Julie Christensen

Julie Christensen bowed deeply to the standing-room-only crowd at The Family Wash, a venerable East Nashville music venue, as her band, Stone Cupid, kicked into a full-bore jam. She blew a two-handed kiss to the audience, exited stage left, and watched from the audience as her bandmates closed out the show. She climbed back onstage for the encore—a powerful rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem.” It’s a song Christensen knows well. And she should—she sang on Cohen’s studio version and countless times in concert with him. Her stirring performance in the Family Wash hushed the room. It was the acclaimed vocalist’s final performance at the humble hangout.

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

All told, Christensen’s performance that night fell somewhere between rock, alt-country, and roots music. Musically, she is a far cry from where she first made her mark with her now-former husband as co-leaders of the influential Los Angeles punk band the Divine Horsemen. Between 1984 and 1987, the band produced three studio albums and two EPs. They played the West Coast circuit including Club Lingerie and the Music Machine, which was a popular venue that often featured heavy-hitters such as the Circle Jerks. The Divine Horsemen’s sound foreshadowed alt-country before there was such a genre as evidenced by the twangy, tremolo-ridden Telecaster in “Tears Fall Away” from their first album, Time Stands Still, on Enigma Records (1984). Chris sang low, while Christensen let fly powerful high harmonies throughout the band’s catalog. As their popularity grew, they headed east, playing the Eastern seaboard several times including D.C.’s famed 9:30 Club and the legendary CBGB in New York. But Christensen had fallen into damaging habits. She abused alcohol and used heroin with regularity—she was an addict.

“I realized I needed to quit that lifestyle a couple of years before I was able to do it—it had become a daily thing,” she said. “I must have tried to kick it 15 times before I finally tried 12-step meetings. I felt my story was too gnarly for some fellowships and not gnarly enough for others—I related to the guys who had gotten out of prison and had tattoos on their face because I felt like I had been in a prison of drugs and alcohol.”

After she and her husband divorced, she redirected her career toward performing in nightclubs as a soulful pop singer. A few months later, she auditioned to be a featured backup singer with Cohen, an eventual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee. At the end of the audition, he asked her to contemplate the rigors of a world tour before accepting the position.

“He told me this was going to be a grueling tour, playing four or five times each week,” Christensen said. “I told him that I had just come off the road myself, and had recently changed my clothes in the bathroom at CBGBs. Just picture the bathroom in the movie Trainspotting, and you’ll get the picture.”

She toured with Cohen from 1988 to 1993.

“I was only six months clean when I first went out on the road with him,” she said.

Although she’s not a practicing Buddhist, she meditates using the techniques she learned from the famous Buddhist teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, credited with popularizing Zen Buddhism in the United States. She met the master Buddhist through Cohen, whom she described as one of the most centered people she’s ever met.

“He is a centered, focused individual,” she said. “I felt safe touring with him. He wasn’t somebody who was out of hand with any of his vices.”

Christensen appears in the award-winning 2005 documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, as well as scores of live-performance videos on YouTube playing with Cohen, Lou Reed, and others.

“We played beautiful concert halls and opera houses around the world,” she said. “We played Carnegie Hall and The Fillmore. It was a beautiful, magical time.”

An Athletic Event
Christensen carries a quiet-but-commanding gravity with her. She’s tall and striking, with tight, short blond curls that, at times, seem to be living lives of their own. She dresses stylishly—often offering a tasteful reboot of film-noir glamour. And she moves that way, too—slowly, and deliberately. She is not the kind of singer who demurely clears her throat as she sidles up to the microphone. Nor is she the type of singer who delicately clinches her fist to indicate to the audience that she has entered the soulful part of a song. No, Julie Christensen belts out her songs in a way that is demonstrative, expressive, forceful even, and at times, explosive. She describes singing as “an athletic event.”

“I have exercise-induced asthma, and I usually use an inhaler before a show,” she said. “I was touring with Leonard in 1993, and they used a smoke machine [on stage], and one day I threw a hissy fit offstage. Leonard was in the green room in Norway—I didn’t know that he was talking to a journalist at the time, when I burst in and said, ‘Who do I have to fuck to get those smoke machines turned down?’ ‘That would be me, darling,’ he said.”

The writer featured the encounter prominently in the article.

To say Julie Christensen is a diva would misrepresent the wholeness of her being. To say that she is not would deny an inarguable truth. Her swagger is true to her rebellious punk-rock roots, and refined through working with the likes of Cohen, Iggy Pop, Public Image Limited, and Todd Rundgren, who produced a solo album of hers in 1990 that fell victim to record-label politics and was never released. She decidedly goes where the music carries her, until the music doesn’t carry her where she wants to go—then she kicks it with spurs. She was on the bill to sing Cohen’s “Joan of Arc” as a duet with Lou Reed in 2006 in Santa Barbara, Calif. The two had performed the Cohen classic together earlier in the year, but this time Reed, widely regarded as a temperamental genius, had worked up a new guitar part, raising the key four steps in the process. To hit the notes in the already-demanding song, Christensen brought out the spurs and belted a forceful performance that she would later describe as “well received” and “favorably reviewed.” But before published reviews could support her claim, Reed wanted to register a review of his own.

