Eternal Rhythm: Julee Cruise's Floating Into The Night
When Floating Into the Night was released in 1989, it barely rippled the surface. Too strange for pop radio, too ethereal for the indie underground, it lived—fittingly—in a kind of limbo. But in retrospect, this album didn’t fail to land; it simply floated above everything else. An eerie collaboration between vocalist Julee Cruise, composer Angelo Badalamenti, and filmmaker David Lynch, it now reads as both a quietly radical work of ambient pop and a necessary prologue to Twin Peaks, which would air the following year and use several of its tracks.
At first listen, it seems deceptively simple. Cruise’s voice—clean, unforced, almost affectless—is set against gauzy synth pads, tremolo guitars, and a kind of narcotized jazz rhythm section. But listen closely and the unease seeps in. “Falling” is not just the Twin Peaks theme—it’s a love song slowed to the point of paralysis. “Into the Night” sounds like a lullaby delivered from the afterlife. “The World Spins” is grief rendered in slow motion, anchored by a descending chord pattern that feels like the floor giving way. Badalamenti’s arrangements are minimalist, but full of ghostly signifiers: vibraphone, brushed snares, strings that swell and retreat like an undertow. Lynch’s lyrics, meanwhile, are both childlike and ominous—full of nightingales, shadows, secrets whispered in dreams.
The album emerged out of Lynch’s dissatisfaction with traditional film scores. While working on Blue Velvet, he asked Badalamenti to compose music with a more open, surreal quality. Cruise—then a backing singer and occasional Broadway performer—was brought in to demo “Mysteries of Love” after Lynch rejected the slick adult-contemporary takes they’d initially auditioned. Her delivery stunned them. “She sang it like an angel,” Badalamenti would later recall. What followed was a long-form mood piece disguised as an LP—nine tracks that feel less like songs than scenes from a shared hallucination.
Floating Into the Night is not merely Lynchian; it is Lynch—the sonic equivalent of his visual language. It refracts 1950s nostalgia through a thick fog of reverb and dread. There’s no percussion driving these songs forward, no climaxes, no release. Everything drifts, the dream always tipping into nightmare.
Cruise, for her part, never received the recognition she deserved. The record was credited to her, but she was often framed as a vessel for the visions of two men. And yet it’s her voice—fragile, floating, unknowable—that defines the record. She brought a kind of calm to Lynch’s chaos, making the horror feel intimate and the sublime feel personal. When she appeared in Twin Peaks, singing “The World Spins” in the Roadhouse as lives came undone, it was clear: she wasn’t just singing to the characters. She was singing through them.
Today, Floating Into the Night is regularly cited as a touchstone by artists working in ambient pop, dream pop, shoegaze, and experimental soundtrack composition. It prefigured the ghostly restraint of Grouper, the velvet hush of Beach House, the Lynch collaborations of Chrystabell and Johnny Jewel. But it remains singular—an album that belongs to no movement, that seems to exist out of time.
Julee Cruise passed away in 2022. In interviews, she often spoke candidly about how sidelined she felt in later years, about her health struggles and her frustration at being remembered for only one role. But her voice—disembodied, elegant, suspended in twilight—still speaks volumes. In a culture that demands constant explanation, her greatest performance left space for ambiguity, stillness, and the strange comfort of the unresolved.
This is not background music. It is music that watches you, patiently, from the edge of the dream.