REAL GONE

Ethereal voice of mystery and dreams, Julee Cruise left us on June 9.

Something was different: Julee Cruise, maverick talent and angel-voiced muse to David Lynch.

THERE WAS something preternaturally calm about Julee Cruise’s strange and dreamlike singing voice, so it made sense she’d become known as the muse/ singer-in-residence of the master of the strange and dreamlike, David Lynch. By nature, though, Cruise’s voice was loud and strong: born in Creston, Iowa in 1956, she’d played Janis Joplin in an off-Broadway musical. The Lynch connection came via Angelo Badalamenti, a musician and film score composer that Cruise knew from the theatre circuit. Lynch had asked him to write a song – Mysteries Of Love – for his 1986 movie Blue Velvet, and was struggling to find a woman with “the voice of an angel” to sing it.

Cruise asked Badalamenti if she could try.

Approaching it like an acting role, she created an otherworldly woman who breathed the song as much as sang it, slow, hushed and airy. Lynch loved it. The song won her a record deal with Warners, resulting in her debut album Floating Into The Night (1989), a collaboration with Badalamenti and Lynch.

Later she won a Grammy for Floating, the dream-pop theme song of Twin Peaks. Cruise appeared in a number of episodes of Lynch’s TV series, playing the role of a singer in a lonely local bar.

After 1993’s second album collaboration with the pair, The Voice Of Love, Cruise spent much of the ’90s taking a different direction, standing in for Cindy Wilson and touring with The B-52’s, and enjoying herself creatively. She released two more albums with different collaborators – electronica-jazz for The Art Of Being A Girl (2002), trip-hop for My Secret Life (2011) – and starred in the New York musical Radiant Baby, about graffiti artist Keith Haring. She returned to Twin Peaks for the third series in 2017. But suffering from lupus, depressed and in pain, Cruise retired from performing soon after. She took her own life.

Sylvie Simmons

Jim Seals: spirituallyinclined pop harmoniser.

Getty, A.J. Barratt

Jim Seals

Soft rocker BORN 1942

JIM SEALS, like his musical partner Dash Crofts, was born in central west Texas. Already an award-winning fiddler, he played sax with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran in the late ’50s, also joining Crofts and Glen Campbell in The Champs.