Julie Christensen: Press

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- Thanks to Joe Woodard of Household INK (Dec 12, 2007)

Background Story Press

ojai LEONARD COHEN SONGBIRDS ON THE WIRE

OJAI’S PERLA BATALLA AND JULIE CHRISTENSEN TOURED THE WORLD WITH LEONARD COHEN, SINGING HIS SONGS. NOW THEY SING THEIR OWN.

There's a moment near the end of the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm Your Man when Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen are singing Cohen's "Anthem," and the film cuts to a reaction shot of the maestro himself. He is smiling broadly, seemingly delighted to see his former backup singers claim the spotlight. But there’s a twist, because Cohen was not present in the Sydney separately and inserted later.

Batalla and Christensen were in Australia to participate in a Cohen tribute concert, which two Ojai singer-songwriters spent most of the concert providing backing vocals for the headliners, including such luminaries as Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle. But separately and together, Batalla and Christensen held their own in that exalted company. Julie’s solo performance of highlight. Perla’s version of “Bird on The Wire” was a second-act triumph. Then, as the evening approached its end, they came together to do “Anthem” as a duet.

They had sung it with Cohen many times. Now they sang it by themselves, to pay tribute to Cohen — and his smiling reaction comes across as a tribute of sorts to Batalla and Christensen as they made his song their own, at least for this night:

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in

Julie Christensen had sung about bells before. Back in high school in Newton, Iowa, she played Marian the Librarian in The Music Man, which — appropriately enough — is set in small-town Iowa. Late in the second act she launched into “Till There Was You,” Marian’s big solo turn: “There were bells, on the hill, but I never heard them ringing ...

No, I never heard them at all, till there was you.” The applause was gratifying, especially for a girl who already knew she wanted to be a singer.

Lots of kids harbor that ambition, but Julie had a voice that separated her from the tuneless masses. People noticed. Even so, starring in the high-school musical is one thing, and committing yourself to music as your career is quite another. After graduation in 1974, Julie enrolled at the University of Iowa with the idea that she would learn Chinese, major in Asian studies and perhaps become a diplomat. Then she met a real- life music man, who invited her to join his country-rock band. One thing led to another, and within a year she had ditched school and was out on the road, singing for her supper.

By 1977 she had landed in Austin, where she gradually evolved into a jazz chanteuse. “Julie would sit in with us sometimes,” recalls Roscoe Beck, who played bass in a jazz- fusion band called Passenger. “She would sing jazz standards, but other things too.”

Then as now, Austin hosted a richly diverse music scene. But Los Angeles was the industry capital. Christensen headed west in 1981, got a job waiting tables at the Bullock’s Wilshire Tea Room, and began making the Street Bar and Grill, where a swing band called Swingstreet was in residence.

“I remember the night Julie came by — she had just moved from Austin to L.A.,” Miriam Cutler says. “The minute I heard her, I said, ‘Wow!’”

Back then she was fronting Swingstreet, which had a regular four-nights-a-week gig at backup singers who joined with Cutler to create three-part harmony vocals, a la the Andrews Sisters. When one of her backups the slot. Which is how this Iowa transplant found herself sharing a microphone with a native Angeleno named Perla Batalla.

Batalla grew up in Venice and Santa Monica, where her family owned a record store on Lincoln Boulevard that catered to the Mexican community. Like her father, a vocalist with mariachi bands, Perla loved to sing. But she had a different genre in mind for herself. “I wanted to sing opera,” she says.

Batalla grew up in Santa Monica. She joined the school choir and explored the classical choral repertoire, along with challenging pieces by modernist composers like Charles Ives. She also studied opera privately. Eventually she realized that her voice was not quite right for opera. But other options beckoned.

The actor (and current longtime Ojai resident) Robert Brown told her about a scholarship opportunity at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in West Hollywood. So Batalla left home at 16 to study acting and dance at Strasberg. Acting was not really her passion, but it was a path and she took it. And in due course, she did land a job in Hollywood — not as an actor, but as a staffer in Norman Lear’s production company. “I started out answering phones for Suzanne Somers,” she recalls.

Lear was producing a number of hit shows, including All in the Family, Maude, and The Jeffersons. Batalla thrived in this star- studded environment, and worked her way up the ladder. Her duties eventually included the job of staff photographer and photo editor. “It was a crazy ride,” she recalls. “And at night I sang — four nights a week.” where she was backing up Miriam Cutler.

Batalla had given up on opera but she still loved to sing, and the Swingstreet gig was a lot of fun. “That’s when I met Julie,” she says. “We connected like sisters the minute we started working together.”

They're very different, stylistically", Cutler notes. "Julie, for me, has sort of the soul of a jazz person. ... Perla has this rich, rich voice, and can really touch people. I’m always amazed how low she can sing.”

Christensen, who is more of a soprano, soared with great intensity. Batalla brought a glorious, well-grounded contralto to the mix. The blend was something special. So was their personal chemistry. The two women clicked as a team, and not just on swing numbers. If, say, the rock band Cheap Trick needed two they continued singing with Swingstreet.

And soon they became involved in another Cutler project, a novelty act called Angel and the Reruns.

The idea came from Cutler’s friend Hillary Carlip, who fronted the band as Angel. Batalla, Christensen and a third woman, Nancy Scher, comprised the by Carlip and Cutler, was “Buffy Come Back,” a satirical tribute to the late child star Anissa Jones, who had played Buffy on the 1960s sitcom Family Affair and later died of a drug overdose. (Sample lyric: “Buffy, Buffy come back to me/Why’d you have to go and OD?”) Carlip as Angel affected a punk attitude, while the three Reruns dressed up like the Supremes. When “Buffy” came out, they donned their bouffant-style wigs, slathered themselves with mascara and invaded the KROQ-FM studios to ask Rodney Bingenheimer to play the song on his show, “Rodney on the ROQ.”

“Julie and Perla were great, they really got into it,” Cutler says. “It was really fun.”

“Buffy” became a cult hit of the “Dr. Demento” variety, and the band went on to Bachelor Party, posing the musical question, “Why Do Good Girls Like Bad Boys?” But Angel and the Reruns never took off, and Julie soon moved on to a band with much better prospects: The Divine Horsemen.

She also married the band’s leader, Chris Desjardins, well regarded in L.A.’s punk rock scene as the founder of the Flesh Eaters. Better known as Chris D., he had dissolved his punk band to go in a new direction. The Divine Horsemen had a rootsier sound that anticipated the advent of alt country. The group put out several albums during the mid 1980s, with Christensen co-writing some songs and sharing the spotlight with Desjardins. She also embraced the rock- star lifestyle, to a point where it became a problem for her. So she did something about it. “I got sober and left the band,” she says.

Now it was early 1988, and Christensen was at loose ends, both professionally and personally. (She had split with Desjardins as well as the band.)

She was planning to record a solo album, which seemed like the logical next step for her career. Then one day the phone rang. It was an old friend from Austin, Roscoe Beck, calling to ask whether she would go on tour with Leonard Cohen.

Beck’s band, Passenger, had backed Cohen on two previous tours, and Beck had produced some tracks on Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man. Now Beck was putting together the band for Cohen’s upcoming world tour, and he needed to hire two backup singers. In

particular he was looking for someone to replace Jennifer Warnes, who had sung on I’m Your Man but would not be doing the tour.

“Julie just kind of came to mind instantly,” Beck says, "I knew what a fine singer she was.”

Christensen was not at this point a Cohen devotee, but she knew and liked a number of his songs — especially the ones in The Judy Collins Songbook, which she remembered from her teenage years back in Newton. And she of course knew him by reputation: the distinguished poet and novelist from Montreal who had reinvented himself in the 1960s as a masterful singer-songwriter, famous for crafting eloquently mordant lyrics and singing them in a raspy, sepulchral baritone. Internationally, his following was considerable. In America he was less a pop small. And it had grown noticeably since the 1986 release of Warnes’ Famous Blue Raincoat, a well-received album of Cohen covers produced by Roscoe Beck.

Christensen hesitated. After co-fronting the Divine Horsemen, taking a job as a backup vocalist would be, well, a step backward. On the other hand, singing with Cohen certainly had done no harm to Warnes’ career. Julie decided to accept Beck’s offer. But she still had to be approved by Cohen himself. She met him at his house in Hancock Park and sang him a snippet of “Suzanne.” He stopped her before she got very far.

“That’s wrong, darling,” he told her. “But let’s go have lunch.”

"I thought I was sunk," Julie says. In fact, she already had passed the audition. “Leonard liked her immediately,” Beck says. “She was pretty much in from the moment she met him.”

Beck still had one more backup-singer slot none seemed right. Meanwhile, rehearsals had begun, and the first concerts were not far off. “I was beginning to get a little frustrated,” Beck says. “I remember almost in desperation asking Julie, ‘Can you think of anyone else?’ And she mentioned Perla.”

Actually, Christensen had mentioned Batalla earlier in the process, but Beck had not picked up on the suggestion. Now she reminded him, and he made the call.

