Dream pop icon Julee Cruise dies at 65
Best known for her work with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Cruise also had a long and fruitful solo career as a singer, songwriter, and actress.
Julee Cruise, a singer, songwriter, and actress best known for her work with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti on Twin Peaks, passed away Thursday at 65 by suicide after a four-year battle with systemic lupus. Her husband, Edward Grinnan, first shared the news in a post to a Facebook fan group for the B-52s, with whom Cruise toured on and off throughout the ’90s.
“For those of you who go back I thought you might want to know that I said goodby to my wife, Julee Cruise, today,” Grinnan wrote. “She left this realm on her own terms. No regrets. She is at peace. Having had such a varied music career she often said that the time she spent as a [B-52] filling in for Cindy [Wilson] while [Wilson] was having a family was the happiest time of her performing life. She will be forever grateful to them. When she first stepped up to the mic with Fred [Schneider] and Kate [Pierson], she said it was like joining the Beatles. She will love them always and never forget their travels together around the world. I played her “Roam” during her transition. Now she will roam forever. Rest In Peace, my love, and love to you all.”
On Friday afternoon, Grinnan confirmed the peaceful circumstances of his wife’s passing to The FADER. “It was a happy day,” he wrote in an email.
Cruise was born in 1956, the daughter of Creston, Iowa’s town dentist. After earning a degree in French Horn from Drake University in Des Moines, she moved to Minneapolis to perform with the Guthrie Theatre, starting an acting career that eventually led her to New York’s East Village. In the early ’80s, she landed a chorus role in a country and western show for which composer Angelo Badalamenti was working as music director. Thus began the creative partnership that would kickstart her career in earnest: Badalamenti was enamored with Cruise’s singing voice and enlisted her for “Mysteries of Love,” a song he wrote for David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet. In 1989, Cruise, Badalamenti, and Lynch released Floating Into the Night, a Billboard-charting album of 10 songs, several of which were subsequently used in the soundtrack to Twin Peaks, Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking TV series which premiered in 1990, scored by Badalamenti. An instrumental version of the album’s second track, “Falling,” became the show’s iconic theme.
In addition to her role in the creation of Twin Peaks’ soundtrack, Cruise was also a cast member. She appears in multiple scenes set at the Roadhouse, the seedy dive bar on the outskirts of the show’s titular Washington town that serves as a liminal location — hosting both critical plot points and uncanny breakout musical performances. She can be found playing there as early as the first episode, singing a sultry rendition of Floating Into the Night track “The Nightingale.” She also performs in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s 1992 feature-length prequel to the show (which ended a year prior after only two seasons), and in the series’ 2017 reboot, Twin Peaks: The Return. In 1993, she released her second album, The Voice of Love, also in collaboration with Badalamenti and Lynch.
Outside her work with Lynch, Badalamenti, and the B-52s, Cruise had a prolific theater career on and off Broadway, appearing in classics such as Cabaret and Little Shop of Horrors, as well as the 2004 Keith Haring bio-musical Radiant Baby, in which she played Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and several more of Haring’s famous associates.
In 2002, Cruise released her long-delayed third album, The Art of Being a Girl, which moved away from her classic dream-pop aesthetic, touching on jazz fusion, house, bossa nova, and ambient electronica. And in 2011, she shared My Secret Life, a dub-adjacent joint project with Dee-lite’s DJ Dimitri that’s even further from her old sound, another example of her singular, ever-evolving sonic sensibility.
Friday morning, Lynch uploaded a brief eulogy for Cruise to his David Lynch Theater YouTube channel. “I just found out that the great Julee Cruise passed away,” he says in the video. “Very sad news. So, might be a good time to appreciate all the good music she made and remember her as being a great musician, great singer, and great human being.” Watch it below.