I realize this is a bit of a late post for a "brunch" this week, but I'll make up for my tardiness with a full plate of dreamy goodness.
Having spent the early part of his career as a musician on the Catskills resort circuit (as well as a songwriter/arranger for artists such as Shirley Bassey and country singer Mel Tillis), film composer Angelo Badalamenti first met director David Lynch when he agreed to score Lynch's 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet. The two have been an inseparable creative team ever since this first collaboration, though Badalamenti has kept himself very busy between Lynch projects scoring films in nearly every conceivable genre, from Nightmare On Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors and City Of Lost Children to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, The Beach, and A Very Long Engagment.
It was during the process of scoring Blue Velvet, however, that Badalamenti stumbled across the voice that would provide him with his best-known musical achievements. While searching for a voice to sing "Mysteries Of Love" (the film's central "love theme") with the kind of naked, angelic innocence Lynch was after, Badalamenti eventually realized that the ideal choice was none other than his talent scout, Julee Cruise.
The results of Cruise's whispery, delicate voice singing Lynch's intentionally naïve lyrics set to Badalamenti's gorgeous bed of synths were so striking that a full-length collaboration between the three was inevitable. Finally released in the summer of 1989, Cruise's Floating Into The Night was an almost ambient work of weightless sonics and heartsick paeans to love and loneliness, much in the same style as "Mysteries Of Love," though the occasional dramatic flourish injected a rather menacing undertone to the album at unexpected times. Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros. had no idea what to do with the record, initially marketing it to accounts in rather shallow fashion as a new spin on The Cowboy Junkies album The Trinity Sessions. While both records did share a soft, shuffling swoon to them, any comparison bewteen the two ended at that point: Badalamenti's rich repertoire of influences made Floating Into The Night sound like an almost indescribable mix of modern synthwave, late-1950's romantica, and classic torch song laments. There was also a weird, alien feel to the record that (at the time of its release) had no stylistic label, but what would eventually be known a few years later as trip-hop.
The next collaboration between the three was a bizarre, surreal performance piece staged at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music in November of 1989. Titled Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream Of The Broken Hearted, this piece was constructed of a couple of new compositions and several selections from Floating Into The Night. Staged on what looked like a burned-out, half-completed Broadway stage, the symphony was prefaced (at least on it's video release) with a dramatic prologue acted out by a Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern (stars of Lynch's 1990 cinematic release Wild At Heart). The rest of the "symphony" was about as strange as anything Warner Bros. ever released in the 1990s (with the possible exception of the Mr. Bungle catalog): as the "voice of heartbreak," Cruise appeared nearly throughout the performance, singing songs while suspended thirty feet in the air or while being filmed trapped in the trunk of a car parked on stage. Even better, at some point what looked like a bipedal skinned deer staggered about the stage, and there were lots of midgets running around with work lights ... well, I guess you'll just have to see it.
While it was almost completely ignored upon release, Floating Into The Night, became a hot property in the late spring of 1990 thanks to the wild popularity of Lynch's dramatic television series Twin Peaks. Not only did the T.V. show feature an instrumental version of "Falling" as it's theme song, but Cruise appeared in the show singing songs from her album as well. Since no soundtrack album for the show was available at the time Twin Peaks-mania hit, Floating Into The Night had to suffice, and Cruise suddenly found herself floating just under the A-list radar as "Falling" took off at Modern Rock, and exposure from the TV series propelled Floating Into The Night as high as Number 74 on the Billboard Top 200. The phenomenon even made it overseas: while Cruise's album never managed to crack the U.K. list, two singles managed to make the lists as "Falling" hit the Top 10 in November of 1990 and "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" skimmed the Top 75 the following spring.
For a couple of years after Twin Peaks took off and Lynch's star rose in Hollywood, there was hardly any new music from Cruise and Co outside of "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears" (which appeared on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World in 1991), and "Questions In A World Of Blue" (from the soundtrack to Lynch's disastrous feature-length prequel to Twin Peaks subtitled Fire Walk With Me). During this period of relative downtime, Cruise made the head-turning decision to join The B-52's on their Good Stuff tour in 1992 as a replacement for the departed Cindy Wilson. What many fans didn't know about Cruise at the time is that her singing voice as heard on Floating Into The Night is only a shadow of a much wider range she has at her command. Effortlessly belting out upbeat punk-pop songs alongside Kate Pierson, Cruise managed to keep the B-52's on the road during perhaps the most uphill battle of their career.
Following the Good Stuff trek, Cruise re-teamed with Lynch and Badalamenti and released The Voice Of Love at the end of 1993. This time, however, Cruise found the odds stacked against her. While David Lynch may have been the Golden Boy of Hollywood in 1990, the bloom had come off the rose since that time, and the overwhelming critical and popular backlash following Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me pretty much ensured an icy reception for The Voice Of Love. Despite (or perhaps because of) a similar feel of creepy suspended-animation to that of Floating Through The Night, Cruise's second album sank without a trace. This also marked her Cruise's last collaboration to date with Badalamenti and Lynch.
In the years since 1993, Cruise has maintained a relatively low profile. Following an appearance on the Scream soundtrack in 1996, she slowly began to re-emerge through guest vocal work with electronic artist Khan's 1999 album 1-900-Get-Khan and as the featured vocalist on Hybrid's international dance hit "If I Survive" in 2001. Attempting to build on her re-acquired visibility, Cruise released a third solo album in 2002 through Varese. Perhaps predicatably, The Art Of Being Of A Girl is a very different kind of record than either of it's predecessors, incorporating many elements of modern electronica into the production and featuring the full range of her singing voice on record at last. Sadly, it met the same fate as The Voice Of Love.
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