Perla in 1988 still was singing in clubs — mostly jazz and swing — but she also had gone back to school and was thinking about becoming a lawyer. She and Julie had lost touch during the Divine Horsemen years. Nor did she know all that much about Cohen’s music. But when Beck called, she went down to the Tower Records store on the Sunset Strip and bought some Cohen albums, including the newly released I’m Your Man. It begins with “First We Take Manhattan:”

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/ For trying to change the system from within/ I’m coming now, I'm coming to reward them/ First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

“This is a serious musician,” Batalla thought. Intrigued, she pursued the opportunity, not really thinking that it would lead to an offer. She showed up for the audition all in white, to find Cohen dressed all in black. “I was comfortable right away with him,” Perla says. And she and Julie found that their voices blended as well as ever. “We didn’t have to talk about what we were going to do,” she recalls. “We just did it.”

“And there was the magic we were looking for,”Beck says.

Batalla was offered the gig, a three-month tour of Europe, to begin almost immediately. “I knew this was really a life-changing moment for me,” she says. She accepted, quit her day job, and applied for a passport. “And we were off.”

As it turned out, they took Berlin first and Manhattan after. The European tour was followed by an equally long North American tour. “We were on the road for seven months in 1988,” Julie says. Both tours were triumphs, thanks in no small part to Christensen and Batalla.

“Julie of course has a wonderful voice and soars,” Beck says. “Perla brought in the more sultry aspect of it, and was the tenor to Julie’s soprano. They blended well and complemented each other well.”

And together they complemented Cohen both vocally and visually, adding what Beck calls “a great sensual aspect” to the performances. The statuesque blonde, the sultry brunette and the world-weary roué comprised a classic cabaret trio, and they put Cohen’s songs over with panache.

“It’s very emotional music,” Beck says. “To really perform it well, you do have to let yourself get caught up in it.” Batalla and Christensen put their heart and soul into every performance, embracing Cohen’s music with the fervor of converts to a cause.

“When you’re part of something important, which I feel Leonard and his says.

She, Cohen and Christensen reprised their act in 1993, touring in support of Cohen’s album The Future (to which Perla and Julie had contributed backing vocals on several tracks, including “Anthem.”)

“We both have pretty big vocal ranges, and though Perla tends towards the alto and I to soprano, we both switched parts a lot throughout Leonard’s repertoire, depending on the optimum timbre needed to make the best artistic move,” Christensen says. “As a but also a sweet, uncanny, almost ethereal upper range that is positively angelic. Our blend was often greater than the sum of its parts, creating a sound that we were often told sounded like more than just two people. And we were pretty telepathic about coming up with new parts in all the different situations in which we worked.”

“It was truly inspiring to sing with Julie,” Perla says. “Always has been.”

Then, in 1994, Cohen broke up the act. He retreated to a Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy near Los Angeles, where he would remain for the next five years. It was time for the backup singers to fly solo.

By this point, Julie had married the actor John Diehl (Miami Vice, The Shield) and given birth to a son. Perla had married the chef Claud Mann (soon to become the co-host of Dinner and a Movie on TBS) and given birth to a daughter. Both women already were developing their own separate careers, and both were writing their own songs, with Cohen’s encouragement. While the master sequestered himself in his monastery, Batalla and Christensen emerged as independent artists.

Perla released her debut album, Perla Batalla, in 1994, followed by Mestiza (1998), Heaven and Earth (2000), Discoteca Batalla (2003), Bird on the Wire (2005), We Three Kings (2008) and Gracias de la Vida album was Love is Driving (1996), followed by Soul Driver (2000), Something Familiar(2006) and Where the Fireworks Are (2007). Perla has embraced her Latina heritage in her music, and also recorded a Christmas album and a collection of Cohen songs. Julie has taken a characteristically eclectic approach; her albums run the gamut stylistically from pop to folk rock to jazz.

Both women expect to release new albums early in 2012. Julie describes her upcoming record, Weeds Like Us, as a rootsy, new album, tentatively called Crazy Love, Leonard Cohen will also be putting out a new record early in the year: Old Ideas, his separate career paths, Perla and Julie still seem to operate in sync with their old boss.

Batalla and Christensen, like Cohen, retreated from Los Angeles during the 1990s — not to a monastery, but to Ojai.

“I was complaining about L.A. and where we lived — there was, like, a meth dealer next to us in Van Nuys." Christensen recalls. A drummer she knew suggested Ojai as an alternative. Julie and John visited the valley, fell in love with it, and bought a house in the East End. “Perla and Claud helped us move on Thanksgiving Day of 1994,” Julie says.

Three years later, Batalla and Mann followed suit, with Julie’s encouragement. “I moved to Ojai because of Julie, basically,” Perla says. “I had a baby and I didn’t want to live in Hollywood.” Over the years, both women have been active members of the community, and of course they continue to make music, both on stage and in the recording studio. (Perla and Claud are also co-publishers, along with Jane Handel, of Edible Ojai & Ventura County Magazine.) Julie’s son graduated from the Besant Hill School at Happy Valley, and is now a freshman in the Film Conservatory at the State University of New York at Purchase. Perla’s daughter is a senior at the Thacher School. “I can’t imagine raising my kid anywhere else,” Perla says.

As for Cohen, he finally emerged form his monastery in 1999, but did not return to touring for another decade. Duing the Maestro's long absence from the stage, a producer named Hal Willner filled the gap by staging a series of all-star Cohen tribute shows from 2003 to 2006, and he invited Batalla and Christensen to participate. Periodically they would leave Ojai and fly off to New York or Ireland or England to perform Cohen songs with the likes of Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. In January 2005 Lunsen for her I’mYour Man documentary. Many who saw that show or watched the Batalla’s and Christensen’s performance – readily available on YouTube -- is both a tribute to the man who wrote the song, and a declaration of independence by the women who helped bring it to life.

“You have to have a certain depth to perform that kind of song well, and they do,” says Ojai singer Julija Zonic, who often performs Cohen songs with her musical partner Smitty West. Christensen and Batalla clearly have the chops to do justice to Cohen’s challenging oeuvre, Zonic says, and not just because they have beautiful voices: “If they were not intellectually strong and emotionally mature, as they are, then it would not work.”

When Cohen finally returned to the stage in 2008, he did so with a vengeance: The tour continued intermittently for three years. With their children still at home and their solo careers in gear, Batalla and Christensen could not make that kind of commitment, so they did not do the tour. “That was a very tough decision to make,” Perla says, “because my favorite music to sing is Leonard’s.”

Nevertheless, their Cohen connection endures.

"They've been a significant contribution to Leonard’s music,” Roscoe Beck says. “They’ll always be associated with that.”

Mark Lewis - The Ojai Quarterly (Dec 10, 2011)

HOME SPUN from Ventura County Reporter Julie Christensen
By Brett Leigh Dicks 03/19/2009

Divine rites After spending five years in Austin, TX, where her famed weekly performances attracted various local and visiting musical luminaries, Christensen headed to the West Coast. In 1983 she joined forces with Chris D (the Flesh Eaters) to form the Divine Horsemen. A forerunner in the then undiscovered realm of alternative country, the band recorded and released three albums and one EP and included among its ranks the likes of Kid Congo Powers (the Cramps), Jeffery Lee Pierce (the Gun Club) and Wall of Voodooâ€™s Stan Ridgeway. The band broke up in 1988, but not before carving a musical path that everyone from the Jayhawks to Ryan Adams have since followed.

Cooing with Cohen Despite establishing an indelible presence on the West Coast music scene with the Divine Horsemen, it was Leonard Cohen who took Christensenâ€™s diverse vocal talent to the world stage. Not only was Christensen vocalizing in support of Leonard Cohen in 1988 when the legendary wordsmith released his seminal album, Iâ€™m Your Man, but she also joined him on his 1993 follow-up, The Future. Cohen took both albums on the road, and Christensen â€” along with fellow county songstress Perla Batalla â€” harmonized with him for three world tours. You can follow their escapades on the road in the BBC documentary Songs From the Life of Leonard Cohen.

A beautiful thing When Hal Wilner curated his famed Leonard Cohen tribute concerts, Came So Far For Beauty, his shrewdest casting ploy was enlisting the services of Cohenâ€™s two long-serving backing vocalists â€” Christensen and Batalla. Not only did Christensen share the vocalizing with Batalla on â€œAnthem,â€ but she also dueted with Lou Reed on â€œJoan of Arcâ€ and joined Nick Cave on his rendition of â€œSuzanne.â€ The initial performance of this tribute series was staged at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Festival of Sydney, and the show subsequently provided the foundation for Liam Lunsenâ€™s 2005 Mel Gibson-produced cinematic love letter to Cohen, Iâ€™m Your Man, in which Christensen is, of course, prominently featured.

Igniting fireworks Her latest recorded endeavor, Where the Fireworks Are, had no shortage of songs for radio to delight in. But when a radio station in Williamsburg, VA â€” which just happens to be home to one of the largest naval bases in the country â€” got its hands on the record, it wasnâ€™t the introspective ballad â€œSomething Prettyâ€ that the station picked up, but rather the politically charged anti-war title track. â€œItâ€™s funny some of the places where certain songs have struck a chord,â€ Christensen said at the time. She was no doubt greatly amused to then find the album being played not only across the United States and Canada, but also on the European Americana network and on similar stations in both Australia and New Zealand.

