise

Julee Cruise is the musical voice of the TV series “Twin Peaks” (1990-2017) and, by extension, of the cinema of David Lynch. The architect behind the sonic construction of the Lynchian imagination is composer Angelo Badalamenti, with whom Cruise had first worked in theatre in New York. A classically trained French horn player and skilled trumpeter, the Iowa-born singer began collaborating with the director and Badalamenti in 1985 on “Blue Velvet”, tasked with creating a song that sounded like This Mortal Coil covering Tim Buckley (“Song To A Siren”, specifically), but both are indelibly tied to the transmedia masterpiece “Twin Peaks”, whose music contributes exemplarily to the show's representational and dramaturgical fabric, and to the film connected to it, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992). Cruise doesn't merely appear as an off-screen voice on the soundtrack: from the very first episode she is woven into the diegesis itself, becoming both a tangible and an intangible element of the symbolic universe of “Twin Peaks”, somewhere between soap opera and crime story, and she returns in the third series produced twenty-six years later.

Cruise's recording debut thus consists of five tracks made for the original “Twin Peaks” soundtrack – three of which were included on the official soundtrack – alongside tracks drawn from “Blue Velvet” and “Industrial Symphony No. 1” (1990). The music was composed by Badalamenti and the lyrics written by Lynch, while the cover art, created by the director himself, ushers us into the jazz-tinged dream/nightmare-pop that the singer would come to embody, epitomized by the track “I Remember”. Years later we'd find ourselves revisiting this image while watching the documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life” (2017) by Rick Barnes, hearing the director recall a disturbing vision from a hot summer night in his childhood in Spokane, Washington: a naked woman emerging from the darkness along the railway tracks of the train station.

Images also guide the choice of words in the lyrics, themselves symbols and keys to understanding the whole of David Lynch's cinema, first and foremost “Floating” and “Falling” – the two tracks that open the album – hovering between falling, falling in love, and losing oneself. Cruise's voice is ethereal and reverb-drenched like those of Elizabeth Fraser and Hope Sandoval, icons of dream-pop, yet she possesses a physicality and a theatricality that are pure jazz, whose every nuance can be appreciated, especially in her lower register. The overall mood is that of a jazzy, hazy-sounding ballad, punctuated by horns, though the overall rhythmic drive is often a touch too insistent for the pulse of a typical ballad, an expression of a latent unease that casts its long shadow over every track.

Given the songs that make up the album, one might expect more cinematic music, concentrated in its instrumental, abstract form; instead, the record's defining trait is precisely the renewal of film music that Lynch and Badalamenti achieve by reworking the song form itself. In this sense, the album's masterpieces are undoubtedly “Falling” and “The Nightingale”, written for “Twin Peaks”, two tracks that have earned their place directly in the history of pop-rock songwriting.

Following the general development of the tracks, whose structure is also rooted in the standards of the American songbook (“The Swan”), it's the unexpected shifts in direction introduced in the composition and arrangement that renew the canon: the grotesque fanfare of the already-mentioned “I Remember”, the endless circularity of “Rockin' Back Inside My Heart”, the sudden plunge of “Into The Night”, the dark, dissonant horns of “I Float Alone”.

“Floating Into The Night” is the album with which Julee Cruise entered not only the history of pop-rock music but the mythology of American cinema. Her performance of “Falling” and “The Nightingale” in the first episode of “Twin Peaks”, inside the Roadhouse bar, is unforgettable: Cruise becomes the voice that fuses and merges with the archetypal figure of the biker, summoning to mind the likes of Marlon Brando and James Dean, immortalized somewhere between fiction and reality, as well as films like “Scorpio Rising” (1963) by Kenneth Anger, “Easy Rider” (1969) by Dennis Hopper and “Rumble Fish” (1983) by Francis Ford Coppola. The genre itself is a creation forged in itinere, somewhere between film music, ambient, jazz and sophisticated pop, the fruit of the synergy between Badalamenti, Lynch and Cruise, whose voice is also shaped by studio technology.

The cinema of the maestro from Missoula wouldn't be the same without these ten tracks that represent it in toto, carefully selected from the forty recorded at the time at Excalibur Studio in New York.

I remember your song

And the way you sang it to me

So many times in other forms

On distant lands

I remember your smile

And the way you sent it to me

So many times through different air

It lives inside my heart

It is a dream, you me

Is it a dream?

Ride the wave of great music

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25/04/2021