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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.” (continued—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.
“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.”

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 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.

Sister of Mercy

By Brett Leigh Dicks, October 12, 2006

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.

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. She’s got an engraver’s way of etching/buffing a lyric, and as Josef Woodard’s guitar screwdrivered around the harmonic edges at B.B. King’s last month, she had us reopening a lot of cold cases.

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.

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

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".

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."

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

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

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....

Thorough it’s not, but the concert documentary “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man” 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.

“I’m Your Man” is unlikely to appeal much beyond Cohen’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 Cohen’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 Cohen’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 “Tower of Song” as the documentary’s musical finale, though the strangely cloistered, unsatisfying cover winds up anticlimactic after some grand live renditions by other performers.

With Mel Gibson’s film company producing, music-video maker and former actress Lian Lunson captures music producer Hal Willner’s Cohen tribute concert “Came So Far for Beauty” 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 father’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, “Suzanne.”

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

“I had the title ‘poet,’ and maybe I was one for a while. Also the title ‘singer’ was kindly accorded me even though I could barely carry a tune,” Cohen recites from one of his poems.

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

Cave energetically sings “I’m Your Man” and does a hushed rendition of “Suzanne.” The McGarrigle sisters and Martha Wainwright (daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III) bring beautiful, trilling harmonies to “Winter Lady,” and Wainwright, brother Rufus and Joan Wasser trade passionate verses on “Hallelujah.”

Annoyingly, Lunson drops interview segments into the middle of some performances, though she thankfully leaves intact the film’s two standouts, Orton’s achingly gorgeous rendition of “Sisters of Mercy” and Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla’s duet on “Anthem.”

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 Cohen’s album “Songs of Love and Hate.”

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

Bono redeems himself with this great summation of Cohen’s grim yet playful sensibilities:

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

LEONARD COHEN I’M YOUR MAN If you can’t think of a crisis in your life that’s tied to a Leonard Cohen song, then Canadian director Lian Lunson’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 Cohen’s unifying influence on an astonishingly diverse range of musicians, from Nick Cave (giving the lounge-lizard treatment to “I’m Your Man”), to Antony jigging up and down in an unraveled sweater and making a gorgeous symphony out of “If It Be Your Will,” a sweet duet of “Anthem” by (concert organizers) Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla and a rousing rendition of “Everybody Knows” by the Wainwright family. Cohen sings “Tower of Song” 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 that’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 (“Punk, that’s it!”), he’s sharp as a tack and as ready as ever to debunk his own myths: He can’t carry a tune. In his years as a monk, “I hated everyone, but acted generously.” And how could he be a ladies’ man when he spent “10,000 nights alone”?

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, you’d be a churl to quibble. And he seems as genuinely humble as he is proud to be lionized in such good musical company. “The Wainwrights have brought my music to life,” he says, “and I appreciate it.” Just as well, for if anyone steals his thunder in this movie it’s the magnetic Rufus Wainwright, who, with his sister Martha, brings such rapture to “Hallelujah,” among others, that you rediscover Cohen’s songs for the continuous hymnal they are. Angelic, sexy, androgynous and mischievously louche, Wainwright couldn’t be less like the manly, bass-voiced Cohen. But in putting his own simple yet operatic spin on Cohen’s gift for suffering and exaltation, he’s also keeping the faith. I don’t know whether those rolled-back eyes are the result of ecstasy or Ecstasy, but if Wainwright carries on making music like this, he’ll make willing bisexuals of us all. (Ella Taylor)

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

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 — 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