Acoustic alchemy Having immaculately crafted the definitive studio album with Where the Fireworks Are, Christensenâ€™s plan is to strip things back for her next recorded venture. In wanting to impart a sound more akin to the musicâ€™s live incarnation, she is teaming up with Kenny Edwards (Linda Ronstadt/ Stone Poneys), who will helm the albumâ€™s production. It was of course no coincidence the two shared the stage at the recent Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, where Christensen performed seven showcases. Having already entertained the thought of doing an acoustic album herself, when Edwards made the suggestion of working together, not only was it the perfect affirmation, but also the perfect teaming.

Julie Christensen will perform at Theater 150 in Ojai, on Saturday, March 21. The show starts 8 p.m., tickets are $20. Call 646 4300, www.stonecupid.com
brett_leigh-dicks@yahoo.com

Brett Leigh Dicks - Ventura County Reporter (Mar 19, 2009)

Julie Christensen

1. What inspires you?
Emotional Triggers will cause me to process things by writing
something down. Walking in the beautiful nature I'm lucky to be
surrounded by inspires me. And listening to some of my favorite
things challenges me to get up off it and create on my own.

2. What would be the three main rules if you ran your own country?
Respect. Dignity. Compassion.

3. If you could swap places with anyone for one day, whom would you
choose and why?
Today that might be my 60-year-old yoga teacher, Ingrid, who is a
great beauty, an artist, and and activist. Of course, I'd have to be
able to do all the asanas she can, and I'm not there yet! On another
day, it might be someone else.

4. Tell us one thing that your fans would be surprised to know about
you.
I took Chinese and Asian studies my first year of college and made
the Dean's List.

5. If you could name a planet, what would you name it and why?
Aiode, one of the three original muses--she is the muse of song. And
only Venus is a female name. How come they stopped naming them female
after that? Earth should also be Gaia; it's so much prettier and
stronger a name for this beautiful planet. Maybe we'd take care of
her better if she had that name.

6. What is your favorite book?
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
It's like traveling in a dream of Old California...I'd missed it when
it was first around. Timeless.

7. If money was no object, what hobby would you like to try?
Horseback Riding--I did it when I was really young and only a few
times since. Generally I haven't warmed to the culture around it, but
I'd like to explore it, because it's a great feeling to bond with
those beautiful animals.

8. If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and
why?
I've never been to Japan, and would like to see Japan outside the
cities. But I've been to Venice five times, and would go back there
again in a heartbeat.

9. If you could be at any one event, which one would you choose and why?
I'd love to be at the inauguration of Barack Obama's presidency.

10. What is the theme song for the movie that is being made about
your life?
Oh, that's a hard one! The movie inside my mind is trippy and
convoluted.
As for a song everybody knows, it might be "Over the Rainbow" because
I run on hope.
And I wrote a song years ago with a couple other people called "Song that Might've Been" about staying in right now and not letting
chances go by...

Visit Julie's store for her latest release
Atlantic Monthly posted a cool clip in honor of the election, and Julie was part of this 1993 video of a great Leonard Cohen song.

e-interview with Julie - The Connextion (Nov 8, 2008)

Julie Christensen: On the Road Again

Julie Christensen has had an amazing career. Having sung in just about every style possible, Julie has worked with legends like Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed, as well as her own bands like The Divine Horsemen. On July 4th she will perform at the Roskilde Rock Festival in Denmark with Van Dyke Parks, Gaby Moreno and the Danish National Radio Orchestra.

What made you want to be a singer?

I don’t remember not wanting to be a singer. Music equaled emotion for me. I remember going to see “Lady Sings the Blues” and turning to my friend Jolene Yoakam in Iowa when we were about thirteen and saying: “I don’t care how hard it is! That’s what I want to do!”

Did you go to a conservatory?

No, bands! My brothers had bands before they ever got out of high school. I set up a recital in my senior year of classical music with my friend Becky Peterson. But when I was getting ready to go to college, I didn’t want music school to ruin it for me. At that time, there were no jazz vocal or pop vocal disciplines at any school. You had to do operatic works and lieder, and I didn’t want to go that way. My brothers were playing Little Feat and Ry Cooder....

So Wagner wasn’t up your alley?

Well I did it later, I even auditioned at The Met, but at the time, I didn’t want it to ruin it, so I decided: “I’m going to be a diplomat!” I was good at languages, and I started learning Chinese and Asian studies and left home with a full scholarship from the Maytag Company. During the first year, I met a man named Dan Keeley – (Longshot), and he invited me to come and audition. We had a great time although I never got paid more than $15 for the gig!! (But then I had a $55/month apartment in Iowa City.) We would open for John Prine, Asleep at the Wheel.... After I went on the road for awhile, I decided I didn’t want to do those pop/disco gigs any more, so I reconnected with some friends in Austin, including the guitar player from Longshot, and moved to Austin. After a while, I started playing with the guys from Passenger. They had a meeting with Joni Mitchell, as she was setting up a tour, but she decided to go another way. But Leonard (Cohen) was there, and he said: “I’ll take ‘em!”

Then Jennifer Warnes introduced me to Van Dyke in the mid-80s. I had my punk rock band then (Divine Horsemen). I actually turned down my first Van Dyke gig for my punk rock band! I’m so glad he continued to call me! Duh! But it was my path – and we got some attention in the LA scene. But I did work with Van Dyke on Tokyo Rose and some other things, and I’m so happy that he called me to join him on this project! It’s with his protégé, Gaby Moreno, and they’re doing this whole Pan-American thing....

Yes, it sounds very interesting!

Yes, there are a few of us traveling over there Gaby, myself, Grant Geissman, Van Dyke, and Doug Lacey is the other background singer, but he also plays steel drum and accordion. He played on a Divine Horsemen album.It’s one gig on the 4th of July with the Danish National Radio Orchestra, but we are looking to do more light “pop” works to do with orchestras

who, as you know, are looking for things to do.... Van Dyke’s orchestrations are just beautiful! He did the music for Popeye, and for one of the Chinatowns. It’s gorgeous!

We played Roskilde with Leonard a couple of times in 1988 and 1993. It’s been going for over thirty years. It’s like a Coachella festival times three, just a huge rock festival.

What was it like touring with Leonard Cohen?

It was amazing. It was at a time in my life when I really needed to regroup, recover, and gather myself. I had the idea that I needed to be of service through the music - that was really important. I felt I really had to tell my truth on stage, or else, run. But I planted myself and just tried to be in the moment, and it was really good! There’s a meditative quality of doing a three-hour show, that is unbeatable! The ’88 tour really had a glow about it. Leonard would call it a “constellation of events.”

How did you get to work with Lou Reed?

Laurie Anderson was part of the first Leonard Cohen tribute, and she knew she wasn’t going to be able to make the one in Sydney. Hal, who was making arrangements for Leonard, asked me if I would sing on “Joan of Arc”, but he still had to run it by Lou Reed. I didn’t even know in rehearsal with Lou if we were going to perform it. He’s kind of mercurial, really sweet at his core, but he has this reputation for being singularly intense. So we finally figured it out, we didn’t do any “la-las”. And instead, when it came time to do these “la-las” in Joan of Arc, I kind of did these “cataralls” that I did with The Divine Horsemen, which he liked, so we performed it that way.

What was your favorite gig?

That would be when we played Seville with Leonard in 1988. At the end of the gig (and my weep-o-meter always goes when I tell this story) we usually did this song based on a Frederico

Garcia Lorca poem called “Take this Waltz”, a beautiful piece, and in Seville, people were waving white handkerchiefs during that song, which is reserved for the matador. That was a big blessing from the people to us. Leonard came back after the encores, and said “I don’t know if you know how heavy that was, kids!” And that set the tone for the rest of the tour. We

felt imbued by that, like it gave us permission to be magical. It was a really special time.

What’s next for you beyond the tour?

I’m making my fifth record. They’ve all been different; it’s my blessing and my curse - I just love all kinds of music. I’ve been talking to Kenny Edwards for a couple of years, and we’re going to do an album of what you would get if I did a salon or house concert. So I’ve been raising money for that on my website (www.stonecupid.com) and on Kickstarter.com. The deadline is June 30th, so if anybody out there can help, I’ll do right by you!! I’ve gathered most of the songs, some are covers, but most of them are mine. It’s a set of bittersweet songs that I really like. And usually I produce my own records, but this time I’m having someone else do it.

Any thing else you’d like to talk about?

I’d like to talk about how important it is to come out and hear music and support musicians. We’re not in this for the money! We would be foolhardy to be in it for the money. We need those interactions, we need the other musicians, and we need the audience. We can’t just do it in a vacuum at home on our computer and post it on YouTube! That’s not what music was like when I came up. I was listening to vinyl, and now people listen to music in ones and zeros. There’s just nothing to compare with live music.

