In praise of Julee Cruise: the voice behind Twin Peaks

This arti­cle is drawn from a con­ver­sa­tion between Tom Hud­dle­ston and David Jenk­ins that was con­duct­ed while lis­ten­ing to Julee Cruise’s album, ​‘Float­ing into the Night’.

Julee Cruise’s album ​‘Float­ing into the Night’, released in 1989, was pro­duced by David Lynch and Ange­lo Badala­men­ti. All music by Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, all lyrics by David Lynch, all vocals by Julee Cruise. It com­pris­es the songs that were used in the first series of Twin Peaks, plus ​‘Mys­ter­ies of Love’ from Blue Vel­vet. It’s kind of the unof­fi­cial sound­track to Twin Peaks, even though there was an offi­cial sound­track to Twin Peaks, which some­what overlaps.

I like the open­ing track, ​‘Float­ing’. Twin Peaks has a slight 1940s wartime dance band kind of vibe to it. Also noir. And this song has a slight dance band‑y wartime vibe to it. So that kind of works. There is a kind of pastiche‑y vibe through­out the album, and there are songs I like a lot less lat­er on because of it.

From what I under­stand, when David Lynch made Blue Vel­vet he want­ed to use ​‘Song to the Siren’, the Tim Buck­ley cov­er, by This Mor­tal Coil. At the time of Blue Vel­vet, he was the guy who had just come off the back of Dune and … he wasn’t who he was going to be a few years lat­er. He cer­tain­ly wasn’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly well-known film­mak­er at the time. Blue Vel­vet was the film that broke him. So, he asked Badala­men­ti to write a song that had the same mood and the same spir­it as ​‘Song to the Siren’, and to get a vocal­ist in. The vocal­ist they chose was Julee Cruise.

Blue Vel­vet was the first time Lynch and Badala­men­ti worked togeth­er, and David Lynch is one of those peo­ple who, if a col­lab­o­ra­tion works, he’ll con­tin­ue that col­lab­o­ra­tion indef­i­nite­ly. ​‘Falling’ is the theme tune to Twin Peaks. It is icon­ic in the purest sense of the word. The ver­sion that appears over the cred­its doesn’t con­tain her vocals. But this ver­sion, the vocal ver­sion, chart­ed in the UK. I sup­pose back then, you didn’t get TV themes with vocals. I remem­ber being real­ly shocked when Star Trek-bloody-Enter­prise came along and it had that awful Rus­sell Wat­son vocal per­for­mance over the open­ing credits.

Badala­men­ti is one of the few peo­ple who can get away with using syn­the­sis­ers in such a blunt way, in such and obvi­ous and strange way. Most peo­ple who use syn­the­sis­ers make them sound cheap, but Badala­men­ti uses synths – and not very sophis­ti­cat­ed synths – cau­tious­ly, and giv­ing the sound some warmth. This is a spec­tac­u­lar­ly relax­ing record. I can’t say the words ​“chill out” with­out think­ing about Michael Caine or peo­ple lying around on big cush­ions in shady super clubs. It just is a real­ly, real­ly super calm­ing record in the same way that Har­ry Nilsson’s ​‘A Lit­tle Touch of Schmils­son in the Night’ is.

The way Badal­men­ti record­ed her voice was with immense reverb. Huge amounts of reverb. But then a song like ​‘I Remem­ber’ has a real­ly inter­est­ing break­down in the mid­dle of it. Badalamenti’s obvi­ous­ly a bit of a jazz guy so there’s a few sec­tions on this record where things go off into slight­ly eerier ter­ri­to­ry. It should be not­ed that this is the first musi­cal project that David Lynch was involved in, unless you count the sound­track to Eraser­head, which is kind of musique con­crète. He wrote all the lyrics. And it’s so David Lynch, you know. It’s so blunt­ly roman­tic and there’s no real shade, it’s up-front and emo­tion­al­ly sim­plis­tic, but in a kind of win­ning way.

The track ​‘Rock­ing Back Inside my Heart’ is a bit too ​‘pas­tiche’ for me. The real­ly fake fin­ger snaps I find annoy­ing. This was the sec­ond sin­gle off the record, and it didn’t do as well as ​‘Falling’. But the lyrics are great and also it reminds me of a par­tic­u­lar scene in Twin Peaks where they’re in the Road House and Julee Cruise is on stage singing this song and Don­na mouths the words to James. I always found that a lit­tle bit embar­rass­ing. There’s some­thing just a lit­tle bit over-clean about this track. It feels like kind of an attempt to write a par­tic­u­lar kind of song as opposed to the oth­er ones which are just sort of drift­ing. But then, it has a great mad sax solo. It’s a com­plete­ly avant garde, weirdo sax solo that sounds like some­thing from Faust or some­thing, so you can’t real­ly argue with that.

Cruise did a sec­ond album called ​‘The Voice of Love’, again with Lynch and Badala­men­ti. I think Lynch was less involved. And it had ​‘Ques­tions in a World of Blue’ on it, from Fire Walk with Me and a vocal ver­sion of one of the songs from Wild at Heart, so it def­i­nite­ly had rela­tions back to Twin Peaks, but it was less about that. It didn’t sell as well. It’s a good record, but not as strik­ing as this one.

I find it hard to say how much of my love for this record is tied up with my love for Twin Peaks, because Twin Peaks is one of my favourite thing of all the things. We’re sit­ting here with a log signed by the Log Lady. Cruise made ​‘Indus­tri­al Sym­pho­ny No.1’ with David Lynch which was fuck­ing won­der­ful. It’s a con­cert per­for­mance. I don’t know whether she’ll be involved in the new series. I think it would be real­ly weird if she wasn’t, con­sid­er­ing she’s still real­ly got it as a vocal­ist. But then it’s real­ly hard to say what the rela­tion­ship between her and Lynch is. But yeah, ​‘Indus­tri­al Sym­pho­ny No.1: The Dream of the Bro­ken Heart­ed’ is the con­cert film that Lynch direct­ed of her and it’s this whole record plus a cou­ple of oth­ers. And there’s peo­ple on stilts and kind of the­atri­cal stuff, and it’s very, very cool indeed. It’s worth see­ing. It’s awesome.

Regard­ing the new series, Lynch and Mark Frost have writ­ten the whole thing already and Lynch is direct­ing the whole thing. I think it’s going to be real­ly inter­est­ing. It may end up like Inland Empire with a kind of 15-hour freak-out with lots of Twin Peaks char­ac­ters in it. I think Frost will pull him back from that even­tu­al­i­ty. You do feel slight­ly like he’s lost inter­est. But then, yeah, I dun­no. Where do you go after some­thing like Inland Empire? That to me felt like a film made by some­one who’d lost inter­est in sto­ry­telling for any kind of ordi­nary plea­sur­able rea­sons. I think it’ll be the last thing David Lynch makes. His final achievement.