Джули Энн Крус: Памяти певицы и музы Дэвида Линча

American singer (1956–2022)

Julee Ann Cruise (December 1, 1956 – June 9, 2022) was an American singer and actress, known for her collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and film director David Lynch in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She released four albums beginning with 1989's Floating into the Night. Cruise is best known for her 1989 single "Falling"; an instrumental version was used as the theme song for the television series Twin Peaks in which she appeared in a recurring role as a roadhouse singer. She reprised the role in the 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which also featured her music), and in the 2017 revival series Twin Peaks: The Return. Other notable singles included "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" (1990) and "If I Survive" (1999) by the band Hybrid, which featured her vocals. In the 1990s, she was a touring member of the B 52's, filling in for Cindy Wilson. Her final album, My Secret Life, was released in 2011.

Born in Creston, Iowa, Julee Ann Cruise was the daughter of John Cruise, the town dentist, and Wilma Cruise, who was his office manager. She studied French horn at Drake University and performed as a singer and actress in Minneapolis with the Children's Theater Company (notably in the role of Jinjur in stage adaptations of L. Frank Baum's Oz books). She moved to New York and played Janis Joplin in a revue called Beehive, while also working with Angelo Badalamenti.

In 1985, Badalamenti was composing the score for David Lynch's Blue Velvet, as well as serving as the vocal coach for the film's star, Isabella Rossellini. A key scene in Blue Velvet was intended to feature This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren" by Tim Buckley, with lead vocal by Elizabeth Fraser. When it proved prohibitively expensive to obtain rights to use the song, it was suggested that Badalamenti compose a pop song in the same style, with lyrics written by Lynch. Because the song required a vocalist with a haunting, ethereal voice, Badalamenti recommended Cruise, who had sung in a New York theater workshop Badalamenti had produced. The result of their initial collaboration was "Mysteries of Love", which figures prominently in Blue Velvets closing scenes and gained a cult following. Badalamenti and Lynch went on to write and produce additional songs for Cruise, most of which were featured in her debut album, Floating into the Night (1989). The album was released on September 12, 1989, by Warner Bros. Records, and charted on Billboard the following year. It also provided musical material for Lynch's Industrial Symphony No. 1, in which Cruise performed while "floating" from a harness dozens of feet above a stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The second, more significant project was the soundtrack to Lynch's Twin Peaks, for which Badalamenti composed the original score. The song "Falling", which became the orchestral theme for the television series, caused a minor sensation, winning a Grammy at the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards in 1991 for Best Pop Instrumental. The Twin Peaks soundtrack, featuring Cruise on the songs "Into the Night" and "The Nightingale" as well as on the vocal version of "Falling", eventually went gold (500,000+ copies) in the U. S., a rare feat for a television soundtrack. Cruise made a number of appearances on Twin Peaks as a singer at a local bar, and was prominently featured in both the show's landmark pilot episode and the episode where Laura Palmer's murderer is revealed, as well as in 1992's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart", the second single from Floating into the Night, was released in 1990 and was also featured in an episode of Twin Peaks along with "The World Spins"; in the episode, several of the main female characters are shown lip synching to "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart". Cruise reinterpreted and sang the theme song for an episode of the USA Network show Psych. The episode, "Dual Spires", was about a secluded town full of secrets and skeletons while they investigate the murder of a girl. It aired 20 years to the day after Laura Palmer's murderer was revealed. on short notice when scheduled performer Sinéad O'Connor refused to appear on the same show as guest host Andrew Dice Clay. Cruise performed "Falling". Afterward, Cruise maintained a relatively low profile until her second album, The Voice of Love, was released in 1993. "She Would Die for Love" was also covered by alternative metal band Fantômas on their The Director's Cut album as "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me". Cruise's early collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch were closely related to Lynch's film work, which was reflected in the lyrics. In 2017 she appeared in Part 17 of the new Twin Peaks season performing "The World Spins". Cruise released the EP Three Demos in 2018, containing the original demo versions of "Floating", "Falling", and "The World Spins".

Cruise's long delayed third album, The Art of Being a Girl, was released in 2002. This was the first of her albums for which Badalamenti and Lynch did not produce or write any of the music for, with music and lyrics for each of the songs being written by Cruise herself (with the exception of an updated version of the single "Falling") and guest produced by Rick Strom and Mocean Worker. In 2011, Cruise released her fourth album My Secret Life. Cruise also acted and sang in the off Broadway cast of Return to the Forbidden Planet, a spoof of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and toured with The B 52's as Cindy Wilson's touring stand in on and off from 1992 to 1999. She also performed regularly with Bobby McFerrin's improvisational vocal group Voicestra/CircleSong.

Cruise lent her vocals to works by a miscellaneous list of collaborators, mostly in electronic music. She provided vocals and lyrics to several of the songs on Wide Angle (1999), the debut album by Welsh electronic music group Hybrid, notably the nu skool breaks track "If I Survive". She appeared on a number of tracks on both the 2003 album Dreams Top Rock and the 2007 album Monstrous Surplus by German post rock act Pluramon, a pseudonym of the musician Marcus Schmickler. Cruise appeared as a guest vocalist on Sarcast While, the 2006 full length album from the New York band, Time of Orchids, released on Tzadik Records. Her vocals appeared on five tracks on Kenneth Bager's 2006 album Fragments from a Space Cadet. Cruise provided the vocals for Delerium's "Magic" song (on the Chimera album).

Cruise recorded several memorable covers over the years, including Sir Cliff Richard's "Wired for Sound" with B(if)tek, R. E. M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" with Eric Kupper, Eurythmics's "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" with DJ Silver, Elvis Presley's "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears", and David Bowie's "Space Oddity" with Supa DJ Dmitry. In 1996, Cruise with the Flow appeared on the Scream soundtrack with the song "Artificial World (Interdimensional Mix)". In 2003, Depeche Mode songwriter Martin Gore included a cover version of Cruise's song "In My Other World" (from her 1993 album The Voice of Love) on Counterfeit², the second in his series of cover albums dedicated to his own musical influences and atmospheric inspirations. A modified sample of Cruise's song "I Float Alone" was used as the backing track in the Dean Blunt song "The Narcissist". Cruise's song "Floating" was featured in TV advertisements and trailers for the show The Riches, which debuted on FX in March 2007. The next year her music was used in CSI: Miami and in episode 12 of season 5 of Psych, "Dual Spires", she sang a rendition of Psych theme song. The episode was a spoof of Twin Peaks. They lived in Manhattan and in the Berkshires. She also had depression. Cruise died in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on June 9, 2022, aged 65; her death was a suicide by suffocation.