Sally Barr - Music! The Sounds of Santa Barbara (Jun 25, 2010)

Press for Fireworks, Something Familiar

The great leap forward: Julie Christensen takes us to Where the Fireworks Areâ€¨â€¨

~ By BRETT LEIGH DICKS ~

For Julie Christensen, music is all about being heard. No matter if her voice is soaring passionately in complement to Leonard Cohenâ€™s laconic rasp or brazenly recounting her disillusionment with the current state of the world on her latest album, Christensenâ€™s musical desires all stem from a steadfast desire to communicate. It has been that way for as long as she can remember.
It is that simple objective that continues to fuel and propel the various undertakings the Ojai-based singer-songwriter so fervently embraces. Over the last few years, she has been touring the world with the likes of Nick Cave, Lou Reed and Beth Orton as part of Hal Willnerâ€™s Leonard Cohen tribute concerts; she also features prominently in Lian Lunsenâ€™s Cohen documentary Iâ€™m Your Man. Last year, Christensen released a recording where she sauntered her way through a collection of old standards, and she is about to follow that up with Where the Fireworks Are, an album of her own evocative compositions.
â€œAs an artist, I donâ€™t think you ever lose the desire to get heard,â€ Christensen says. â€œThatâ€™s really what gave rise to this new album, and itâ€™s what music has always been about for me. It doesnâ€™t matter whether I was dueting with Leonard Cohen on â€˜Joan of Arcâ€™ while touring the world or singing â€˜Wishing on a Starâ€™ in an a cappella group for people who were waiting in line to visit the Queen Mary; for me, it all comes from the same place. Itâ€™s all music. Itâ€™s all about communicating. And itâ€™s all part of the same incredible journey.â€ (continuedâ€”please turn page over)
(The Great Leap Forward: Julie Christensen Takes us to Where the Fireworks Are cont.)
The starting point for the most recent leg of that journey could not have been any more exacting. Christensen has long maintained a fertile and active social conscience, so much so that she decided to delve headlong into voter registration for the 2004 federal election. The reality of the outcome seemingly became too much of a burden for her to bear. Across the recent past, her songwriting had not been as prolific as she had wanted. But the prospect of more of the political same, and its accompanying social ramifications, soon provided the spark that would ultimately ignite a compositional firestorm.
â€œIn the buildup to the last elections, I felt really strongly that the current administration shouldnâ€™t be allowed to stay and do another four years worth of damage,â€ Christensen says. â€œThen the elections went the way they did, and all these songs just came out. I really hadnâ€™t written all that much for a while. Normally I have to be depressed or have bad luck in love before the urge to express myself will override everything else. The last time I had been this creative was when I was dumped. And thatâ€™s how the election made me feel: I felt like a jilted lover.â€
Her political rejection quickly led to musical salvation. Christensen turned to the Santa Barbara-based Headless Household collective to help guide her vision. Recorded in Tom Lacknerâ€™s mountainside studio, the album radiates in poignancy, yet shimmers in sublime beauty. From the heart-wrenching title track, which serves up an aching does of harsh reality, to the cascading piano that drives the plaintive â€œSomething Pretty,â€ Where the Fireworks Are is a collection of songs spanning the emotional spectrum. It provides an evocative musical chariot for Christensen to weave her vocal magic.
In being swept along by Christensenâ€™s current musical voyage, one could be forgiven for overlooking some of her former musical credits. She has fronted infectious swamp rockers Divine Horsemen; sung with musicians as diverse as Iggy Pop, Steve Wynn, Melissa Manchester, k.d. lang and Van Dyke Parks; and, of course, performed as a vocalist with Leonard Cohen on his last two world tours. So when she was engulfed by the urge to express herself in song again, she turned to the latter for some initial support and guidance.
â€œOne of the first songs that came was the one that eventually became the title track,â€ Christensen recalls. â€œI started writing it a few years back around the time of Independence Day. I asked Leonard Cohen to help me write because he was the only person I knew who could give it the weight that it deserved. But when I told him the opening line, which goes â€˜Between my thighs/Is all my country,â€™ he responded, â€˜I canâ€™t help you there, darling. You got yourself into this one, so youâ€™re on your own.â€™ But, in the end, that one just propelled itself forward.â€

Brett Leigh-Dicks - VC Reporter (May 17, 2007)

IN CONCERT: Fireworks in April -
Local vocalist Julie Christensen drops another genre-bending album

Julie Christensen has performed with a healthy list of notable musician. On Monday at SOhO, she releases her latest album, "Where the Fireworks Are."
COURTESY PHOTO

April 20, 2007 10:20 AM

At age 10, Julie Christensen decided music was going to be her life. Since then, she has plumbed the depths of virtually every genre of American song.

"(My music) is sort of an amalgam of rock, blues, funk, country, folk and jazz, with an overall seasoning of Americana-rock influence Ã¡ la Aaron Copeland," she said.

On Monday, Christensen will be defying genre classification at SOhO.

She has collaborated with notable artists, including Leonard Cohen (with whom she has toured and recorded for years), Lou Reed, Van Dyke Parks, k.d. lang, Todd Rundgren and Robben Ford.

Her past three albums, "Love is Driving" (1997), "Soul Driver" (2000) and "Something Familiar" (2006), have received critical praise. Now, with the upcoming release of "Where the Fireworks Are," she is making her most personal statement thus far.

"This stuff is what I was listening to in college." she said. "This recording impelled itself to be made. I grew up with Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, Buffalo Springfield and Laura Nyro. Their songs were poetry and had emotional weight and the wild energy of rock."

Christensen's appearance at SOhO will be part of a release party for the album.

"I started writing 'Where the Fireworks Are' in 2004," she said. "It's a clear statement of how I see myself and my relationship to the world in which we live at this point in my life. It's a reaction to what we're going through as a country. I wanted to say how I really feel about this news, not what we should do about it, because, at the point I'm writing these songs, as a poet, it's not my business."

Christensen was born in Iowa City, Iowa, started vocal lessons at 11, and sang in a western-swing/country-rock group. She said, "I didn't take music in college because I was afraid they'd ruin it for me by institutionalizing it." She encountered jazz in her early 20s and moved to Austin, Texas, in 1977, where she played mostly in blues and jazz clubs.

"People used to tell me that I sang jazz with a country accent," she said.

Stone Cupid, Christensen's back-up band, consists of pianist Karen Hammack, guitarist and News-Press correspondent Joe Woodard, drummer Tom Lackner and bassist Steve Nelson.

As for the songs on "Where the Fireworks Are," Christensen said that "Well Enuf," while seemingly about a domestic argument, is meant to be scaled up to the dimension of the world today. "Have a Pretty Dream," is a pro-peace lullaby, while "The Meteor" is what it's like to live in her brain. "Woodstock" is a tribute to an event that neither Christensen nor Joni Mitchell, who wrote the song, were able to attend, and "One More Song" expresses her hope that music is in service to love.

Stanley Naftaly - Santa Barbara News-Press (Apr 20, 2007)

Sister of Mercy
By Brett Leigh Dicks, October 12, 2006

Julie Christensenâ€™s Impassioned Musical Crusade

by Brett Leigh Dicks
In the studio recording Julie Christensenâ€™s new album, producer Tom Lackner raised his arms in exhilaration and guitarist Joe Woodard smiled coyly from a resting place against the studio wall. For the past few hours, the pair had been trading instrumental scrutiny on Christensenâ€™s latest recording, the gestation of which the Headless Household colleagues are currently overseeing. The song in question was a rousing country-tinged composition called â€œFinger on the Trigger,â€ and its ringing guitar lines are as inflicting as its lyrical barbs. While Lackner dialed back the recordingâ€™s vocal track, Christensen swiveled around and refocused her attention on the music. In an instant, she was bellowing out her impassioned vocals across the latest edit.

For these three musicians, this recording has been a labor of love. At the core of the project resides an unwavering belief in its purpose, though because of other commitments, the trio has been getting together between other undertakings. Lackner squeezes sessions in his studio between other recording commitments. Woodard, when not working on his own music, is committed to presenting noteworthy artist endeavors here in town. And Christensen, a long-serving vocal colleague of Leonard Cohen, is currently touring with Hal Willnerâ€™s Cohen tribute concerts. She also has a role in Iâ€™m Your Man, filmmaker Lian Lunsenâ€™s recent cinematic exploration of Cohen and his music.

As fate would have it, Cohen-related endeavors loom large in the coming weekâ€™s artistic calendar. UCSB Arts & Lectures presents an encore screening of Iâ€™m Your Man at Campbell Hall on the evening of Wednesday, October 18, and Julie Christensen will be taking the stage at SOhO on Monday, October 16 to celebrate the release of her new album, Something Familiar. And though Something Familiar and the unreleased album in the works will both unleash Christensenâ€™s vocal prowess, the performances are very distinct. Something Familiar contains tunes from the songbooks of Jimmy Webb, Charlie Parker, and Frank Loesser, while the untitled record-in-progress is all originals.

Just like these magical covers, their conveyor also yearns for an audience. â€œAs an artist, I donâ€™t think you ever lose the desire to get heard,â€ offered Christensen in a whisper from her perch in the studio. â€œThatâ€™s really what gave rise to Something Familiar and itâ€™s what music has always been about for me. It doesnâ€™t matter whether I was touring the world and dueting with Leonard Cohen on â€˜Joan of Arcâ€™ or singing â€˜Swinging on a Starâ€™ in an a capella group. For me it all comes from the same place. Itâ€™s all about the music. Itâ€™s all about communicating. And itâ€™s all been part of the same incredible journey.â€

But Christensenâ€™s current musical voyage isnâ€™t her first notable undertaking. She has fronted the infectious swamp rockers Divine Horsemen, a band that blazed its way out of the L.A. music scene forged by the likes of X. She has sung with musicians as diverse as Iggy Pop, Steve Wynn, Melissa Manchester, k.d. lang, and Van Dyke Parks. And, having performed as a vocalist on Leonard Cohenâ€™s last two world tours, she was the perfect choice for Hal Willnerâ€™s series of Cohen tributes, performing alongside the likes of Nick Cave, Teddy Thompson, and Beth Orton.

