Julee Cruise
Floating Into the Night
1989, Warner Bros.
February is a miserable month, maybe even the worst month. By this point, I’m not just over winter, but I’m actively offended by it. My Texan body chemistry craves warmth. Any weather that makes me put on gloves and a scarf is an insult and I take it very personally. In February, I blame the cold for all of my problems.
Why is this article late? February, goddammit. It fucks me up. I’d be happy to sleep through it.
Sure, winters here aren’t too bad compared to other places. It’s not unusual to get a week or so of T-shirt weather while northerners are seeing blizzards. However, in February the threat of an Arctic blast always looms. The 65-degree days will become 25-degree days again, often overnight, and I’ll not only be shivering but feel seriously jerked around.
While I’m bitching, the Super Bowl can go to hell and I don’t think that anyone likes Valentine’s Day. Even February’s special traditions suck.
The only nice thing I have to say about February is that Twin Peaks music sounds extra good during this time of year. Perhaps it means something that the series begins in February (see Agent Cooper’s famous “11:30 AM, February 24th” monologue in the pilot).
In even Angelo Badalamenti’s most beautiful pieces of music for David Lynch’s film and television projects–and most of them are stunningly beautiful–there’s a disturbance in between the notes, a demon hiding in the silk. You can’t see her, but she’s there giving an eerie edge to these hushed and pretty pop songs. It’s this tension that makes Floating Into the Night a good fit for the unrest of February.
Lynch wrote the lyrics and, I suspect, envisioned the mood. He also shot the sleeve photos and gets an art director credit. Badalamenti composed and arranged the music. Julee Cruise brings the vocals that embody the word “angelic”.
Half of the album would shortly be featured in episodes of Twin Peaks and the other half may as well have been. Every song has the same ethereal haunted malt shop vibe. They all sound like they come from a mist-covered town where the prom queen was murdered and the detective’s best clues are coming to him in his dreams.
I should also mention Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken-Hearted, an artsy filmed stage show from Lynch’s busy year of 1990. It was only released on home video and it features so many Floating Into the Night songs, you could almost consider it an extra-elaborate extended music video for the album.
Opening track “Floating” is just about the sexiest blend of whispers, synthesizers, guitar twang, moody horn riffs, pop melody, and ultra-tidy 1989 production that you’ve ever heard.
Until the rest of the album keeps topping it and expanding on it.
“Falling” is one of the two singles and is the most famous moment because it’s the Twin Peaks theme (exact same recording), but with Cruise intoning on top. By the third track, “I Remember”, it’s clear that this will be nothing but yearning ballads and that the cover photo is an accurate summary of the record’s mood. An unreal angel surrounded by dreamy darkness.
The most common adjective used to describe David Lynch’s work is “weird” and the weirdest thing about his lyrics here are how they’re so straightforward, not really mysterious or even clever. They read like lonelyheart poems written on napkins and the backs of receipts. This isn’t an abstract art piece. Rather, it’s an earnest pop album meant for swaying and singing along.
Sample lyric: “Now the night is falling/ You have gone/ Sad dreams blow through dark trees/ Love’s gone wrong/ Clouds of sadness raining all night long/ Love’s gone/ The end of our song” from “I Float Alone”.
What I think is happening here is that Lynch, born in 1946, was coming down with a serious case of nostalgia. Hey, it hit me hard in my 40s, too. Lynch’s 1950s and 60s upbringing is an essential ingredient in nearly all of his work, but it’s right there on the surface of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Wild at Heart, three works that are built on playing with pre-JFK assassination “innocent America” tropes.
(When Lynch died in January of this year, a Twin Peaks meme group on Facebook launched into a running joke of fake announcements for a new Twin Peaks with current young creative talent involved. It was horrible. And funny. It also made me think about exactly WHY I find the idea of a Twin Peaks reboot offensive. It’s not just loyalty to Lynch. It’s also that Twin Peaks can never be Twin Peaks without a director who grew up in the 1950s and remembers it well and has all sorts of complicated feelings about it.)
Floating Into the Night comes from the same place. It’s an updated Shelley Fabares record. It also recalls the delicate tones of The Fleetwoods, the great vocal combo who always perfectly pronounced every syllable in angel food cake lullabies such as “Come Softly To Me” and “Mr. Blue”, big radio hits in Lynch’s early adolescence.
Meanwhile, Lynch was also aware of the 4AD “dream pop” sound, which is another influence here. The origin of this LP is that he wanted to use This Mortal Coil’s version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” in Blue Velvet, but the licensing fee was beyond the film’s small budget so he got Badalamenti to cook up a track that sounded like it without stepping on anyone’s copyright. To sing, Badalamenti brought in Julee Cruise whom he knew from the New York theater scene. The result was the song “Mysteries of Love”, a track almost too ethereal for this world. It came out on the Blue Velvet soundtrack and it gets a rerun here.
One big difference though between this and most 4AD groups is that the British tended to not care if the listener understood the words. The vocalists were often buried in the noise or, in the case of Elizabeth Fraser of The Cocteau Twins (and This Mortal Coil) had a singing style that made English words sound like another language.
By contrast, Lynch and Badalamenti put Julee Cruise in a spotlight. She’s the leading lady. Her voice is right on top and you can taste the vanilla ice cream in every single word. Lynch and Badalamenti like 4AD bands, but they also remember the jukeboxes of 1961.
“Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”, the album’s other single, is pure jukebox goodness. I want to hear Roy Orbison do it. And Wanda Jackson. And Rosie and the Originals.
“Into the Night” captures the spookiness of old ballads. Put it in your next Halloween mix, even if the big monster in this song is the horror of heartbreak.
“I Float Alone”, “The Nightingale”, and “The Swan” keep you swaying and keep the whispers coming.
The best track is at the end.
You think you’ve heard slow songs? “The World Spins” is slower. You think you’ve heard pretty songs? “The World Spins” is prettier. It’s a song so good that it was used in Twin Peaks TWICE and bursting into tears in the middle of it became an actual part of Cruise’s live performances.
Julee Cruise, who passed in 2022, never quite got her due as a singer. She saw herself as more of a belter than you’ll hear on her work with Lynch and Badalamenti. When Cindy Wilson took a break from touring with the B-52’s, Cruise got the job as her replacement.
She also made a second record with Lynch and Badalamenti, The Voice of Love from 1993. It’s good stuff that, alongside originals, offers vocal versions of instrumental themes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Wild at Heart. Lynch was uncool at the time (Twin Peaks was deemed a failure by the mainstream after a prestigious beginning) and the album was buried. I don’t think I even knew about it until a few years after it was out.
What you really need to hear though is Cruise’s great 2002 album, The Art of Being a Girl, her first record made without Lynch and Badalamenti. She co-writes nearly everything on it and breaks out of her role as the Voice of an Angel and shows us her sassy and jazzy side over screwball electronic-infused music that sounds like big city nightlife. It’s wacky and chaotic and I love it. It deserves a killer reissue.
Still, Floating Into the Night is Julee Cruise’s big moment and that’s okay.
Say her name to me and I will hear a whisper and I will think of mystery and fog and something glowing and beautiful in the middle of a vast pool of darkness.
And I need that. God, I need that, for some crazy reason.
So long live Julee Cruise (RIP). Long live Angelo Badalamenti (RIP). Long live David Lynch (RIP).
Y’all made some classics and Floating Into the Night is one of them. I hope to have many more awful Februarys with it.