The celestial sigh that we think of as the voice of Julee Cruise was a collaborative fiction. In 1986 David Lynch was obsessed with This Mortal Coil’s version of Song to the Siren, sung by Elizabeth Fraser, and desperate to feature it in his movie Blue Velvet but he couldn’t afford to license it. His plan B was to commission the composer Angelo Badalamenti to mimic the song’s peculiar, oceanic blend of bliss and oblivion. To complete the composition, Mysteries of Love, Badalamenti needed a very particular voice and he asked Julee Cruise to help him track one down.
Cruise thought her own would never work. Having appeared in children’s theatre and TV movies, the 29-year-old was an off-Broadway chorus girl with a voice for musical theatre and club tunes. She’d even played Janis Joplin on stage. But when nobody else could be found she agreed to try something completely different. “I’m anything anybody wants me to be and I’m going to be the best there is,” she told Pitchfork in 2018.
Mysteries of Love proved even more ethereal than Song to the Siren, achieving the disembodied, immersive quality of ambient music even while using vocals and lyrics. Cruise isn’t so much singing as breathing to a melody. The effect was so distant from her usual voice that she had to approach it like an actor and inhabit a persona, which the trio nicknamed “the white angel”.
“What [Badalamenti] did with my voice was incredible,” Cruise said in 2005. “I was a belter, and he turned my voice around and created that angelic sound. I wouldn’t have a career without him.”
Mysteries of Love was so captivating and otherworldly that Warner Bros Records offered Cruise a deal to make a whole album, with Lynch writing the lyrics and Badalamenti the music. They ended up working on three projects simultaneously – 1989’s Floating Into the Night, the theatre piece Industrial Symphony No 1 and the music to Lynch’s new TV series Twin Peaks – with songs and motifs flowing between them. Similarly, some of the music on Cruise’s 1993 follow-up, The Voice of Love, appeared in Lynch’s films Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The trio also collaborated on a cover of Elvis Presley’s Summer Kisses, Winter Tears for the Wim Wenders movie Until the End of the World. For several years the three were a dream team.
The songs are exquisite in their own right but their indelible association with Lynch’s imagery makes them transcendent: it wasn’t until Twin Peaks mania broke out that Floating Into the Night became a hit. “It was so much fun to be part of something that just went ba-boom!” Cruise recalled in 2017. “You really didn’t know it was going to do that.”
During this period Lynch was obsessed with a dreamlike misremembering of the 1950s, in which wholesome innocence is eaten away by the uncanny and the outright horrific. Badalamenti translated this into music which combined tranquillity with menace. Cruise becomes our enigmatic ghost-guide, suffusing Lynch’s extremely simple lyrics with unfathomable longing. She was credited in Industrial Symphony No 1 as The Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman and appeared as a roadhouse singer in Twin Peaks. “Julee Cruise, with her ethereal, angelic voice … to have her singing in a rough redneck bar … I mean, there’s no way in hell that would really happen,” Badalamenti told the NME in 2011. “It’s the contrast that makes it work.”
Cruise’s songs still evoke a particular early-90s sensibility. In one direction, they were in conversation with the eerie Americana of Lynch soundtrack highlights such as Roy Orbison’s In Dreams and Chris Isaak’s quiff-rock throwback Wicked Game. In another, they spoke to the swooning dream-pop of Mazzy Star and the UK’s shoegazing scene. Lana Del Rey, for one, might not exist without that hybrid.
Cruise had a picaresque creative life beyond Lynchworld and the white angel. She toured with the B-52’s, duetted with Pharrell Williams, made a trip-hop album with Deee-Lite’s DJ Dmitry and played Andy Warhol in a stage musical, before retiring from performance due to systemic lupus. She was last seen by the public in familiar surroundings, reprising her old song The World Spins in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, so it was painful to learn that she hated the episode and had fallen out with Lynch. “I will never perform again,” she wrote on Facebook. “I’m through with this!”
Sometimes Cruise seemed emphatically proud of her connection to Twin Peaks and sometimes sick of it but either way, that is how she will be best remembered. One day in 1986 she took on a vocal persona to help out a friend and it defined the rest of her life, plunging her deep into the dream-life of American culture.