“It was two and a half keys higher than we did it in Dublin,” she said. “In order to get out my part, I had to really haul off and sing, or else I would have had to sing it falsetto and that wasn’t going to be the same. Lou thought I was trying to hog the stage. When we went backstage, he said ‘You couldn’t have done that with your jazz guys, this is rock & roll.’ He’s right, and I know not to upstage the bandleader. But that was the only way I could have performed it in that key. That was the last time I spoke to him. And I felt bad about that, especially when he died.”

Eastbound from Ojai
Christensen moved from Ojai, Calif., to East Nashville in 2013 with her husband, actor John Diehl—he’s worked steadily in film for decades, and is perhaps best known for his role as Det. Larry Zito on Miami Vice. Their son, Magnus, now a recent college graduate, relocated with them. Christensen had met singer/songwriter Amelia White while attending the 2012 International Folk Alliance conference in Memphis. White described to Christensen the fertile musical scene of East Nashville, where she’s based, and encouraged her to come to Nashville for AmericanaFest later that year—which she did.

“Nashville wasn’t on my radar until I met Amelia. It felt like Austin, Texas, felt in the 1970s,” Christensen said. “The unpretentiousness of it, and the willingness of the creative community to be open to new blood while being loyal to the people who are already here.”

She played a gig the night before AmericanaFest at Two Old Hippies with White, Tommy Womack, and John Jackson, and visited the Family Wash for the first time a few nights later, playing with Doug and Telisha Williams of the Wild Ponies.

“I immediately felt like the Wash was like a vortex and a place to call home,” she said.

She asked Diehl to visit Nashville as a relocation test drive. They moved as soon as they could sell their home in Ojai.

“People were incredulous that we would leave Ojai for East Nashville,” she said. “Why would you leave paradise? Well, East Nashville is our paradise.”

This winter, Stone Cupid will release The Cardinal, a powerful 12-song LP Christensen co-produced with Jeff Turmes, which prominently features guitarists Chris Tench and Sergio Webb, Bones Hillman on bass, and drummer Steve Latanation. Christensen wrote five of the cuts and co-wrote another three with Laura Curtis (“Riverside” and “Broken Wing”), and John Hadley and David Olney (“No Mercy”). The record also includes “Shed My Skin” written by Dan Navarro, “Girl in the Sky” by Amelia White, and “Would You Love Me?” by Chuck Prophet. Perhaps the standout cut on The Cardinal is “Saint on a Chain,” by East Nashville powerhouse Kevin Gordon. In typical Gordon fashion, the song is an oddly romantic tale of a small-town fella whose bad choices lead him to contemplate steering his speeding car to a white-knuckle fiery end.

“As he’s driving toward his death at 85 MPH, he asks this Saint Christopher medallion to carry him across to the other shore,” Christensen said. “It feels like a male version of Thelma and Louise. The first time I heard Kevin play it, I was blown away. I could hear my band doing it—I could hear it, the whole thing, it was like an aural hallucination. It just came over me like a wash. That song is like a Faulkner story.”

As solid as the musicianship and songwriting are throughout The Cardinal, the real gems are Christensen’s soaring seasoned vocals. The Cardinal offers a “bonus” track: Christensen’s patient rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”—an ideal cut to showcase her power and versatility as a vocalist. - No Depression

LEONARD COHEN SONGBIRDS ON THE WIRE
by Mark Lewis, Ojai Quarterly
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 - The Ojai Quarterly

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!:

(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 [Poly - Billboard February 8, 1997

Julie Christensen’s Impassioned Musical Crusade

by Brett Leigh Dicks

In the studio recording Julie Christensen’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 Christensen’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 “Finger on the Trigger,” and its ringing guitar lines are as inflicting as its lyrical barbs. While Lackner dialed back the recording’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 Willner’s Cohen tribute concerts. She also has a role in I’m Your Man, filmmaker Lian Lunsen’s recent cinematic exploration of Cohen and his music.

As fate would have it, Cohen-related endeavors loom large in the coming week’s artistic calendar. UCSB Arts & Lectures presents an encore screening of I’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 Christensen’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. “As an artist, I don’t think you ever lose the desire to get heard,” offered Christensen in a whisper from her perch in the studio. “That’s really what gave rise to Something Familiar and it’s what music has always been about for me. It doesn’t matter whether I was touring the world and dueting with Leonard Cohen on ‘Joan of Arc’ or singing ‘Swinging on a Star’ in an a capella group. For me it all comes from the same place. It’s all about the music. It’s all about communicating. And it’s all been part of the same incredible journey.”

But Christensen’s current musical voyage isn’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 Cohen’s last two world tours, she was the perfect choice for Hal Willner’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. “I started writing this recording around the time of the last election,” explained Christensen, “and 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 ‘Between my thighs, is all my country,’ to which he responded, ‘I can’t help you there, darling. You got yourself into this one. You’re on your own.’”

