Floating into the Night
Floating into the Night is the debut studio album by American singer Julee Cruise. It was released on September 12, 1989, by Warner Bros. Records, and features compositions and production by Angelo Badalamenti and film director David Lynch. Songs from the album were featured in Lynch's projects Blue Velvet (1986), Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990), and Twin Peaks (1990–1991).
Floating into the Night
September 12, 1989
Excalibur Sound (New York City)
47:56
The album peaked at number 74 on the US Billboard 200 following the success of the Twin Peaks TV series in 1990. Lead single "Falling" reached the top 10 of the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number seven and spending 12 weeks in total on the chart.
Background[edit]
Filmmaker David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti's collaboration with Cruise first came about during the scoring for Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet, in which a key scene was intended to feature This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren" by Tim Buckley. With the rights to the song proving prohibitively expensive, it was suggested that Badalamenti compose a pop song in the same style and recruit a vocalist with a haunting, ethereal voice. Badalamenti recommended Cruise, who had sung in a New York theater workshop Badalamenti had produced. The result was the track "Mysteries of Love". Lynch and Badalamenti were impressed with the results, and elected to record subsequent tracks with Cruise.[1]
Release[edit]
Floating into the Night was released on September 12, 1989 on Warner Bros. Records,[7] although the album was originally set for release in late April.[9] It was originally issued on CD, LP and cassette.[12] Two singles were released from the album: "Falling" and "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart".[13] Floating into the Night has since been reissued on several occasions. The album received a CD reissue in Europe in October 1998,[14] a 180-gram LP repressing by Plain Recordings in the United States in October 2014 and a separate 180-gram LP repressing by Music on Vinyl in Europe in February 2015.[15][16]
Tracks from Floating into the Night were used in other projects by Lynch. "Mysteries of Love" had been previously featured in Blue Velvet.[17] "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart", "Into the Night", "I Float Alone" and "The World Spins" were performed in the 1990 Lynch production Industrial Symphony No. 1.[18] "Falling", "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart", "Into the Night", "The Nightingale" and "The World Spins" appeared in Twin Peaks, a television series co-created by Lynch. Lynch's lyrics on the album have been the subject of analysis from fans and academic studies of the series. In The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, academic John Richardson said that Cruise's considerable use of reverb makes her sound as if she sings "from a distance that clearly parallels the distance between the other world that [Twin Peaks character] Laura Palmer has fallen into and the primary diegetic world of the other characters"; he considered the lyrics to "Falling"—an instrumental version of which was used as the theme song to the series—as "reinforc[ing] this impression since they can easily be understood as representing Laura's point of view".[5] Cruise, however, considers Lynch's lyrics to have been written about his then-partner, Italian actress and model Isabella Rossellini.[3]
"The World Spins" was featured on the soundtrack to the 2003 film The Company.[19]