Twin Peaks is back. And its soundtrack is as inventive and esoteric as ever. Kirsten Johnstone talks with Kathryn Ryan about the influence director David Lynch has had on music over the past four decades.
David Lynch's cult 90s TV show has returned to confuse, confound and creep us out again 27 years after the premiere of its first season. In its absence, references and nods to Twin Peaks in popular culture have only heightened the cult appeal.
Twin Peaks cover Photo: supplied
Music plays a prominent role in the production, as with all of Lynch’s work. There are 21 musicians in the new cast, including New Zealander Finn Andrews from The Veils. There are two soundtracks coming out in September, and the original soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti has been re-issued. That haunting theme has been reprised, dark, slow, and evocative.
“So much came out of the music that made the mood and the place and the feeling of the show come to life.” David Lynch has said of the original Twin Peaks soundtrack.
His partnership with Badalamenti came about when he was hired as composer and Isabella Rossalini’s vocal coach for the 1986 film Blue Velvet.
Lynch had been obsessed by This Mortal Coil’s version of the Siren Song by Tim Buckley and had wanted Rossalini to sing it during the film, but the song was too expensive to buy the rights to. Lynch instructed Badalamenti to write a piece evoking a similar mood, with lyrics he’d scribbled on a piece of scrap paper. That became the Julee Cruise song 'Mysteries of Love'. She went on to become the voice of the Twin Peaks soundtrack.
Working as a musician with David Lynch is clearly an intense and demanding experience, with composers having to improvise music on the spot to fit with the surrealist images in Lynch’s mind. Even Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, was intimidated by this approach.
“In the studio, [Lynch] wrote shit down on a piece of paper—he scribbled something in a star-like pattern with an ink pen and said, “I would really like it to sound like that” Reznor said of his work on the 1997 film Lost Highway.
Blue Velvet itself was inspired by a song - the 1963 hit of the same name by Bobby Vinton - that sparked for Lynch an image of “a twilit, shadowy neighborhood with a girl with red lips in a car surrounded by the rich hue of the neighborhood’s black-green lawns” which set the whole tone for the film.
There are several pivotal cabaret moments in his films - like Dean Stockwell performing Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, or the scene in Mulholland Drive when the female leads spend four minutes sobbing to an a capella performance of ‘Crying’ in Spanish.
One of the greatest of these scenes is in his 1977 film Eraserhead. A blonde- wigged woman with deformed cheeks, living in a dark damp radiator sings “In Heaven, everything is fine…”
While David Lynch hasn’t released a film in 11 years, he has focussed his attentions on music. He came on board with super producer Danger Mouse and songwriter Sparklehorse (Mark Linkous) to collaborate on an album called Dark Night Of The Soul, which was released in 2010.
With songs written by Linkous, the album featured singers such as James Mercer of the shins, Wayne Coyle of Flaming Lips, and Julian Casablancas of The Strokes.
Lynch took surrealist photographs to accompany the album but also became involved in the music - even undertaking vocal duties in a couple of the songs.
And then in 2011 Lynch released his first solo album. Crazy Clown Time is avant electro pop which revelled in the ridiculous, and featured Lynch’s vocals processed through a vocoder. It received some pretty lukewarm reviews, but positive enough for Lynch to release another album in 2013, The Big Dream.
Another New Zealander was invited into Lynch's home studio recently too. On the suggestion of Lorde, Hollie Fullbrook of Tiny Ruins was summoned for a collaboration with Lynch. Originally intended for the Hunger Games soundtrack, the song was instead released as a single last year.
The new Twin Peaks screens on the SoHo Channel, Mondays at 8.30pm (the first two episodes screened on Monday, May 22). It's also available on Neon.
Chromatics, the Portland electro-pop band who play at the end of episode two of the new Twin Peaks.