But not all was fun and games. “Then the election happened and all these songs just came out,” Christensen said. “The last time I had been that creative was when I was dumped, and that’s how the election made me feel. I really felt like a jilted lover.” 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. - Santa Barbara Independent

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.








- Los Angeles Times

By Stanley Naftaly, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT


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 á 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. - Santa Barbara News-Press

by Joe Woodard
Julie Christensen, the stylistically gymnastic songbird calling Ojai
home, has a resume that includes work with the post-punk band Divine
Horseman, Leonard Cohen, and Todd Rundgren, for whom she opened up at the
Ventura Theater last year. On her second solo album, Christensen justifies
her wandering idiomatic interests-veering from piano-oriented pop of the
Carly Simon ilk to L.A. C&W to soul and back--with a lucid artistry and a
love of the beautifully-sung note or nicely-sculpted lyric. The title track's
horn-fueled feisty R&B/pop energy yields to the emotional, metaphor-fortified
sincerity of songs like "Traveling Companion" (in a sinuous 7/8) and "Stone
Cupid" (also the name of her label and web-site). Guests include ambient
pedal steel hero Greg (Bill Frisell, Joni Mitchell) Liesz and drummer Jim
(Dwight Yoakum) Christie. All in all, a happy, luminous occasion. (WR) - Santa Barbara Independent

The great leap forward

Julie Christensen takes us to Where the Fireworks Are

~ 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 Cohen’s laconic rasp or brazenly recounting her disillusionment with the current state of the world on her latest album, Christensen’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 Willner’s Leonard Cohen tribute concerts; she also features prominently in Lian Lunsen’s Cohen documentary I’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.

“As an artist, I don’t think you ever lose the desire to get heard,” Christensen says. “That’s really what gave rise to this new album, and it’s what music has always been about for me. It doesn’t matter whether I was dueting with Leonard Cohen on ‘Joan of Arc’ while touring the world or singing ‘Wishing on a Star’ 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. It’s all music. It’s all about communicating. And it’s all part of the same incredible journey.”

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.

“In the buildup to the last elections, I felt really strongly that the current administration shouldn’t be allowed to stay and do another four years worth of damage,” Christensen says. “Then the elections went the way they did, and all these songs just came out. I really hadn’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 that’s how the election made me feel: I felt like a jilted lover.”

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 Lackner’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 “Something Pretty,” 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 Christensen’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.

“One of the first songs that came was the one that eventually became the title track,” Christensen recalls. “I 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 ‘Between my thighs/Is all my country,’ he responded, ‘I can’t help you there, darling. You got yourself into this one, so you’re on your own.’ But, in the end, that one just propelled itself forward.”


05-17-2007





- Ventura County Reporter

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 - The Sydney Morning Herald

ohn Doe, lead and founder of LA’s born-and-bred punk giant “X” and longtime friend Ojai’s Julie Christensen (with her Stone Cupid band) recently assembled for a couple shows at Ventura’s Buffalo Records, and later that Sunday night at Zoey’s on Main. The Ventura surf-skate-punk-music crowd turned out nicely, and were not disappointed. I was happy to see Raging Arb pals Southside Richie, Toby, Russ, and Emery, plus pal Geno Camarillo (who later happened along). It’s not too often you get n in-store show from one of the foundational elements of the punk rock movement. Hey, they actually still sell LP’s there. John was more than happy to hang back with folks after the show!

And there is one other thing we’d really like to know.

Is the Ventura City Council turning punk? Check out the photo of honorable Councilman Brian Brennan “punkin’” out (photo F, left)! We’d like to see a few more “cowpunks” on the City Council! What’s the pre-election view on bringing punk concerts to the “Ivory Tower”? If you feel inclined to hear some more check out “Wrecking Ball” on www.rhapsody.com/johndoehiphop. But, pleez, Brian, just try not to use “your” taxpayer-funded wrecking ball too much more on our just-fine-like-it-is Ventura.

Later, joining a packed crowd at Zoey’s, I caught more of Julie’s great voice, Doe showcased some new stuff, played a few songs from his “Year in the Wilderness” CD, and added some much appreciated and irreverently timely “X” gems. Woodstock was represented with original concert-goer Rene Wilkinson there for the show. Toward the end of the night, coming back for an encore, John reminded the crowd that if they were down on “productivity” at work a little bit the next day, to remind that pencil pushing boss, “Hey what did you do last night? Watch TV? (Just say) I went to a rock show.”

As the night wound down, it was obvious the sound at Zoey’s was first-rate, as was the song-writing and talent, “I’ve been practicing ... for 30-years”. Keep watching because there’s a special John Doe-type show coming up locally.
photo here:
http://www.ov-voice.net/photo/JDoeZoey/pages/page_64.html
- Ojai Ventura Voice

Julie Christensen is one of the truer singers you’ll ever hear — straight up, no mannerisms, perfect taste; listen to her takes on “But Beautiful,” “Stolen Moments” and “Blame It on My Youth,” from her piercing new Something Familiar, and recognize how she could sing with both Leonard Cohen and Chris D. --Greg Burk - L.A. Weekly