While these outside projects afford Christensen the chance to display her prowess as a vocalist, her talent shines brightest on her own recorded endeavors, about which she has quite a sense of humor. â€œI started writing this recording around the time of the last election,â€ explained Christensen, â€œand there was one song that I asked Leonard Cohen to help me write because he was the only person I knew who could give it the weight that it deserved. I told him the opening line, which is â€˜Between my thighs, is all my country,â€™ to which he responded, â€˜I canâ€™t help you there, darling. You got yourself into this one. Youâ€™re on your own.â€™â€

But not all was fun and games. â€œThen the election happened and all these songs just came out,â€ Christensen said. â€œThe last time I had been that creative was when I was dumped, and thatâ€™s how the election made me feel. I really felt like a jilted lover.â€ It may have been a heartbreak for Christensen, but I think she would agree that it was well worth the effort, as the album is truly a beauty.

Brett Leigh-Dicks - Santa Barbara Independent (Nov 5, 2006)

Beauty/Noise

L.A. Discgrace

Local (and universal) jazz CDs

By Greg Burk
Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - 11:58 am

I know Smogtowners are supposed to be dumfuqs, so all these sharp abstractionist discs must be by Manhattanites pretending to be from L.A., right? Right?...
Julie Christensen, Something Familiar (Household Ink). Standards of several eras, from swing to Jimmy Webb, sound right-now when Christensen sings them straight through your ribcage. Sheâ€™s got an engraverâ€™s way of etching/buffing a lyric, and as Josef Woodardâ€™s guitar screwdrivered around the harmonic edges at B.B. Kingâ€™s last month, she had us reopening a lot of cold cases.

Greg Burk - LA WEEKLY (Nov 8, 2006)

MUSIC REVIEW: Walls
of Sound and Vision JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
November 4, 2006 8:32 AM
Advance notice about Lou Reed's "Songs and Noise" program at Campbell Hall amounted to a cryptic tease.
Nothing shocking there: Throughout his strange 40-year trip through rock history, Reed -- now 64 but in fit and fighting form -- has carefully maintained an element of mystique and surprise.
Still, some old fans of Reed's songbook -- going back to his seminal work with the still-influential Velvet Underground in the late '60s -- might have feared the word "noise," given his controversial avant garde 1976 album "Metal Machine Music."
Would this be another exercise in Reed's sonic abstract expressionist exorcism of the sort that once inspired youngins' like Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth?
Sure enough, when Reed hit the stage, he strapped on his guitar and cranked
up the fuzz and wah-wah for some soundscape painting, with the low rumble of his bassists supplying a sternum-bracing wall of sound.
But this too was a tease. The lion's share of his solid, two-hour "Songs and Noise" show at Campbell Hall was about songs, with only short bursts of noise and some tasteful musical caulking.
Reed, who last played in Santa Barbara with his full band at the Arlington in the early '90s, is again experimenting with format in this California tour, which began and was rehearsed in Santa Barbara.
His basic experimental notion at the heart of the tour is a simple matter of
stripping away elements of his standard rock 'n' roll band foundation and beefing up the low end with two (count 'em) bassists.
Reed was the lone guitarist (doubling on a Moog synthesizer for two songs),
flanked by bassist-around-town Rob Wasserman and Reed's longtime bassist Fernando Saunders, who also supplied some soulful vocals this evening.
Like Ornette Coleman, whose recent groups have featured two -- or more -- bassists, Reed has discovered the secret power of low-end fortification, and,
implicitly, the dullness of plural guitars.
At one point, Reed marveled that his stage mates were "going where no bass has gone before" and later added, during a rumbling instrumental section, "my goodness, get the drums out of there and you see what you got." He seemed genuinely happy about the first foray of his new setting.

In this pared-down, drum-free setting, the lyrical savvy of Reed's songs bubbled up closer to the surface. He plucked songs from old and new places, and
kept swerving from the profane to the potentially sacred, as in "What
is Good" (with its lyric, "life's good, but not fair at all")
.
From the Velvet Underground days, we got "Femme Fatale," one of those many songs that gains intrigue through the tense juxtaposition of Reed's
brusque vocals and the folk-poppy sweetness of his major seventh chords and
wistful pining. In Reed's musical world, the tough and the tender keep jockeying for position, with neither clearly winning.

One of the highlights of the show, interestingly enough, was a move outside the Reed songbook, when he invited Ojai-based singer Julie Christensen onstage for a duet of Leonard Cohen's song "Joan of Arc."
Reed and Christensen -- a longtime backup singer for Cohen -- were well familiar with the song, having just performed it twice in Dublin during a Cohen tribute program. They work wonders together with Reed issuing his gruff sing-spiel against Christensen's purer vocal graces and her magical, reverb-coated wordless wailing (which spurred the crowd into a mid-song applause).
Hearing Reed singing Cohen, you can find points of comparison -- and contrast -- between the two. Like Cohen, Reed tends to write literate, word-playful
songs in which lavish and meandering verses are punctuated by simple, hypnotic refrains.
The difference with Reed, compared to the poetically detached Cohen, is that
the New Yorker doesn't mind in-your-face subjects, be it details of a messy
divorce, a beating in an urban alley (''Rock Minuet") or startling tidbits of sex and violence tossed in with the eloquent verbiage (''Waltzing Matilda").
Among other traits, Reed finds intriguing new routes to self-revelation, as
in the narrated piece "The Dream" from his album "Songs for Drella." The piece, accompanied by mesmerizing atmospheric sonics from his Moog Voyager, is a rambling tour of Andy Warhol's brain, told from Warhol's dazed point of view.
In the midst of the piece, Reed/Warhol starts castigating "Lou," as an ingrate who didn't even invite Andy to his wedding, after Warhol essentially launched Reed's career.
It was one of many surreal moments in an evening full of them, in terms of sound, persona and nicely twisted expectations.
Egged back to the stage by the adoring throng, Reed's trio returned to play
the bittersweet jewel of a song "Vanishing Act" from his underrated (and now unavailable) 2003 project, "The Raven."
Finishing off with a nod to the future, they played a 2-week-old song, "
;Gravity." It sounded like a dark variation on Mother Goose and could be about aging, the world's compounding woes, or any number of spirit-dampening factors, but set artfully into deceptively lilting lines.
Another underlying message with this new song, part of a hopeful work in progress, is that Lou Reed's muse is still tugging at him after all these years.
e-mail: life@newspress.com

DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTO
Related article: 'Every day, it gets more hilarious'
All Content Copyright © 2006 Santa Barbara News-Press / Ampersand Publishing, LLC unless otherwise specified.

Josef Woodard - Santa Barbara News Press (Nov 4, 2006)

Main Reviews

Billboard February 8, 1997
Stone Cupid's Christensen In Gear With "Driving" by Chris Morris (reprinted by permission)

LOS ANGELES--When vocalist Julie Christensen approached Dave Crouch, GM of the Rhino Records store in West Los Angeles, to see if he would take copies of her self-released album "Love is Driving," Crouch asked her where the album should be stocked.

Crouch recalls, "She said, 'It's jazz/country/ swing/folk/rock/cabaret.' It's hard to figure out where to put it, because she does all that stuff well"

Indeed, in her 15-plus years on the L.A. music scene, Christensen has been recognized as a singer's singer who is comfortable with material in every imaginable genre.

"Yeah, that's my blessing and my curse," Christensen says with a laugh about her reputation for versatility. The singer's diverse resume includes stints in a Western swing outfit and torchy jazz/blues/R&B combos; several albums co-fronting the seminal early-'80s L.A. post-punk band Divine Horsemen; leadership of her own intimate jazz/pop groups; two years as a featured backup singer for Leonard Cohen; and session and concert work with Van Dyke Parks, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Steve Wynn, and k.d.lang, among others.

But only now has Christensen, who recorded an album for PolyGram with producer Todd Rundgren in 1990 that went unreleased, issued an album of her own that captures the full scope of her talents. Self-written, self-produced, and self-financed, "Love is Driving" has been released on Christensen's Stone Cupid Records.

She believes that audiences for other similarly eclectic and challenging femalie vocalists may gravitate to her album: "Maybe the people who listen to Sam Phillips will listen to this, or the people who listen to Marianne Faithfull."

The wide range of musical styles heard in Christensen's music has been accumulated over two decades of performing.

Born in Iowa, she sang with a western swing/country rock group before moving in 1977 to Austin, Texas, where she mixed blues and jazz during performances at the local clubs. On relocating to L.A. in 1981, she got into what she terms "post-punk."

Christensen shifted stylistic gears again when, recording a number for the L.A. cow-punk compilation "Don't Shoot," she met musician/producer Chris Desjardins, former leader of the hard-edged punk group the Flesh Eaters, who was then forming a new band, Divine Horsemen. She ended up joining the group as co-lead vocalist and later married Desjardins.

