The Strange Path of Julee Cruise

Of all the people in the world, I have my brother Jonathan to thank most of all for a lot of the good music I've heard. One way or another he introduced whole styles into my CD and digital collections. One of the best of the many great tracks I got by sharing a roof with a jazz pianist/DJ was This Mortal Coil's haunting cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren". When Jonathan brought home a copy of David Lynch's excellent film Lost Highway some time in 1998 or 1999, he and I shared a deep need to find out what that song was in the bizarre, revelatory scene in the last act. This required research, though. For one reason or another, the rights to This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren" are ridiculously expensive, so the song doesn't appear on the official soundtrack of Lost Highway even though it's arguably the film's sonic centerpiece. In fact, if it weren't for this song's heavy price tag, a gorgeous singer named Julee Cruise wouldn't have skirted the big time.

Julee Cruise is one of those rare cases of a Midwestern kid risking everything to try her luck in New York City and actually succeeding. She's been a fixture on the off-Broadway scene since the early 1980's, but her music career began when she got a job working as a talent scout for composer Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti's name comes up most often when discussing David Lynch, for whom he effectively served as the court composer for most of his films right up through Mulholland Drive. When Lynch was putting the finishing touches on 1986's Blue Velvet he had every intention to use This Mortal Coil's cover of "Song to the Siren" in a pivotal scene between his two leads, only to run into the aforementioned financial wall of song rights. Not to be stymied, Lynch commissioned Badalamenti to write an original track that parroted the beautiful, dreamy allure of "Siren". The result was "Mysteries of Love", the song that launched Julee Cruise, its singer, into the music business.

Three years later, Cruise recorded her debut album Floating into the Night, perhaps the greatest record of its style. Lynch and Badalamenti composed every track on the album, making it a 48-minute exercise in the ghostly lounge atmosphere This Mortal Coil pioneered and then never really revisited. Four years later when the trio attempted to follow up on the artistic success of Floating into the Night with 1993's The Voice of Love things didn't turn out so well. Really, Julee Cruise's musical career was unfortunately something of a side project for all parties involved, especially Lynch and Badalamenti who were still very much in the movie-making business.

As for Cruise herself, she spent the better part of the 90's either acting or singing with the B-52's. This decade she's been more focused on music, adding her distinct vocals to a number of collaborative efforts and putting out one more album, The Art of Being a Girl. Word has it she's been working on a fourth album for a year or two, but it already missed its projected 2009 release date.

Julee Cruise's story is, in essence, the story of dream pop as a genre; Beautiful music that graced the occasional soundtrack but never became the sensation it probably should have been. Stunning, influential and unique? Sure, but never truly popular.