Back in 2013, David Lynch was in his home recording studio late one morning, surrounded by electric guitars of different shapes and colors. With effects pedals scattered at his feet, he opened a case with an orange sunburst lap-slide guitar inside. “This is the guitar that Ben Harper gave me,” Lynch said with a smile and genuine awe in his voice, dressed in a black suit jacket and shirt, gray hair piled high on top. “That thing makes a hell of a sound.”
The occasion was the coming release of his second solo album, “The Big Dream,” but it wasn’t the first or last time we talked about his music. He was a self-taught improviser on guitar, and a high school trumpeter, but he was drawn to any sounds that tapped meaningfully into feelings of heartache and tension, beauty and noise.
Over a half-century of work, he built a well-earned reputation as a surrealist auteur and master filmmaker. But Lynch, who died last week at 78, was equally passionate about other creative mediums, from painting and photography to designing furniture, and nothing held his imagination more powerfully than the music that filled his life and work.
We were in his fully equipped recording facility, called Asymmetrical Studio — built inside the house he once used as a location for his 1997 film “Lost Highway.” He spent a lot of his time there, and it was just one sign of his lifelong obsession with sound. It held an essential role in his life as a filmmaker and, eventually, a recording artist, songwriter and producer.
Lynch was a rare director with a recognizable musical aesthetic, created with the help of composer and close friend Angelo Badalamenti, among many others. He was attracted to smoky electric guitar twang and the most abrasive industrial sounds, and to rich female voices and lush layers of strings and organ. The through-line were sounds that leaned toward the smoldering and idiosyncratic — from his use of achingly passionate songs of heartbreak by Roy Orbison and Chris Isaak to his own shadowy recordings with modern torch singers Julee Cruise and Chrystabell.
Among his musical collaborators was Karen O, singer for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who appeared on his first solo album, 2011’s “Crazy Clown Time,” and remembers Lynch’s sound as tense and passionate. “There’s an eroticism, there’s an urgency, there’s mystery, there’s darkness, there’s the edginess, the rebellion,” she says. “All that is in David’s musical taste.”
They recorded an ominous, twangy, thunderous tune called “Pinky’s Dream,” featuring a breathless Karen O vocal. “I’ve never met a Pinky,” she says now with a laugh. “It’s a character that inhabits a David Lynch dreamscape. The music is chugging along and you just feel like you’re on one of those lost highways.”
“I guess I like it low and slow, but I also like so many kinds of music,” Lynch told me during a 2015 visit to the painting studio behind his home high up in the Hollywood Hills. “I love what sound can do, what music can do, and to marry to the picture and make the whole thing greater than the sum of the parts.”
As a director, he showed a gift for placing music with stunning impact, from Samuel Barber’s deeply emotional “Adagio For Strings” in 1980’s “The Elephant Man,” to the raging thrash metal riffs of Powermad in 1990’s “Wild at Heart,” and Rebekah Del Rio’s torrid Spanish a cappella reading of “Llorando” in “Mulholland Drive.”
In “Blue Velvet,” Lynch created an eerie moment of romance and nostalgia in an otherwise disturbing scene as actor Dean Stockwell, in paisley tuxedo jacket, lip-syncs Orbison’s 1963 hit “In Dreams.” The song’s use in the film helped spark an Orbison revival, and Lynch soon co-produced a new version of the song with the singer and T-Bone Burnett for a 1987 retrospective, “In Dreams: The Greatest Hits.”
That love of music ultimately led the director to begin dabbling in creating some of his own, starting with his distinctive collaborations with Badalamenti, which stretched from “Blue Velvet” in 1986 until the composer’s death in 2022. It was an especially close relationship between director and composer that Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran compares to Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, who scored all of the Italian filmmaker’s films from 1959 to 1979.
Likewise, Lynch and Badalamenti were “so closely linked that they almost can feel each other’s heartbeats,” says Rhodes, whose band of hitmakers also worked with Lynch on a few occasions, including his remixing two of their songs.
“I always say Angelo Badalamenti brought me into the world of music,” Lynch said. “I played the trumpet when I was young and I understand music, but I was in love with sound effects. So I wanted to build a studio to experiment with sound, but I knew I wasn’t a musician really. Angelo said, ‘David, I need lyrics.’ So I started writing lyrics for Angelo, and we worked together. And that was a combo — the David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti combo, and it brought out those things. That gave me more confidence.”
By the late 1980s, that impulse led the duo to Excalibur Sound Productions in New York City, where they worked on music with a young unknown singer, Julee Cruise, who had recorded their song “Mysteries of Love” for “Blue Velvet.” An album, 1989’s “Floating into the Night,” emerged after a year and a half of sessions, launching the single “Falling,” which had a second life as a theme for “Twin Peaks.”
In 2017, as the acclaimed third-season revival of “Twin Peaks” unfolded on Showtime, Cruise recalled to me the original directions from Lynch during her sessions. “He said, ‘Julee, you are a child full of wonder,’” said Cruise, who also performed the dreamy, mournful “The World Spins” on the series.
