Listen, I’ve started watching THE WIRE and I can’t stop. I think after tonight I might just focus the rest of the week on sharing that much-anticipated Adventures In Dating story I’ve been promising you for a month. Now that the story has a definitive beginning, middle and end I can write it up quickly and post it in three or four installments. Which is perfect, because I want to spend all my free time watching THE WIRE now. Which is why you’re getting an album download tonight instead of a real blog entry.
You all know Julee Cruise, right? You’ve watched Twin Peaks? If you haven’t, you need to get on that immediately. Just make sure you skip the really dumb episodes from season two, or else you’ll lose momentum and you probably won’t make it through to the end of the show. That’s almost what happened when we watched it. Luckily Tom knew the trick to skipping through the dumb episodes and we stayed pretty much on track the whole time. You’d be wise to find a Tom to guide you like a sherpa through the peaks (see what I did there!?) and valleys of Twin Peaks.
Floating Into The Night is the debut album by Julee Cruise. Wikipedia calls her style of music “dream pop,” but I like to think of her as the godmother of chill wave. And I fucking hate that term. Chill wave? What the fuck? Does literally every piece of music have to have a genre or title pinned to it so that tangentially related things can be grouped together under and easy-to-digest heading? That’s bullshit!
But seriously, if we’re going to accept “chill wave” as a legitimate musical style, I defy you to find someone who exemplifies it better than Julee. Can you find someone who was doing it before ’89? Unlikely. I think the first time I saw Nite Jewel I went home and told everyone they sounded like Julee Cruise. Then I think I corrected myself and said, “No, it’s more like…Nite Jewel sounds like my idea of what Julee Cruise sounds like.” Way to go, closed-minded Evan! Don’t bother describing the music, just compare it to something that’s been done before. Very smart. No wonder you’re making the big bucks as a popular rock crit–
Oops.
Because Cruise is tied up in the whole Twin Peaks thing, it should come as no surprise that the songs were written and produced by David Lynch and his composer partner Angelo Badalamenti. Or maybe you didn’t know that, and I just blew your mind. The B-man (that’s what I call him) wrote the music, and Lynch provided the lyrics. The two singles to be released from the album were “Falling” (heavily featured on Twin Peaks — the instrumental version is the theme song to the show) and “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”. Not to be outdone by his own television series, Lynch also featured the song “Mysteries Of Love” in his film Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet, by the way, includes some of the greatest quotes in movie history. “Don’t toast to my health, toast to my fuck!” Oh, Frank…
Man was Laura Dern good in that movie.
Not to be left out of the conversation (because they want to so badly be a part of every music-related conversation) Pitchfork voted “Falling” as the 146th greatest song of the ’90s. Even though the album came out in September of ’89. Go Pitchfork!
By the way, the best part of watching Twin Peaks was finding out after it was over that Ilya had accidentally ruined the whole thing for us during the first episode as he nonchalantly revealed the biggest secret imaginable. We just thought was his idea of a joke. I felt really fucking dense when I found that out. Funny stuff! In other Twin Peaks/Julee Cruise related news, the last time Phoebe came into the store I forced her to buy this record. $2.99, how could anybody pass up such a good deal!? I’m sure she’s broken it over her knee and thrown it out her bedroom window by now.
Julee Cruise
Floating Into The Night
Warner Bros., 1989
MediaFire DL Link
01. Floating
02. Falling
03. I Remember
04. Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart
05. Mysteries Of Love
06. Into The Night
07. I Float Alone
08. The Nightingale
09. The Swan
10. The World Spins
June 14th, 2011
The best version of Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart is called the Acapella Mix and it’s only available on the vinyl EP; the CD EP doesn’t have it. The “Tibetan” mix is also pretty good.
June 14th, 2011
“Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” is actually how I found your blog, SwanGuy.
It used to be that the only music I listened to was straight-ahead rock and blues. Then one day a wrong turn on the Internet led me to a site called panoptican.org that addidentally granted download access to a cache of a hundred-odd MP3 files in all *kinds* of random music genres that I’d never be caught dead listening to: rap, power pop, drone, hip-hop, post-rock, post-punk, noise, alt-rock, you name it.
I forget why, but I downloaded every song and was powering through them one by one through my headphones player, not really enjoying the experience, but grimly determined to get through them all, and eventually sappy old “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” starts up, and I recognize the singer’s voice from Twin Peaks, and I’m sort of half-listening to the song when suddenly this discordant saxophone breaks in, and it’s not what I’d consider *real* music but holy hell it’s HEARTBREAKING, and like a thunderclap, for the first time in my life, I GET it. Then that song is over and some off-kilter tune by The Harvey Girls starts up and I GET THAT TOO. Then a RZA song plays, and I GET THAT TOO. All of a sudden, stuff that I’d always written off as willfully pretentious, nonmusical crap MAKES SENSE.
So after I listen to all the Panoptican songs twice and my mind’s thoroughly blown I’m yearning for MORE MORE MORE, and I go to the Hype Machine and start plugging in the names of the artists of the Panoptican tunes, and one of them — I think it was Boris — leads me to Swan Fungus, and I start listening to what’s there, and holy hell, my mind gets blown AGAIN. And here we are!