Melding her blues-drenched singing and writing to the band's ferocious punk guitar attack, Christensen cut three albums and an EP with Divine Horsemen for indie SST Records. But Christensen and Desjardins' marriage unraveled, and she exited the group in 1987.

In 1988, at the invitation of Cohen's musical director, Roscoe Beck, Christensen toured the U.S., Canada, and Europe as a backup vocalist for the singer/songwriter. She continued to perform her own material in L.A. usually in a trio format, often accompanied by the remarkable blind New Orleans pianist Henry Butler. It was during this period that A&R exec Michael Goldstone--then moving from MCA to PolyGram, and today a key executive at DreamWorks--approached Christensen at one of her solo shows at McCabe's Guitar Shop.

"He said,'Get me a tape right away.' He didn't really know what we were gonna do...He spent $50,000 doing two or three songs with a producer with whom I'd written a couple of these songs. Then Michael left PolyGram and went to Epic, and I [made an album] with Todd Rundgren producing it"

Further changes ensued within PolyGram's A&R staff, and the label decided not to release the Rundgren-produced album. After that disappointing experience, Christensen says,"I went out and got a life." In the early '90s, Christensen married again (to actor John Diehl), worked regularly with her own small groups, and made frequent appearances for the Bohemian Women's Political Alliance, a group of L.A. artist/activists. In 1993, soon after giving birth to son Jackson, Christensen went out on a second tour with Cohen.

Everything began to click for Christensen when she and her family moved to ... a picturesque town north of L.A. near Santa Barbara. Most of her current band members have ties to the town. "Getting out [there], a lot of things became clear," Christensen says. "I started working with a different piano player, Karen Hammack, who is just a gold mine and a secret weapon, and a really good friend...[Drummer]Jim Christie has been playing with me for years...I went through different bass players, but Cliff [Hugo] is somebody I played with at my first showcase at the Bla Bla Cafe in 1981. He's played with Ray Charles, and he's been with Melissa Manchester for 15 years. That trio really locked on."

Christensen says she had no intention of making an album when she cut the sessions that became "Love is Driving." "We were going in to just demo some tunes," she says. "If I had just set out to make a record, I don't know [if it would have worked], because the [PolyGram] experience was so monumentally disappointing."

The album came in--"manufacturing and all"--at less than $13,000, she says, financed with credit cards and promises of additional payment [if] a distribution deal was found.

The album features Christensen's working band,plus such guests as vocalist Perla Batalla, who worked alonside Christensen in Cohen's group; guitarist Robben Ford, an old friend and Ojai neighbor; and guitarist Greg Leisz, a former member of lang's band and current guitarist for Dave Alvin's group the Guilty Men.

So far, Christensen has been distributing "Love is Driving" herself, via mail order and through such L.A. outlets as Rhino, Aron's Records, and McCabe's...Some specialty shows on L.A. area public radio stations, like Andrea Leonard's "Twister" on KCRW Santa Monica and Howard and Roz Larman's "Folkscene" on KPFK North Hollywood, have aired the record. "Her music is very, very personal," says Larman. "I don't know if anybody else could do those songs...you can feel every emotion when she sings. You don't get that from a lot of performers. She's very intense."

Christensen, whose career is handled by Garry George Management in L.A., is currently in New York, playing previews for a bill of Sam Shepard one-act plays that opens Feb. 9 at the Public Theatre. She has one of the two leading roles in "The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife"

While she is mainly proud of shat she has achieved by releasing her own album, Christensen says, "I don't want to be my own cottage industry. I do want somebody else to take it over...I would really love to have somebody produce [my next album] and make it a more cinematic thing, and not have to be producing it and doing all of it. I want to write songs and sing and work with the band. But if I have to produce another one, I'll do it, because now I know I can."

Chris Morris - Billboard (Feb 8, 1997)

JULIE CHRISTENSEN: Biography
Related Genres: Rock

Sometimes listing an artist's music under one style that fits it best is a little hard to do -- sometimes it's almost impossible. With Julie Christensen the latter fits. Her music is a smooth mix of blues, R&B, jazz, and even a little pop and western swing. Maybe that's because she has sampled a little of it all along the path of her career and didn't find any she didn't like in some way.

Singer and songwriter Christensen was born and raised in Iowa. Her first band was a little country and western swing group, which also played rock. In the late 70s she moved to Texas and picked up jazz and blues. A few years later, she headed to sunny California and found post-punk floating about. She soon joined a punk band, Divine Horsemen, and even married one of its founding members, Chris Desjardins. The group released one EP and three albums while Christensen was with them.

By 1987 the marriage was over, her part in the band was over, and she was on her own again. As luck would have it, she was invited to become a backup singer for the well-known Leonard Cohen. It gave her the chance to tour through the United States, Canada, and even into Europe, and to spread her wings some.

In 1996, Christensen released her first solo album, Love is Driving. Four years later, she finally recorded a sophomore work, Soul Driver. Some of the superb tracks on her albums that fans might want to sample are "The Moon Was," "I Have a Photograph," "Shipwreck," "Biggest Fool of All," and "Sweet Sound."~ Charlotte Dillon, All Music Guide

Charlotte Dillon - All Music Guide

Pop Music;
Lhasa Club Spirit Brought to Life

By: CHRIS WILLMAN

Doing a reading Friday night, local poet Doug Knott pointed out
that in the days when screenwriter Michael Blake used to live out of the
back of his car, Blake would read at the modest shows Knott put on at the
late and lamented Lhasa Club.

Now that Blake is a Golden Globe winner, Oscar nominee and all-around
toast of the town for his "Dances With Wolves" script, he can return the
favor and present similar evenings of acoustic music and verse himself,
albeit with a much higher industry profile.

Friday and Saturday nights, in otherwise separate bills, Blake was the
centerpiece of two programs dubbed "The Race Is On," in which the Lhasa
spirit was successfully transplanted to the cafe at Raleigh Studios in
Hollywood. The Southwestern-styled cafeteria at the film studio where
Blake and comrade Kevin Costner have long held fort turned out to be an
appropriately charming and intimate venue for this sort of live
performance.

Actually, more than the Lhasa, even, it was possible to imagine
oneself transported to a secret literary nightspot in Montana, given the
denim spirit and environmental concerns of the proceedings. At the late
show Friday, chanteuse Julie Christensen sang a soaringly lovely song
about driving through the majesty of Idaho to visit Exene Cervenka (not
present this time), and John Doe invoked the ghost of Woody Guthrie in
dedicating a duet with Tony Gilkyson to drought-stricken farmers.
Exactly which race the participants consider to be on was not entirely
clear, beyond the general onus of anti-war, pro-environment progressive
politics; this was one benefit where more time could have been
spent on the soapbox. (A card given out to departing attendees pitched
the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation.)
Blake's climactic reading of an excerpt from "Helmut," a
Hollywood-themed novel in progress, was much anticipated. But the clear
highlight and crowd favorite Friday was the four-song set from Christensen, a knockout pop-jazz crooner and inspired songwriter who has everything it might take to revive the torch-song tradition among the rock crowd.
PHOTO: Julie Christensen: a set of inspired torch-songs for
rockers.
PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBERT DURELL / Los Angeles Times

Type of Material: Concert Review

Chris Willman - Los Angeles Times

reviews of Cohen Movie

A documentary on the life and times of Montreal poet-singer-songerwriter Leonard Cohen, with performances of his work by musicians who worship at his altar....I like this mix: A little bit of "live" Cohen, a lot of fresh takes on his songs from Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Antony, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Nick Cave (whose anecdotes are illuminating), Perla Batalla, Teddy Thompson, The Handsome Family
and the remarkable vocal gymnast Julie Christensen (whose eerie voice can sound like a human Theremin). Except for that New York club shoot with U2 and Cohen, all the performances are from a concert at the Sydney Opera House in February, 2005....

By BRUCE KIRKLAND - Toronto Sun/Jam! Showbiz (Jun 30, 2006)

Various Artists
Location: Dublin (The Point)
Event Date: October 05, 2006

October 24, 2006,
Varied Cast Brings Cohen Songbook To Life
Nick Kelly, Dublin
Despite an all-star cast and the embarrassment of riches contained in the blue chip Leonard Cohen songbook, the four-hour running time of this tribute show to the septuagenarian singer seemed like too much of a good thing on paper. But the second of a two-night run in Dublin proved a thoroughly absorbing, occasionally maddening and sometimes transcendent experience.

Initially performed in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in 2003 as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival, the show's core cast has been sporadically reconvened by artistic directors Hal Willner and Janine Nichols for shows in Brighton, England, and Sydney -- the latter providing the basis for Lian Lunson's documentary "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man."

Some of the performers have dropped out - most notably the McGarrigle and Wainwright family, whose less-than-amicable departure is catalogued with jaw-dropping candour in Willner's program notes -- to be replaced for these shows by first-timers Lou Reed, Cohen's fellow Canuck Mary Margaret O'Hara, recent Cohen collaborator Anjani and local boy Gavin Friday, who is well known in Dublin for his close association with Bono.

