Julee Cruise

Julee Ann Cruise (December 1, 1956 – June 9, 2022) was an American singer and actress, known for her collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and filmmaker 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. She was also featured in Lynch and Badalamenti's avant-garde 1990 theater production Industrial Symphony No. 1, which was filmed and released on home media.

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. Cruise was also a stage actress and appeared in the off-Broadway musicals Return to the Forbidden Planet and Radiant Baby in 2004. 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 Theatre 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 Velvet's 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".