photo credit: David Lynch
The two releases bookend Cruise’s incredibly fruitful Twin Peaks-era collaboration with David Lynchand Angelo Badalamenti.
25 years after its initial release, Julee Cruise’s sophomore album The Voice of Love will be issued for the first time on vinyl August 17 via Sacred Bones Records. Also available August 17th; Three Demos: a very unique companion 12” featuring the very first demo recordings for songs from Cruise’s initial LP with Lynch and Badalamenti, Floating Into the Night. Stream the original demo version of "Floating" from that release here.
Julee Cruise fulfills a special cornerstone in the Twin Peaks universe. Her initial collaboration with Lynch and Badalamenti on Blue Velvet’s ‘Mysteries of Love’ set into motion a chain of events that would ultimately help birth the core sonic identity of the 1990 series…all before a frame of it was ever shot.
In 1985, Lynch’s obsession with This Mortal Coil’s "Song to the Siren" was at a fever pitch. Wanting to feature the song in Blue Velvet, the rights to the Tim Buckley cover proved problematic and prohibitively expensive. Lynch had famously just began working with Angelo Badalamenti, who had been suggested by producer Fred Caruso to coach Isabella Rossellini with singing "Blue Velvet" for the film. Faced with the "Song to the Siren" dilemma, Caruso again suggested his friend Badalamenti as a possible solution…encouraging Lynch himself to pen lyrics in order to come up with an original alternative for the film. “David reluctantly agreed to write a lyric, but he thought writing a new song was absolutely preposterous because ‘Song to the Siren’ was his favorite song of all time,” Badalamenti says. The result ended up forging a rich blueprint for not just one song, but two full-length albums.
Two years after Blue Velvet was released, the notion of a full album of material took shape and three crucial demos were recorded to gain the confidence and financial support of a label. Early versions of"Floating," "Falling" and "The World Spins" were all roughed out in economic elegance, rendering distinctive snapshots of what could be if the formula of ‘Mysteries of Love’ was spun into a larger body of work. They’re fascinating glimpses into the genesis of what became Floating Into the Night and the minimal key ingredients that made the material alchemize. An early version of the album opener ’Floating’ originally began with a stunning spoken-word intro later dropped entirely from the album version. A revelation in their overarching simplicity, the three song collection is devoid of the LP’s additional arrangement flourishes, and yet still manages to present the same emotional depth charge with only voice, synthesizer and lyric.
When the finished 10-song LP Floating Into the Night was released in 1989, it would precede the Twin Peaks network premiere by more than six months…giving "Falling" an incredibly brief window of time before it would eventually become impossible to disassociate from the series as its theme. An incredibly difficult thing to imagine, yet the demo recording manages to give us a unique peek into the moment this was in fact reality.
In 1992, after the release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch, Badalamenti and Cruise returned to the studio with new compositions as well as the intent to craft previously instrumental score-based material from Fire Walk With Me and Wild at Heart into Julee Cruise songs. The result was 1993’s final studio album The Voice of Love. “In the studio, David would always say ‘[sing] like an angel, like an angel…” Cruise remembers. In many ways, this quest for ‘angelic’ was the seed that grew an entire genre out of the inability to utilize ‘Song to the Siren.’
It’s eerie to ponder what might not have been had the song actually been within reach for Blue Velvet. Fitting that all these years later, Twin Peaks concluded on a similar question followed by Cruise’s performance of ’The World Spins’…what happens if Laura Palmer was never murdered?
Julee Cruise
Three Demos
Sacred Bones Records
August 17, 2018
1. Floating (Demo)
2. Falling (Demo)
3. The World Spins (Demo)
Julee Cruise
The Voice of Love
Sacred Bones Records
August 17, 2018
1. This is Our Night
2. The Space For Love
3. Movin in on You
4. Friends for Life
5. Up In Flames
6. Kool Kat Walk
7. Until The End Of the World
8. She Would Die For Love
9. In My Other World
10. Questions in a world of Blue
11. The Voice of Love
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