David Lynch – the visionary filmmaker, artist and musician – has died at the age of 78. With his passing, the world has become a little less strange, and a little less beautiful, but his singular visual style, use of sound and profound influence will remain woven into the fabric of culture. Here are 11 musical moments which will stay in our memory forever.
From the sycamore trees of Glastonbury Grove to the nocturnal backstreets of Lumberton, North Carolina, sound and music are so deeply embedded into David Lynch‘s films as to be almost impossible to separate from his unforgettable visuals. No director had a better ear for sound, be it a forgotten pop hit, industrial drone, or the crackle of ambient static, high in the mix, designed to unsettle – and worse.
The common ground, for Lynch, lay in blissful indefinability. As he wrote in his 2006 self-help book, Catching The Big Fish, “Cinema is a lot like music. Someone might say, I don’t understand music; but most people experience music emotionally and would agree that music is an abstraction… You don’t need to put music into words right away – you just listen.”
In the wake of his devastating passing, we’ve compiled a list of moments where those twin worlds collide across his work. Machines, nightmares, joyrides and endless beauty. Sweet dreams.
'In Dreams'
'Blue Velvet'Frank Booth is one of cinema’s most disturbing characters, an unstable, brutal psychopath who – in a film obsessed with what lies beneath – represents pure id. This scene, in which his smarmy-but-suave stooge (excellently played by Dean Stockwell) placates Dennis Hopper’s Booth by lip-syncing to In Dreams, is Blue Velvet’s unsettling set piece. Everything about this vignette is designed to convey a sense of disconcerting artificiality, from the still women in the background to the curtain framing the “stage”. Roy Orbison, predictably, wasn’t pleased about the use of his 1963 pop classic in this context, but it’s impossible to imagine the scene – the film – without it. In response to the yearning sentimentalism of the song, Booth breaks down, triggering the final descent into nightmare.
'Llorando'
'Mulholland Drive'A singer with a single artificial tear stuck to her cheek steps through the curtains onto Club Silencio’s dimly lit stage. She begins her haunting, melancholy acapella rendition of Llorando – a Spanish cover of Roy Orbison’s 1961 song Crying – that forms the fracturing heart of Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. This hypnotic marriage of sadness and surrealism is a moment where catharsis and artifice coalesce. The emotions are real, even if the dream is not. The singer collapses on stage yet the song continues. Once it’s over, a foreboding droning sound returns. It has all been an illusion. No hay banda.
'She's Gone Away' by Nine Inch Nails
'Twin Peaks: The Return'Music’s role was centre stage in Twin Peaks: The Return, as Lynch seized the opportunity to expand the show’s enduring musical legacy and bring a new generation of musicians into the world of Twin Peaks. Most episodes concluded with a feature a live performance in The Roadhouse – the town’s unmistakable in-house dive bar – from a selection of modern musical contemporaries and icons alike (Julee Cruise closed the circle in the season finale). From one week to the next, we were treated to brooding dirges, jewel-toned dreampop, classic ringing guitar and, of course, the odd curveball, including one Hudson Mohawke. Of these performances, it was Nine Inch Nails’ She’s Gone Away that perhaps had the most startling impact, the industrial glamour – and leather clad, magenta-lit performance – easily sliding into the same universe that gave us The Pink Room.
'Falling'
'Twin Peaks'Twin Peaks’ 1990 pilot Northwest Passage set the tone for the groundbreaking series, and served as the unexpected entrypoint to Lynch’s surreal vision for many unwitting viewers who had settled in for a detective show on ABC. It also set the tone for Lynch’s use of music in Twin Peaks’ storytelling: to build its dark, engulfing atmosphere, to punctuate the eerie and uncanny, to harness profound emotion and to contrast haunting tragedy with haunting beauty. Julee Cruise’s Roadhouse performance of Falling exemplifies all of the above, pulling us in, for just a minute, to indulge in pure dream pop transcendence, and ultimately magnifying Cruise’s otherworldly presence throughout the show. Lynch, Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti’s lengthy collaboration began making Mysteries of Love for Blue Velvet, crafting a sound that was heavily inspired by This Mortal Coil’s Song to the Siren — a song Lynch couldn’t afford at the time, but used a decade later in Lost Highway. “Oh, just make it like the wind, Angelo,” Badalamenti remembered Lynch telling him. “It should be a song that floats on the sea of time. Make it cosmic!”
'I'm Deranged'
'Lost Highway'David Bowie lands in Lynchworld via 1997 neo-noir thriller Lost Highway. Hurtling through disturbia with Jay Johnson’s type design building on the motif of highway lines, Bowie and Eno’s caustic, industrial loops set pace. They wrote the song after a trip to the Gugging Psychiatric Clinic on the outskirts of Vienna. The vocals are chopped up vowels, reconfigured to make unhuman bursts of lyric (“be real” becomes “before we reel”, “blonde” morphs into “beyond”). The song returns for the closing credits, this time just a couple of lines acapella. A perfect asymmetry.
