It’s an easy mistake to make, imagining that Julee Cruise might have a personality as serene and otherworldly as her singing. Not only has her actual voice aged into a wine whose label reads “Takes No Shits,” after years of onstage experience, she often speaks with a bracing candor. “The majority of the U.S. does that line-dancing stuff and listens to country,” says Cruise, calling from her home in the Berkshires. “They don’t know who the fuck I am. And I don’t want to know them, either.”

Born in Creston, Iowa, the 61-year-old Cruise has led the life of a Renaissance woman: She is a renowned singer, multi-instrumentalist, actress of both stage and screen, former touring member of the B-52’s, pilot, and dog trainer. She recorded two gorgeous and haunting dream-pop albums with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti: 1989’s Floating into the Night and 1993’s The Voice of Love, the latter of which has recently been reissued. She also cut two highly underrated albums on her own: 2002’s The Art of Being a Girl and 2011’s My Secret Life. Both records steer away from the ethereal qualities of her early music to embrace an earthier, playful sound that’s rooted in lounge jazz and electronica.

It is her work on Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” though, as the disembodied voice soundtracking key moments (and the occasional Roadhouse singer) that made her something of an underground icon. As detailed in Martin Aston’s Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, Cruise’s artistic alliance with Lynch and Badalamenti was a happy accident. Unable to get the rights to This Mortal Coil’s celestial cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” to use in his 1986 film Blue Velvet, Lynch enlisted Badalamenti to create a new song that had a similarly ethereal vibe. Both Cruise and Badalamenti were New York theater veterans; performing in a Janis Joplin stage revue at the time, Cruise was approached by Badalamenti. It was then that she turned her brassy belting into a voice floating eternally in the astral plane.

Cruise’s close association with “Twin Peaks” has garnered an intense interest in the singer from the show’s fans, which is one of the reasons why she leads a somewhat reclusive life. “I get a lot of stalkers,” she says. Cruise isn’t exactly easy to reach, either, but when we finally did, she opened up about her music, her “big brother” Lynch, and her preferred final resting place.

Pitchfork: You’ve kept a relatively low profile since the release of My Secret Life seven years ago. Did you just need a change of pace, or was this motivated in part by your struggles with lupus?

Julee Cruise: Well, my back is narrowing because of the lupus. And the steroids make your bones crumble—I had the bones of an 85-year-old woman at 33! It’s hard to walk right because I’ve got a pinched nerve running down my right leg. So I take mega amounts of anti-inflammatories. It’s going to give me liver cancer before I ever die of kidney failure from lupus. I’m fucked either way, but I still look great [laughs].