Julie Christensen to Release DON'T YOU PUSH Single and Video

Julie Christensen, the singer-songwriter known for her work with Divine Horsemen and as a longtime collaborator with Leonard Cohen, is set to release the single 'Don't You Push' on 9/11, a track expressing her feelings about the ICE raids. Glide Magazine premiered the video for the track and featured the artist in conversation.

Christensen is a veteran singer-songwriter-bandleader, an ace and coveted harmony vocalist to music legends--Leonard Cohen, Van Dyke Parks, Lou Reed and others--and an open-eared genre-crosser who has moved seamlessly between Americana, roots rock, jazz, her own self-described 'great plains soul' and even country-punk, with Divine Horsemen.

She has also crossed state borders, as a mobile American artist, Iowa City-born and with stints spent in Texas, Los Angeles, Ojai, Nashville and now New Mexico. She has also frequently dealt with social and political issues in her songs, up through the moving new single 'Don't You Push,' giving a human-scaled response to the abuses of ICE raids.

Hers has been a highly personal and adventurous American musical journey, starting with the young singer's role in the popular Iowan band Longshot and the Austin, Texas jazz-and-more band Passenger, before landing in the famous punk and punk-adjacent ferment of Los Angeles in the early 1980s. She comments that 'people used to tell me that I sang jazz with a country accent.' Bands such as X, The Blasters, Green On Red (w/Chuck Prophet) and Los Lobos were putting the city on the indie/post-punk music map around that time, and she fit neatly into the scene.

It was in that ripe time and place that she joined forces with leader Chris D (her husband for a short time in the 1980s) to create the alt-country-punk Divine Horsemen, recording for the mythic American indie label SST in the mid-'80s, before drug use within the band (including a short period of Christensen's own heroin addiction from which she then recovered) brought the band to a close.

A recommendation from Texan comrade Roscoe Beck, then Leonard Cohen's musical director, brought her into the fold of one of Cohen's fruitful periods, from 1988 to 1994, with her harmony singing ally (and later fellow Ojai resident) Perla Batalla. The pair toured the world and worked closely with the poetic sage Cohen and later appeared in the 2005 documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man and various Cohen tribute projects around the globe. Post-Cohen, Christensen settled in for family life in the idyllic Southern California outpost of Ojai, with her husband, actor and artist John Diehl and son (and now film-world artist) Magnus Diehl. Among her many side projects was work, live and on record, with the 'hopelessly eclectic' band Headless Household, out of Santa Barbara.

As for her life in solo artist mode, after the false start of making a sadly unreleased solo album project produced by acclaimed pop artist and producer Todd Rundgren--kiboshed through record industry shakeups--she embarked on a self-determined path as an indie artist. Her JC discography launched in 1996 with Love Is Driving, also marking the birth of her Stone Cupid moniker, record label and attitudinal touchpoint, and continuing with Soul Driver in 2006. She celebrated her own versatility, and diverse interests, by releasing, in rapid succession, the jazz chanteuse project Something Familiar and the soulful and roots rock-y Where the Fireworks Are, which contained her righteously indignant socio-political commentary during the George W. Bush era.

Next came Weeds Like Us (2012), The Cardinal in 2016--with a bonus track of her fresh arrangement of Cohen's classic 'Anthem'- and A Sad Clown in 2018, further examples of her expansive artistry. The past came calling and reanimating when she re-teamed with Divine Horsemen head Chris D, appearing in his supergroup incarnation of the Flesh Eaters for YepRoc's I Used to be Pretty release in 2019. Divine Horsemen turned out two double LPs on the In The Red label between then and 2023, before calling it quits again, amicably.

In February of 2020, just before the pandemic unplugging, Christensen took stock of her long and eclectic musical life, joined by a long list of musical allies including Chris D and longtime keyboardist right-hand woman Karen Hammack, with a 'Retrofestive' show at McCabe's in Santa Monica. It was to be the last show for a long hiatus, forced by the onset of the pandemic a few weeks later.

In recent years, Christensen's creative path has passed through more varied terrain. Working at home in Nashville in the first COVID lockdown year, she worked on 11 from Kevin: Songs of Kevin Gordon--in tribute to Gordon, an underrated songwriter friend from East Nashville--and then in her New Mexican hilltop abode spent a couple years on the 2023 album The Price We Pay for Love, working in collaboration with and old musical connection, bassist and string arranger Terry Lee Burns.

By this point deep into the game, Christensen views her musical trajectory and her twists and turns through genres philosophically, and as a singer determined to make her creative voice heard, she won't stop, can't stop. As she says, 'I'm really inspired by Bonnie Raitt, Joe Ely and others who've made their names picking great songs by friends and songwriters who others might not know, as if to say, 'I've gotta let you in on this secret.' Since I have a voice, I'm going to sing it.'

Some appraisals of Christensen's musical presence, from those who know, and who have known her up close:

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