“I will always be known as this, and I will always be proud of this,” said Cruise, who died in 2022. Lynch also directed a one-hour musical film starring Cruise, “Industrial Symphony No. 1,” released in 1990 by Warner Bros. Records.
In subsequent years, Badalamenti was based in New Jersey, and made occasional trips to L.A. “Wherever we were, we would sit and make music,” Lynch said. Last year, the director expressed lasting sadness over the 2022 death of Badalamenti, who he called “my brother.”
“It just doesn’t seem possible that he’s gone,” Lynch said. “It just seems like I could call him up and we could make music again.”
In time, Lynch created multiple workspaces adjacent to his home in the Hollywood Hills: the recording studio, painting studio, wood shop and offices. He performed music live only one time, with his band Blue Bob in 2002, an experience he called “a traumatic thrill,” and something he wasn’t anxious to repeat.
“He wasn’t a musician. He couldn’t tell you, ‘I want an E minor here, and then I want to have eight bars of this,’” says Isaak, whose “Wicked Game” became a hit after appearing in 1990’s “Wild at Heart.” “We didn’t talk in that language.” Lynch went on to direct the music video for “Wicked Game.”
Aside from creating music alongside Lynch, Isaak appeared on camera in a prominent role in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” “I sure got lucky for how the stars aligned, that I got to work with him and hang with him and get to know him a little. I must have somebody up there looking over me because what a treat.”
Lynch was a filmmaker who treasured music enough to turn the Roadhouse bar in the 2017 season of “Twin Peaks” into a world-class nightclub, and included performances of complete songs in many episodes from the likes of Moby, Eddie Vedder and “The” Nine Inch Nails. In 1997, he’d recruited NIN’s Trent Reznor to create a soundscape for “Lost Highway,” and together they landed on the cover of Rolling Stone. (Lynch would later create a music video for NIN’s “Come Back Haunted.”)
Some collaborations were less expected but just as rewarding. In 2011, Duran Duran asked Lynch to direct the livestream of a concert from the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, as part of the American Express “Unstaged” series that matched musicians with filmmakers. The result was fully in character, photographed in murky black-and-white for a worldwide online audience, and layered with Lynchian imagery and juxtapositions: smoke, fire, strange objects and dead animals superimposed over the band.
“When something magical like that happens, you embrace it as quickly as you can,” says Duran Duran’s Rhodes. “I just love his vision and the world that he creates. I knew that merging with Duran Duran would be something mad, something surreal and beautiful and extraordinary that nobody would’ve ever expected. I felt that he had the same intention with what he was making with us. It was an absolute joy.”
For several years, Lynch harnessed his musical connections to raise funds and awareness for the David Lynch Foundation, established to promote the benefits of Transcendental Meditation. He hosted a series of music and art events on both coasts, including his popular Festival of Disruption, and a 2009 benefit concert with former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at Radio City Music Hall.
On his next solo album, 2013’s “The Big Dream,” he recruited Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li soon after she relocated to Los Angeles. He handed her a coffee-stained note with a few lyrics jotted down and said, “Make this into a song.” She accepted Lynch’s note as “a clue, a puzzle, a question” toward something new. She recast his words “I’m waiting here” as the title of the aching bonus track “I’m Waiting Here.” Recording the track was unlike a normal session.
“I’ve never done that again with anyone else,” Lykke Li says now. “He stood next to me and it was almost like he directed me how to sing. It was almost like a seance. It was really based on feeling and intuition.”
Lykke Li also notes that Lynch “saved my life,” by introducing her then to Transcendental Meditation at a time when things were fast-moving and chaotic in her life. “It was like only when I started meditating that I really found a center and it’s unlocked everything for me,” she says.
The final project Lynch finished and released before his death was “Cellophane Memories,” a collaboration with Chrystabell, recorded at his home in 2023 and 2024. Unlike the songs of romance from their previous work together, the record was marked by an experimental layering of vocals and other effects that eased it deeper into the avant-garde.
“We were both doing what we love to do, which is to experiment and to create,” Chrystabell says now, days after Lynch’s passing. “His mind was always alive, always inspired. There were always things brewing.”
Along the way, the duo recorded several other songs in different modes, including an unfinished project that was to be called “Strange Darling.” But the filmmaker-painter-musician was already looking to their next round of songs together.
“David loved a great pop song,” the singer recalls. “That was the next thing we were going to do. He was like, ‘Chrystabell, should we write some hits next time?’”
Instead, Lynch’s musical friends and collaborators have been in mourning this week, grateful for their moments together, diving back into the work he left. Chrystabell says she has dealt with her close friend’s death by listening to music left behind.
“So much of our music is really tailor-made for these moments,” she says, recalling Lynch lyrics like “the great unknown,” “angel star” and “10 trillion miles of dark.” “He was right there, and we explored that territory. Lyrics could be cute and fun backseat kind of sexy or cosmic, otherworldly, spiritual, almost hymnal music. I was marveling at that. It all hits different now.”
The post From Chris Isaak to Karen O, David Lynch’s musical collaborators recount his strange, sonic mysticism appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
