Dear listeners,
David Lynch, the filmmaker whose death at 78 was announced Thursday, was known for his surreal visions that mix the macabre with the everyday. And as early as his very first feature, the 1977 midnight movie “Eraserhead,” sound played a huge role in achieving those unsettling effects — Lynch and the sound designer Alan R. Splet populated that film’s industrial urban hell with hums, low roars and rumbles, crackling electricity and grinding gears. (They also paused the action to present an unusual performance — more on that later — in a move that would become something of a Lynch trademark.)
The scores were crucial, too: Lynch’s long collaboration with the composer Angelo Badalamenti resulted in some of television’s most enduring music, for “Twin Peaks,” which aired in 1990 and 1991. For anyone who didn’t experience it at the time (when programming the VCR to catch an episode felt like life or death), it might be hard to believe what a mass phenomenon the show was — suffice to say that my mom was driving us around the suburbs with a Julee Cruise tape in the deck. Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” music played a huge role in defining the show’s distinctive atmosphere of stirring beauty and ominous darkness.
The soundtracks of Lynch’s movie and TV works also showcased existing songs, often mined from American popular music of past decades, and they clearly were not casual choices — one resonated so strongly with Lynch that he took it for a film’s title. Like Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising,” which set transgressive biker imagery to 1960s pop, Lynch’s visual and musical juxtapositions could rearrange songs’ DNA, adding depth and new layers of meaning — just try hearing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” the same way after watching “Blue Velvet.”
Here are 13 songs that helped us step inside David Lynch’s dream worlds.
In heaven everything is fine,
Dave
Listen along while you read.
1. Angelo Badalamenti: “Twin Peaks Theme”
Can any other TV theme transport you as quickly and completely into the show’s world as the music Angelo Badalamenti created for “Twin Peaks”? Hearing its opening bass note is like entering a portal — at Mission Chinese Food’s original New York spot, there was a “Twin Peaks” restroom, with red lighting, the theme playing and Laura Palmer’s picture on the wall, and the effect of stepping through that door was uncanny. This song won Badalamenti a Grammy, and the show’s popularity propelled a vocal version, “Falling” by Julee Cruise, onto the pop charts.
2. Julee Cruise: “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”
Julee Cruise first worked with Lynch and Badalamenti on the song “Mysteries of Love” for Lynch’s 1986 film “Blue Velvet,” starting a partnership that grew to include two albums and prominent appearances on “Twin Peaks.” (Cruise and Badalamenti both died in 2022.) Within the show, she performed songs from her debut LP, “Floating Into the Night,” at the Roadhouse bar frequented by the characters, including “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” in a memorable Season 2 episode just before the Giant delivers an ominous warning to Agent Cooper: “It is happening again.”
3. Bobby Vinton: “Blue Velvet”
This 1963 Bobby Vinton hit gave Lynch’s psychosexual noir its title, and Isabella Rossellini, as the nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens, performs it in the movie. “I never really liked this song,” Lynch said at a 2014 event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “But one day I listened to it, and suddenly images just started coming out of nowhere.”
4. Roy Orbison: “In Dreams”
The most unforgettable musical scene in “Blue Velvet,” though, starts with a song request from the monstrous Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper): “The candy-colored clown they call the sandman.” With his face illuminated from below by a mechanic’s work light doubling as a microphone, Dean Stockwell’s character Ben lip-syncs this Roy Orbison classic as Lynch draws out the hidden menace in lyrics that read as romance: “In dreams, you’re mine.” (Orbison’s music also figures into 2001’s “Mulholland Drive,” with Rebekah del Rio performing a Spanish-language cover of “Crying” in a climactic scene.)
5. “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)”
In “Eraserhead,” the Lady in the Radiator appears to Henry, the film’s shock-haired protagonist, and performs this tune on a tiny stage inside, you guessed it, his radiator. The songwriter Peter Ivers co-wrote “In Heaven” with Lynch and released his own version later, and the track has drawn as much of a cult following as the movie: I heard the cover version by Pixies long before I had actually seen “Eraserhead.”
