3rd Coast Music 7/2016 (copyright John Conquest)

Unable to retrieve her Polygram masters, Christensen rerecorded some tracks and, with new songs, self-released her solo debut, Love Is Driving (Stone Cupid, 1996, which, back then, meant maxing out credit cards). Since then, she’s put out five more albums including The Cardinal, on which she originally broke format, crediting it to Stone Cupid, rather than herself, but later she found out about algorithms. Do not ask me to explain this, suffice to say, they were not her friends when it came to actually monetizing The Cardinal, so she changed it to Julie Christensen & Stone Cupid, which apparently solved her problem.
Thinking of Stone Cupid, which Christensen praises for “absence of ego,” one name will resonate with most 3CM readers—Sergio Webb, one of my, and I hope your, favorite pickers. Like many people, Christensen first saw him, after she moved from Ojai, CA to East Nashville in 2013, accompanying David Olney or Amelia White, but it wasn’t until she saw him play in a full band setting that she realized he could rock, and asked him to join her band. Come to think, Olney and White are also represented in the credits, Olney for cowriting No Mercy, with Christensen and John Hadley, White for her Girl In The Sky. Other cowrites are Riverside and Broken Wing, with Laura Curtis, other covers are of Dan Navarro’s Shed My Skin, Chuck Prophet’s Would You Love Me? and the album standout, Christensen’s take on Kevin Gordon’s Saint On A Chain. Actually, there is one more cover, of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem. Torn between wanting to record Anthem and the fact that it simply didn’t fit into the sequencing (I do dearly love artists who think like that), Christensen included it as a ‘hidden bonus track’ (great version, by the way, with rather fewer rivals than Hallelujah).
Positioning Christensen is a little difficult. As the song selection and the move to East Nashville suggest, she’s got at least a foot in the singer-songwriter/Americana camp, but recruiting Sergio Webb affirms that she is, au fond, a rocker, albeit one whose alt country history still underpins her work. For some reason, she doesn’t think she’s qualified to be a country singer. like who is these days? Still, if I might dream of a pure country album, I’ll take anything Christensen has to offer, though I will say that, on this one, Sergio Webb is very much added value. JC

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