The celestial sigh that we think of as the voice of Julee Cruise was a collaborative fiction. In 1986 David Lynch was obsessed with This Mortal Coil’s version of Song to the Siren, sung by Elizabeth Fraser, and desperate to feature it in his movie Blue Velvet but he couldn’t afford to license it. His plan B was to commission the composer Angelo Badalamenti to mimic the song’s peculiar, oceanic blend of bliss and oblivion. To complete the composition, Mysteries of Love, Badalamenti needed a very particular voice and he asked Julee Cruise to help him track one down.
Cruise thought her own would never work. Having appeared in children’s theatre and TV movies, the 29-year-old was an off-Broadway chorus girl with a voice for musical theatre and club tunes. She’d even played Janis Joplin on stage. But when nobody else could be found she agreed to try something completely different. “I’m anything anybody wants me to be and I’m going to be the best there is,” she told Pitchfork in 2018.