'In Heaven'
'Eraserhead'At the heart of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty concept was the use of sound to keep audience’s dread levels high and anxiety percolating throughout a performance. Eraserhead took this idea and ran with it into the future, deploying a foreboding proto-ambient score – created by Lynch with sound designer Alan Splet – to amp up unease and set the scene for some of cinema’s most unsettling moments. And at the heart of this queasy, decaying soundworld is the trippy, laugh-or-you’ll-scream In Heaven – a song composed and sung by the cult figure, Peter Ivers, and lip-synced by Laurel Near in her role as the apparition-like Lady in the Radiator. Like the rest of the soundtrack, it’ll occupy the weirdest part of your brain forever.
'I've Told Every Little Star'
'Mulholland Drive'This simple love song is a palette cleanser within the dark and disorienting universe of Mulholland Drive. David Lynch often deployed saccharine pop songs of the 1950s and 60s in this way, juxtaposing them against a rising sense of unease. This rendition of I’ve Told Every Little Star – a cover of Linda Scott’s1961 teen pop hit – is an audition for a film within a film. It sparkles, literally, with sickly nostalgia while sinister darkness brews, threatening to expose the disquieting underbelly of Hollywood corruption in this film within a film, and the film itself. The singer in the booth is a vision of classic mid-century Americana femininity with blonde bobbed hair and a bubblegum pink diamante dress, but the song fades in and out of focus as eerie, beady-eyed executives in suits talk over it distractedly, leering “This is the girl.” Finally, it dwindles into the background completely, replaced by an ominous hum; a sonic harbinger of the film’s shift towards complete narrative breakdown.
'Laura’s Theme'
'Twin Peaks'As iconic television themes go, few have reverberated through genre and generation quite like Angelo Badalamenti’s Laura’s Theme. That whirring continuum C-note, pierced by heartbreaking, lilting piano, almost telepathically communicating the uncanny beauty of Lynch’s imagined town in the Pacific Northwest. If you haven’t already seen the always-scroll-stopping video of Badalamenti talking through the composition, you’ll have met Laura’s Theme on any number of atmospheric NTS broadcasts or heard its influence across jazz-ambient film scores by Oliver Coates, Trent Reznor and Mica Levi. It wasn’t until a 2017 deep dive into the Peaks score that we discovered the MIDI notation of Laura’s Theme takes the shape of two peaks, underscored by an unbroken hum.
'Red Bats With Teeth' saxophone solo
Lost HighwayAs much as it would be nice to think a man who helped save Earth from invading aliens in Independence Day was also a fiery free-jazz saxophonist, it isn’t actually Bill Pullman skronking out his character Fred Madison’s scorching Red Bats With Teeth solo in Lost Highway. It was Bob Sheppard. Befitting a soundtrack with seemingly zero budgetary constraints (Bowie! Lou Reed! Rammstein! Nine Inch Nails! Smashing Pumpkins! Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christopherson!), it seems only right that Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti – who showed their jazz hands in the early 90s with their short-lived Thought Gang project – would rope in such a respected gun-for-hire. Sadly for Madison, his crush Renee considered his avant-jazz soloing an inferior substitute for virility in the sack.
'Love Me Tender'
'Wild at Heart'Thirty seconds into the final scene of Lynch’s The Wizard of Oz inspired Wild at Heart, there’s a moment where the busy traffic of California melts away and the camera cuts off the rest of the world, leaving Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune to fill the blue-skied frame as he serenades her with an exaggerated Elvis-like rendition of Love Me Tender. Set up like a stage play or a dream, the surrealist happy ending (which differs from the book, where Ripley simply runs away), represents Lynch’s intuitive genius contrasting tender moments of high-drama emotion with absurdity, irony and humour, and remains one of his most iconic uses of live music to soundtrack a closing scene.
David Bowie’s cameo
'Fire Walk With Me'This one’s a bonus. While not a musical performance, it nonetheless feels remiss to leave off David Bowie’s unforgettably strange turn as “the long lost” Philip Jeffries in 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The scene opens with a shot of an elevator, the ambient thrum of static – a Lynch hallmark – high in the mix, and only gets weirder from there on out. The exchange between Jeffries and Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, played by David Lynch, is deliberately inscrutable and riddled with non sequiturs (“Albert! I’ll take a second mineral water!”) before it collapses into a terrifying nightmare. There are, predictably, many fan theories as to what it all means, to which we say: good luck. It’s worth noting that when the character returned in series three, it was as a machine made of metal. A tin machine. Make of that what you will.
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