The night began with Nick Cave's moody reading of "Avalanche" and ended with a stirring a cappella chorus of 'Winter Lady', sung by a half-circle parade of the various chanteuses, including sometime Cohen backing singers Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen.

In between, there were some radical re-interpretations of Cohen's work with the house band, under Steven Bernstein's direction, showing an impressive versatility, sometimes adding lush string and brass arrangements to material that was originally recorded either with the most minimal instrumentation or with those cheesy-sounding synths.

Teddy Thompson stepped out from under the shadow of his famous parents to deliver a galvanizing ska/reggae take on "Waiting for the Miracle" and a politically charged sliced of Dylan-esque social commentary on "The Future," as he sang with total conviction, "I have seen the future... and it's murder".

Lou Reed offered an amped-up remodeling of "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong," but this paled in comparison to his raw, rapturous reading of "The Stranger Song," which he made completely his own. Better still was his duet with Christensen on "Joan of Arc," a pooling of charisma and vastly different singing styles that proved one of the highlights of the evening. Reed's rough'n'ready growl the perfect foil for Christensen's warm, sonorous tones.

The joker in the pack was Friday and O'Hara's collaboration on "Hallelujah." A rare live appearance from the reclusive O'Hara should have been an event to be savored. Alas, the pair strangled the life out of a song that, thanks to John Cale and Jeff Buckley, has become one of Cohen's best-loved standards. Friday's overly melodramatic delivery milked it dry of all its poetry, and O'Hara's idiosyncratic scat seemed to want only to draw attention to itself.

Worse was to come after the interval, when O'Hara needlessly took three attempts to get through "The Window," publicly admonishing Chris Spedding in the process, whose guitar playing had been flawless all night.

Anjani's smoky supper club renditions of "Blue Alert" and "Never Got To Love You" charmed the audience, with Bernstein's muted jazz trumpet making the listener feel as though they were in Ronnie Scott's rather than an impersonal docklands arena with temporary seating.

But Antony (of Antony & the Johnsons) probably made the biggest impression of all the performers on the night. His voice sounds like a gift from the gods and Cohen's complex tales of love, lust, betrayal and redemption must equally seem, to him, like manna from heaven.

During the most perfectly measured renditions of "The Guests" and "If It Be Your Will," Antony seemed to completely lose himself in the music; a master interpreter communing intimately with a master songwriter -- so much so that the audience spontaneously broke into applause when he reappeared in the second half.

Beth Orton and the Handsome Family, respectively, delivered faithful, straightforward readings of the better-known songs in the Cohen canon. But thank heavens for Jarvis Cocker, who was one of the few artists in the course of the four hours to actually speak to the audience. This event was crying out for an MC; someone to introduce the acts -- not all of whom were household names -- and to acknowledge the crowd as participants in the show.

What's more, the ex-Pulp frontman brought a much-needed levity and comic relief to proceedings which, until his hilariously racy duet with the heavily pregnant Orton on "Death of a Ladies' Man," had steadily built up an almost suffocating sense of reverence and solemnity towards its subject.

Using the mic lead as a whip, Cocker effortlessly strode around the stage like the born showman that he is, using his trademark dramatic flourishes to locate the coal-black humor in "I Can't Forget." But this was trumped by his version of "Chelsea Hotel #2" -- a song whose narrative seems so personal and tied to its author that to attempt a cover seems faintly preposterous and doomed to failure.

But, miraculously, Cocker made this tale of snatched sex in a grubby hotel room sound like the quintessential Pulp song: wry, funny and bitingly honest. It was no longer Cohen's bittersweet reminiscence of Janis Joplin but the audacious kiss-and-tell of a working class lad from Sheffield.

The other singer who was in a refreshingly playful mood was Laurie Anderson, who used a vocoder to bring her voice down to a bass-baritone for "Dear Heather," an effect which mimicked Cohen's famously lugubrious drone.

It was well past midnight when Cocker led the rousing finale of "Memories," with all the artists congregated on stage to sing us home. There was only one singer conspicuous by his absence: the man himself.

Here is the "Came So Far for Beauty" set list:

"Avalanche" - Nick Cave
"Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" - Robin Holcomb
"One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong" - Lou Reed
"A Thousand Kisses Deep"- The Handsome Family
"The Guests" - Antony
"Dear Heather" - Laurie Anderson
"In My Secret Life - Laurie Anderson
"Who By Fire" - Gavin Friday
"Hallelujah" - Gavin Friday & Mary Margaret O'Hara
"Blue Alert" - Anjani
"Dress Rehearsal Rag" - Nick Cave
"Stranger Song" - Lou Reed
"So Long, Marianne" - Beth Orton
"Tonight Will Be Fine" - Teddy Thompson
"Death Of A Ladies' Man" - Jarvis Cocker & Beth Orton

"Because Of" - Mary Margaret O'Hara
"The Window" - Mary Margaret O'Hara
"I Can't Forget" - Jarvis Cocker
"Sisters Of Mercy" - Beth Orton
"Joan Of Arc" - Lou Reed & Julie Christensen
"Closing Time" - Robin Holcomb
"Bird On A Wire" - Perla Batalla
"Chelsea Hotel" - Jarvis Cocker
"Waiting For The Miracle" - Teddy & Kamila Thompson
"If It Be Your Will" - Antony
"Famous Blue Raincoat" - The Handsome Family
"Suzanne" - Nick Cave, Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen
"Never Got To Love You" - Anjani
"Everybody Knows" - Gavin Friday
"You Know Who I Am" - Laurie Anderson & Antony
"Anthem" - Perla Batalla & Julie Christensen
"The Future" - Teddy Thompson
"Memories" - Jarvis Cocker & cast
"Winter Lady" - the female cast

Nick Kelly - Billboard (Oct 24, 2006)

I'm so proud of this Review of the recent Cohen Retrospective Show From the Sydney Morning Herald.....
Came So Far For Beauty By Bernard Zuel
January 31, 2005

Page Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, January 28

In Leonard Cohen's 1973 song A Singer Must Die, presenting himself before a panel of stern judges he declares: "I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song." Some smudge. Some song.
That smudge's lasting imprint on several generations of singers and fellow songwriters is the subtext of what simplistically would be called a tribute show but in effect was a celebration of song. Spread across nearly four hours it was as strong on interpretation as it was light on unnecessary reverence; as steeped in Jacques Brel and country music as German cabaret and folk; as joyous as it was moving.
You could see that with a cocked-hip Jarvis Cocker wholly inhabiting Death of a Ladies Man (in duet with Beth Orton) and bringing a self-mocking playboy touch to I Can't Forget. And certainly it was there in Nick Cave, who made us re-evaluate one of Cohen's more contentious songs, Diamonds In The Mine - "a nasty Leonard Cohen song" he cheerfully declared - by playing up some Vegas sleaze while the always impressive and flexible backing group briefly turned into Elvis
Presley's TCB band.
Not that the evening's stars were only the best-known faces. The Handsome Family took and gave great delight by relocating A Heart With No Companion to the Kentucky hills, while Teddy Thompson (whose mother Linda Thompson earlier had hushed the room with The Story of Isaac) found a bruised centre to lines such as "I choose the rooms that I live in with care/the windows are small and the walls almost bare".
And in the category of "where the hell has he been hiding?" was the hulking, shambling figure of New York singer Antony, who left open mouths on and off the stage with his heart-piercing explorations of The Guests and the prayer-like If It Be Your Will. (He's playing tonight at the Vanguard and must be seen.)

What was staggering was how each time you thought the night had just had its peak someone else would stroll on stage and give you another one. And then another. For example, Rufus Wainwright's version of Hallelujah, which escaped from the shadow of Jeff Buckley's seemingly definitive interpretation with an elegant but effortlessly transporting take, is the kind of song that would climax any regular show, but here was presented early in the first set. Three songs later a former Cohen backing vocalist, Julie Christiansen[sp], beautifully balanced The Singer Must Die between pathos and humour and upped the ante again.
Martha Wainwright's bared-to-the-bone Tower of Song was matched by her appearance with her mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, on a spare but riveting You Know Who I Am. But soon after that came Perla
Batalla, the other of Cohen's long-term backing vocalists, delivering a
rich, passionate exploration of Bird On a Wire.

It was a wondrous night. A long, winding, rich and constantly rewarding
evening brought to us by the musical equivalent of a fantasy football team whose dedication was to the work and not the ego.
Somewhere in California you imagine the droll Mr Cohen hearing this and saying to them, "I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty/you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty".

Bernard Zuel - The Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 28, 2005)

Thorough itâ€™s not, but the concert documentary â€œLeonard Cohen: Iâ€™m Your Manâ€ gathers solid interviews, anecdotes, recitations and tribute performances that present a fairly engaging portrait of the wry, dark poet who became a distinct voice in pop music.

â€œIâ€™m Your Manâ€ is unlikely to appeal much beyond Cohenâ€™s loyal fans or bring converts to the brooding whimsy and dense wordplay of his songs. The movie does do a far better job than a couple of 1990s tribute albums in matching Cohenâ€™s sobering lyricism with kindred spirits who can do justice to the tunes during a concert in his honor in Sydney, Australia.