6. Chris Isaak: “Wicked Game”
Chris Isaak’s update of Orbison’s high lonesome croon and Elvis Presley’s low growl fit perfectly in Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), a violent romance featuring Laura Dern and an Elvis-obsessed, snakeskin-jacket-wearing Nicolas Cage as lovers on the run.
7. Jimmy Scott: “Sycamore Trees”
Lynch tapped Jimmy Scott, a jazz singer with a high, ghostly voice, for a key scene in the final episode of “Twin Peaks” in 1991. Agent Cooper enters the otherworldly Red Room and watches Scott sing “Sycamore Trees,” a mournful ballad written by Lynch and Badalamenti.
8. Rammstein: “Rammstein”
One of Lynch’s seemingly more incongruous musical enthusiasms was for industrial hard rock verging on metal, used most prominently in his 1997 film “Lost Highway.” Alongside tracks by Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, this pummeling song by the infamous German band Rammstein contributed to the movie’s sinister undercurrent.
9. Beck: “Black Tambourine”
Beck’s album “Guero” (2005) includes this groovy shuffle that plays underneath Dern’s Hollywood breakdown in “Inland Empire,” Lynch’s experimental (even for him) 2006 feature.
10. Connie Stevens: “Sixteen Reasons”
This lushly orchestrated teen-pop song, a No. 3 hit for Connie Stevens in 1960, is showcased in “Mulholland Drive.” The scene’s “wait, what decade is this?” framing — a close-up on a retro girl group slowly pulls back to reveal a modern film set — feels emblematic of the way Lynch nested different eras of American pop culture within one another to make his art.
11. David Lynch and Karen O: “Pinky’s Dream”
Outside of film, Lynch also released several albums under his own name, sometimes collaborating with vocalists like Lykke Li, Chrystabell and, on this lead track from his 2011 solo debut “Crazy Clown Time,” the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O.
12. Nine Inch Nails: “She’s Gone Away”
“Twin Peaks: The Return,” Lynch’s 2017 revival of the series, featured a slew of new artists performing at the Roadhouse, including Au Revoir Simone, Eddie Vedder, Sharon Van Etten and Chromatics (who seem born for this gig). The most intense, though, was “the Nine Inch Nails,” who tore through “She’s Gone Away” in the show’s audacious eighth episode.
13. Nina Simone: “Sinnerman”
For the end credits of “Inland Empire,” his final full-length film, Lynch set a strobe-lit dance by the cast members to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” (1965), which builds to a wail of “Come on, Lord!” and a climax of frantically pounding piano just before the fade to black. Silencio.
The Amplifier Playlist
“David Lynch’s Enchanting Sound Worlds” track list
Track 1: Angelo Badalamenti, “Twin Peaks Theme”
Track 2: Julee Cruise, “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”
Track 3: Bobby Vinton, “Blue Velvet”
Track 4: Roy Orbison, “In Dreams”
Track 5: “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)”
Track 6: Chris Isaak, “Wicked Game”
Track 7: Jimmy Scott, “Sycamore Trees”
Track 8: Rammstein, “Rammstein”
Track 9: Beck, “Black Tambourine”
Track 10: Connie Stevens, “Sixteen Reasons”
Track 11: David Lynch and Karen O, “Pinky’s Dream”
Track 12: Nine Inch Nails, “She’s Gone Away”
Track 13: Nina Simone, “Sinnerman”
Bonus Tracks
This clip from the documentary “Secrets From Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks,” where Badalamenti describes how he wrote the haunting “Laura Palmer’s Theme” with Lynch’s input, is a wonderful illumination of their working method. And your regular Amplifier playlister, Lindsay Zoladz, suggests checking out Brian Eno’s “Prophecy Theme,” from the soundtrack to Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of “Dune.”
The post David Lynch’s Enchanting Sound Worlds appeared first on New York Times.