Julee Cruise may not have gotten famous exactly, but in the nearly three decades since her debut, she’s heard traces of herself in other female singers: “They sing like sexy baby girls,” she noted in a 2014 interview. Cruise didn’t always sing that way. Before meeting David Lynch through his go-to composer, Angelo Badalamenti, the Iowa-born singer had a big, belting musical theater voice; Badalamenti, who’d met Cruise on the set of a Greenwich Village production he’d written, doubted she could fit the bill when Lynch needed an airy, Elizabeth-Fraser-of-Cocteau-Twins kind of voice for Blue Velvet’s main theme. But Cruise surprised him, restraining her delivery by imagining she was the soloist in a boy’s choir. Lynch directed her to sing like an angel; later in their collaborative relationship, he advised her to sing as though she were on the brink of orgasm.
And so, alongside Lynch and Badalamenti, Cruise was creatively reborn, seeming to arrive Birth of Venus-style by an otherworldly spotlight onto a dark stage. Her first album, Floating Into the Night, arrived in 1989, with lyrics written by Lynch and arrangements by Badalamenti. But her breakthrough came the following year with the premiere of “Twin Peaks”; on stage at the Roadhouse near the end of the pilot episode, Cruise performed “Falling” and “The Nightingale,” two weightless, transportive dream pop songs from her debut album. In black leather with cherry-red lips and nails, she gave the impression of an angel who’d awoken on earth on the back of a stranger’s Harley Davidson. In the rare moments she opened her eyes, her gaze drifted longingly above the audience towards somewhere unreachable in the distance.
Cruise’s best-known songs appear on that first album; “Falling” even cracked the Billboard charts, a rarity for a song from a television soundtrack. Its follow-up, 1993’s The Voice of Love, never quite achieved the same cult status. But its 25-year anniversary reissue via Sacred Bones makes a case for the album as, if not as vital as her debut, a captivating chapter in her beguiling and sometimes confusing catalog. (Cruise’s subsequent albums—2002’s The Art of Being a Girl and 2011’s My Secret Life—depart from Badalamenti’s jukebox noir to venture into some of the strangest trip-hop I have ever heard.) Floating Into the Night dealt mostly with love’s power to stun, sending Cruise down a rabbit hole of desire. The Voice of Love follows this dizzying trajectory, where love and loss are flip sides of the coin—in Cruise’s world, it is love’s fleeting nature that gives it meaning.