Fellow somber travelers such as Nick Cave, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Beth Orton are among those covering songs that span most of Cohenâ€™s 40-year career.

Quick facts
Starring: Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker
Director: Lian Lunson
Run time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13

The reclusive Cohen offers warm and amusing recollections and teams with U2 for a version of â€œTower of Songâ€ as the documentaryâ€™s musical finale, though the strangely cloistered, unsatisfying cover winds up anticlimactic after some grand live renditions by other performers.

With Mel Gibsonâ€™s film company producing, music-video maker and former actress Lian Lunson captures music producer Hal Willnerâ€™s Cohen tribute concert â€œCame So Far for Beautyâ€ at the Sydney Opera House in 2005.

Interspersed between the performances are frank, wistful segments with Cohen, who also recites some of his poetry. Canadian-born Cohen discusses his boyhood, his fatherâ€™s death, the Montreal poetry scene, his spiritual quest with a Zen master and the real-life woman who inspired one of his best-known songs, â€œSuzanne.â€

Cohen, whose bass vocals often lean more toward talking along to the music than singing, also touches on his musical abilities.

â€œI had the title â€˜poet,â€™ and maybe I was one for a while. Also the title â€˜singerâ€™ was kindly accorded me even though I could barely carry a tune,â€ Cohen recites from one of his poems.

Even so, trained singers have trouble approaching Cohenâ€™s soulful depth when covering his songs. Willner assembles musicians who deeply respect Cohenâ€™s songs and know what to do with them.

Cave energetically sings â€œIâ€™m Your Manâ€ and does a hushed rendition of â€œSuzanne.â€ The McGarrigle sisters and Martha Wainwright (daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III) bring beautiful, trilling harmonies to â€œWinter Lady,â€ and Wainwright, brother Rufus and Joan Wasser trade passionate verses on â€œHallelujah.â€

Annoyingly, Lunson drops interview segments into the middle of some performances, though she thankfully leaves intact the filmâ€™s two standouts, Ortonâ€™s achingly gorgeous rendition of â€œSisters of Mercyâ€ and Julie Christensen and Perla Batallaâ€™s duet on â€œAnthem.â€
Interviews with the musicians are a mixed bag. Rufus Wainwright vividly relates the first time he met Cohen, who was in his underwear, feeding tidbits of sausage to a sickly baby bird. Cave talks with wonder about the transformative day from his youth when a friend played him Cohenâ€™s album â€œSongs of Love and Hate.â€

U2 frontman Bono and guitarist The Edge have some nice insights, yet both grow overly grandiose in their fawning praise of Cohen (â€œHeâ€™s the man for me who comes down from the mountaintop with the tablets of stone, having been up there talking with the angels,â€ The Edge says).

Bono redeems himself with this great summation of Cohenâ€™s grim yet playful sensibilities:

â€œA lot of writers have dared to walk up the edge of reason and stared into that great chasm, into the abyss,â€ Bono says. â€œVery few people have got there and kind of laughed out loud at what they saw.â€

David Germain - Associated Press (Jun 19, 2006)

LEONARD COHEN Iâ€™M YOUR MAN If you canâ€™t think of a crisis in your life thatâ€™s tied to a Leonard Cohen song, then Canadian director Lian Lunsonâ€™s velvety, exuberantly hagiographic film of a 2005 Sydney tribute concert to the Prince of Pain may not be the movie for you. If you can, the experience will be weepy bliss. Produced by Hal Willner, the concert shows off Cohenâ€™s unifying influence on an astonishingly diverse range of musicians, from Nick Cave (giving the lounge-lizard treatment to â€œIâ€™m Your Manâ€), to Antony jigging up and down in an unraveled sweater and making a gorgeous symphony out of â€œIf It Be Your Will,â€ a sweet duet of â€œAnthemâ€ by (concert organizers) Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla and a rousing rendition of â€œEverybody Knowsâ€ by the Wainwright family. Cohen sings â€œTower of Songâ€ at the end, flanked by U2, but his life flashes by us, intercut with the musical numbers, in grainy footage and wry commentary by the man himself. A total babe in his salad days, if thatâ€™s the right expression for a man plagued all his life with depression, at 71 Cohen looks like any one of my heavy-lidded Jewish uncles, only with better suits. (He never got into the jeans thing, even while hanging with the Beats at the Chelsea Hotel.) But notwithstanding a touching moment when he gropes for the name of a musical movement (â€œPunk, thatâ€™s it!â€), heâ€™s sharp as a tack and as ready as ever to debunk his own myths: He canâ€™t carry a tune. In his years as a monk, â€œI hated everyone, but acted generously.â€ And how could he be a ladiesâ€™ man when he spent â€œ10,000 nights aloneâ€?

Cohen may be as obsessive a reviser of his own history as he is of his songs and poems, but his way with words is so sublime, so gently precise and musical, youâ€™d be a churl to quibble. And he seems as genuinely humble as he is proud to be lionized in such good musical company. â€œThe Wainwrights have brought my music to life,â€ he says, â€œand I appreciate it.â€ Just as well, for if anyone steals his thunder in this movie itâ€™s the magnetic Rufus Wainwright, who, with his sister Martha, brings such rapture to â€œHallelujah,â€ among others, that you rediscover Cohenâ€™s songs for the continuous hymnal they are. Angelic, sexy, androgynous and mischievously louche, Wainwright couldnâ€™t be less like the manly, bass-voiced Cohen. But in putting his own simple yet operatic spin on Cohenâ€™s gift for suffering and exaltation, heâ€™s also keeping the faith. I donâ€™t know whether those rolled-back eyes are the result of ecstasy or Ecstasy, but if Wainwright carries on making music like this, heâ€™ll make willing bisexuals of us all. (Ella Taylor)

Ella Taylor - LA Weekly (Jun 28, 2006)

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Starring: Beth Orton, Bono, Nick Cave, Julie Christensen, Adam Clayton?
Directed by: Lian Lunson

Peter Travers - Rolling Stone (Jun 22, 2006)

Cohen's appeal goes beyond ageless lyrics
An all-star tribute cast and a Latino beat bring new insight to the songwriter's work.
By Ann Powers
Times Staff Writer

February 26, 2007

Most musical legends have a horde of imitators nipping at their legacies, but there will never be a new Leonard Cohen.

Sure, a young pretender could copy Cohen's ground-glass growl, or whip out a Bible and some volumes of European poetry and nail his reference points, but the fullness of meaning that Cohen's songs achieve is nearly impossible to emulate.

His compositions don't simply echo folk ballads and hymns â€” they strive for the quality those songs gain through the centuries, the sense that no one and everyone wrote them.

"I find my own opinions very tiresome and predictable," Cohen once told an interviewer. So he strives to create songs that belong to him through myth, history, the turn of the world.

In this way, Cohen's songs were made to be not imitated but interpreted. Yet another tribute to the man, this one organized by his longtime backup singer Perla Batalla, took place at Royce Hall on Saturday. Under Batalla's eclectic direction, "The Gospel According to Leonard Cohen" proved the universality of Cohen's distinctive art.

Batalla's event couldn't help but recall "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man," the critically lauded 2006 documentary built around a tribute concert produced by Royce Hall regular Hal Willner and featuring snazzy stars such as Rufus Wainwright and U2.

Batalla, who has just released her own excellent Cohen tribute album, "Bird on the Wire," appears in the documentary. Her own show, however, took Cohen's oeuvre in new directions.

Big-name participants included Jackson Browne, whose graceful ennui suited the late-career gem, "A Thousand Kisses Deep"; Dave Alvin, who delivered an oracular reading of "Democracy," and Michael McDonald, who coped with the burden of singing Cohen's one truly overexposed song, "Hallelujah," by making it a full-force gospel excursion (complete with backing from the choir from Batalla's alma mater, John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica).

Guitarists Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz anchored a top-notch band and string section; Steve Weisberg was musical director.

The program's signal twist was Batalla's insight that her Latina heritage could enrich her readings of Cohen's songs. She sang in Spanish and English, her gorgeous alto persuasive in both.

Most intense was a duet with Javier Colis, a Madrid-based rocker making his California debut. The rough-edged Colis is a star at home, and could become one here; his howling dive into "The Butcher" (or "Le Carnicero") was the night's only really sexy moment. Martha Gonzales of the East L.A. band Quetzal also excelled, transforming "Sisters of Mercy" into a foot-stomping corrido, and making "Famous Blue Raincoat" as richly enigmatic in Spanish as it is in English.

Cohen in Spanish contradicted any thought that his work is only about lyrics: His primal melodies easily attached to a new language.

The veteran soul shouter Howard Tate took Cohen's songs, especially a raucous "Tower of Song," into the deep South, making them into testimonials worthy of a fainting spell. With a flourish, rocker gal Jill Sobule brought "First We Take Manhattan" into the Berlin of "Cabaret," a canny choice for that fable of political resistance.

Batalla and fellow Cohen backup singer Julie Christensen nearly stole the star-studded "I'm Your Man" film with their version. They did so again at Royce Hall, their passion and clarity bringing the glow of the sacred into the room. Cohen would have been proud to hear it. But maybe he's content to let his songs become universal without him.

ann.powers@latimes.com

Ann Powers - Los Angeles Times (Feb 26, 2007)