“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thought,” said Percy Bysshe Shelley. In support of that sentiment, I offer exhibit one: The Price We Pay for Love, the new release from vocalist Julie Christensen, coproduced with bassist Terry Burns, who also contributes string arrangements and orchestral programming.

Julie Christensen
The Price We Pay for Love (Wirebird Records)
A review
Vocalist Julie Christensen’s brothers got the whole thing started. When their bassist friend Terry Burns said he was moving to Los Angeles, they told him to give their sister a call. He did, and they met for the first time in November 1982. Not long after that meeting, Christensen called him to sub for her swing band’s bassist at their regular gig at the Vine Street Bar and Grill in Hollywood. “He showed up and basically stole the gig,” says Christensen. Burns, to this day, feels a certain remorse as the new guy who stole somebody’s gig. But he can’t fully regret it because it led to a 12-year stint playing together and a lifelong finish-one-another’s-sentences friendship. Forty-one years later, both deposited by life’s currents in New Mexico, that friendship has yielded a sterling new album, The Price We Pay for Love, which reflects on several varieties of love and the particular grief extracted in payment by each.

In November 2020, Christensen was driving through the Valles Caldera listening to John Scofield’s Quiet album and singing along with it. She thought it might be a fun project to write lyrics for the songs, and she thought Burns, with his expressive bass, deft orchestrations, and skilled programming, would be a great match for the project. (Check out his recent albums Arroyo, Behind the Mask, and Particles.) She called him, and the next thing she knew, he had got up at 4:30 in the morning and transcribed Scofield’s “Away with Words” and written an orchestration for it.

Then, Christensen mentioned the Joni Mitchell tune “Hejira,” and Burns found the chart for it and wrote another arrangement/orchestration. Next, Burns suggested Steve Winwood’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” and Jimmy Webb’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” (He wrote an arrangement of the latter based on the Pat Metheny/Charlie Haden version. Christensen said, “That’s not the tune,” and he used Glenn Campbell’s version as a starting point instead.) Then came Burns’ song, “Hilltop,” a love song to a lost love and the most poignant tune on the album, and Michael Moss’s “Goldbridge Road,” which relates the regrets and endurance of parental love. Christensen’s lyrics to Joe Zawinul’s “A Remark You Made” nimbly explore the aching premonition of a love affair’s demise. “How He Lost Her,” written by Christensen and Wendy Waldman, plumbs the hollowed-out feeling of an inexplicably lost love. Buddy Johnson’s hit tune “Save Your Love for Me” and a Christensen/Karen Hammack song, “All the River,” round out the album.

Every track also features Burns’ spare but deeply expressive bass and his rich orchestrations, which, set low in the mix, offer a subtle yet articulate emotional support. At times, the orchestra seems to function as an aural nimbus around Christensen’s voice.

The mixing was done by Burns and Christensen at Burns’ home studio, and he notes that Christensen was responsible for dramatically and skillfully lowering the orchestral parts. “Julie’s got the most incredible ears,” says Burns. “She hears things that I couldn’t hear with a court order.”

Christensen cries easily when the music is sad, and she and Burns made use of what they call her “weep-o-meter” or “weepometer”—however you want to pronounce it—in the mixing process. Burns says that sometimes “when we were mixing this—and it took us a long time—she would sit at the desk, and I would leave the room. I would sneak back and peak in, and if she was crying, I knew we had it.”

A few old friends round out the instrumentation on several of the tunes, with signal contributions from Michael Moss (guitar), Sergio Webb (slide guitar), Greg Leisz (lap steel), Chris Tench (atmospheric lap steel), Karen Hammack (piano), and Steve Schwelling (drums). One new friend, John Funkhouser (piano and melodica), graces four tracks with understated elegance.

“There’s a lot of love in it,” says Christensen. To fully appreciate that love, listeners are advised to set time aside and listen with focused attention. This is not a cleaning-the-house album. It requires close listening, and it will repay that in spades.

“I always felt that music is a service industry,” says Burns, “that it’s meant to make people feel something.” The Price We Pay for Love is freighted with feeling, and if the listener approaches it with focused attention, the album will deepen their day.

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© 2023 Mel Minter