Julie Christensen

JULIE CHRISTENSEN

Julie Christensen's first solo CD Love is Driving was released in 1996

Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla contributed to Cohen's last two albums
(I'm Your Man and The Future) and world tours of 1988 and 1993. We also have
seen the ladies singing with Leonard in numerous television shows and documentaries.

Julie Christensen & Stone Cubid:
Sould Driver, released in 2000

"Now, with the long-awaited release of her solo debut, Julie Christensen grabs the wheel and takes us on an emotional journey down the city streets, through small, god-forsaken towns, alongside jubilant love-trains and past heartbreak motels. This is Soul- Country, the American musical crossroads of jazz, blues, soul, folk and country. Better buckle up, love is driving"

"One of the loveliest, purest voices in contemporary music" - John Payne, LA Weekly.

"A knock-out pop-jazz crooner and inspired songwriter who has everything it might take to revive the torch song tradition among the rock crowd" - Chris Willman, Los Angeles Times.

Click here to enter Julie's own website! Order her albums, listen to her songs in MP3, see her performance schedule etc.!

Photos from the 1993 I'm Your Man tour provided by Julie.

Julie has had the blues and jazz in her ears and soul and voice for a long time. Long before her two backup singing stints with Leonard Cohen in 1988 and 1993. Before and during the years of alternative post-punk band Divine Horsemen, which she fronted with Chris D from 1983 to 1987, putting out four albums on SST. Before, during, and since the recordings and live sessions with Cohen, Van Dyke Parks, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Steve Wynn, Osamu Kitajima, k.d. lang, Robben Ford and others. Blues and jazz and other roots music are conjured up on Julie's gigs alongside her evocative original songs and blended into them.

In her five years in the Austin, Texas scene, members of many of the town's luminary bands and touring musicians showed up for her weekly jazz/blues gigs and mounted the stage to blow tunes. Then, Julie moved to LA in the early 1980's. There, she was one of the early purveyors of jazz and blues to the post-punk boho crowd, playing venues like Cathay de Grande, Lhasa Club, Cafe Largo, and the Music Machine on bills with spoken word and acoustic spinoffs of bands like X, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Blasters, & Oingo Boingo. She would be seen in glamorous gowns with virtuoso musicians like Henry Butler.

Julie has opened theater concerts for acts as diverse as Nick Cave, Todd Rundgren, Michael McDonald, Luka Bloom, Jeff Buckley, & Doug Sahm . She's playing in L.A. regularly again, finding time to swing with longtime cohorts the Stepsisters who blow minds and dancing shoes at haunts like the Viper Room, or the Derby, or PBS' Swing Alive at the Palladium.

Julie performed off-Broadway in early 1997 in New York's East Village at Joseph Papp's Public Theater as Slue Foot Sue, Pecos Bill's doomed wife in Sam Shepard's Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife to solid reviews and full houses. After that Julie has done a run as "Rosie" in Sam Shepard's Simpatico at the Florida Shakespeare Theater (located in the lovely restored Biltmore Hotel in Miami's scenic Coral Gables, where Al Capone wintered and Bill Clinton recently stopped to get a massage). Her husband John Diehl played "Vinnie" .