The Discomfort Zone: Exploring the Musical Legacy of David Lynch

The visionary director has not only changed how we see movies across the last four decades, he’s changed how we hear them too. Collaborators including Trent Reznor and composer Angelo Badalamenti—along with the man himself—talk about the secrets to unsettling soundtrack success.
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Music shapes the cinematic vision of David Lynch in ways that go far beyond the simple marriage of song and image. In his films, soundscapes give sense to strange dream worlds filled with red velvet curtains, the churn and soot of industry, split personalities, and piping hot cups of coffee. Music is not merely an accompaniment or garnish—it plants itself deep into the narrative, revealing themes, building characters, and ultimately guiding the subconscious to parts unknown.

Lynch’s musical experiments have always gone right alongside visual work. For his debut feature, 1977’s Eraserhead, he worked on the sound design with collaborator Alan Splet for more than a year, tinkering with unorthodox foley techniques and producing dark ambient sounds full of static hiss, convulsing gargles, and eerie clangs, as well as writing the lyrics for “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)” as performed by Peter Ivers on the soundtrack. By 2006, Lynch had started to sing his own compositions, as with Inland Empire’s “Ghost of Love.” Though he hasn’t released a proper film in the last 10 years, he’s continued his work as a solo artist with the release of two albums under his own name, 2011’s Crazy Clown Time and 2013’s The Big Dream. And across the last four decades he has also contributed to several music projects as a lyricist, producer, director, guitar player, and keyboard player.

But perhaps none of Lynch’s musical endeavors has had the impact and longevity of “Twin Peaks,” the skewed soap opera he created with Mark Frost in 1990 and which will be returning to TV screens next year. It’s inconceivable to separate Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti’s euphoric and amorphous score—along with Julee Cruise’s floating vocals, which glide so delicately they feel like a draft gently creeping in through a cracked window—with the show’s cinematic and narrative world. It’s something the auteur is still proud of to this day. “The music of ‘Twin Peaks’ was integral to the experience,” Lynch tells me. “So much came out of the music that made the mood and the place and the feeling of the show come to life.” In fact, Badalamenti will perform music from the show at this weekend’s Festival of Disruption, a two-day event in Los Angeles curated by Lynch and featuring musicians including St. Vincent, Robert Plant, and Questlove.

“Twin Peaks” impacted an entire generation of music makers in profound ways. “Everyone we knew watched it religiously, and if you didn’t watch it, we didn’t like you,” testifies the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, who took part in a concert celebrating the director’s musical legacy alongside Lykke Li, Sky Ferreira, and others last year. Trent Reznor, meanwhile, recalls delaying Nine Inch Nails gigs in the early ’90s so that he and his band could tune in to “Twin Peaks” in real time. “That was a real problem on that tour,” he says. “We had our priorities.”

Longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti and his haunting keyboard tones star in a teaser for the forthcoming "Twin Peaks" series.

“Twin Peaks” is not an anomaly however. Lynch’s career is inundated with singular musical moments that have given birth to pioneering explorations. Fittingly, these instants have manifested themselves through missed opportunities, infatuations, serendipity, and the unexplainable.

Back in Boise, Idaho in 1956, on a warm September evening, Lynch’s childhood friend came pelting down the road to inform him he had just missed Elvis Presley on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But not seeing the seismic cultural event allowed Lynch’s imagination to fester and spark, to forge his personal vision of the birth of rock’n’roll, his own mutated take on the King’s croon, his own version of the music.

An analogous moment would take place almost three decades later when Lynch first heard This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren.” “It just drove me crazy,” he says. “I’m fascinated by that piece of music. I’ve not heard hardly anything as beautiful as it yet.” In the middle of putting together his 1986 film Blue Velvet, he became obsessed with the song and craved for it to be in the film—but the budget wouldn’t allow it. Instead, he decided to put something similar in its place, which turned out to be “Mysteries of Love,” the first collaboration between Lynch and Badalamenti. The pair’s creative partnership would go far beyond a pale imitation of This Mortal Coil.

“Sometimes when you don’t get what you want, there’s a reason, and that brought me together with Angelo in a really important way and started this whole thing,” says the director. The two have since collaborated on iconic works including “Twin Peaks,” Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.

Isabella Rossellini performs "Blue Velvet" in Lynch's 1986 film of the same name; Bobby Vinton's version of the song provided the initial inspiration for the movie.

Lynch’s fixation with individual pieces of music has exploded to life on screen repeatedly over the years. The Bobby Vinton version of the song “Blue Velvet,” for instance, provided an initial spark for that movie; when Lynch heard the 1963 hit, it triggered his imagination, and he suddenly envisioned 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. The track painted a picture and set the scene for the whole film.

Adagio for Strings,” by the American composer Samuel Barber, was another one. While shooting The Elephant Man in London, Lynch recalls, “I was in the living room on a couch with the radio on and up comes ‘Adagio for Strings,’ and the whole ending for the film came to life in my head.” David Bowie’s 1995 electro-pop deep cut “I’m Deranged” led him to the opening speed and pulse of Lost Highway. And singer Rebekah Del Rio’s Spanish translation of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” recorded on a whim at Lynch’s home studio, opened up the disconcerting universe of Mulholland Drive.

Singer Rebekah Del Rio performs a Spanish version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" in this iconic scene from Mulholland Drive.

Orbison is yet another bizarre mirror in Lynch’s career and musical life. “Crying” was also a catalyst for another unforgettable scene in Blue Velvet, 15 years before Mulholland Drive. After hearing the song in a cab, Lynch picked up the crooner’s Greatest Hits album and found himself drawn to another Orbison track, “In Dreams.” “I thought, This song absolutely is Blue Velvet, and Dennis [Hopper] is gonna sing this thing,” he recalls. “But Dennis, because of so many drugs, had a problem memorizing the lines. So [co-star] Dean [Stockwell] was helping him, and one day they showed me what they were rehearsing, and at one point Dennis couldn’t remember the next line, and Dean took over—and Dennis’ face was so beautiful watching him. That led to the way it is in the film.”

Dean Stockwell ended up singing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet because Dennis Hopper couldn't remember the song's lyrics.

Though the end results of Lynch’s cinematic output may be phantasmagoric, inimitable, and at times brain-warping, a great deal of them are rooted in the everyday, in extracting the profound from the ordinary. Or, as he describes it in the context of allowing the music, or the idea, to dictate the movement of a film, “The world is filled with beautiful accidents.” Here, many of those who have worked with—or been inspired by—Lynch and his beautiful accidents reflect on their experiences.

Dean Hurley

Lynch’s in-house studio engineer, co-producer, and collaborator

The buzzword David uses for everything is “experiment.” That’s at the root of his whole quest—it’s just about wanting to collide elements and see what comes out. In the studio, I’ve seen David say to a drummer, “I want you to play World War II in three parts: Start with being on the ship and then move towards the beaches of Normandy and then have a storm rush onto Normandy.” Then he’ll just say, “OK, go.”

We’ll play each other songs in the studio, and once in a blue moon he’ll get super excited about something. The last time was with Kanye West’s Yeezus. His favorite track was “Blood on the Leaves,” but the first thing I played him was “I’m in It,” and he just looked over at me and his eyes got really big. That’s his reaction when he gets excited about something: He gets that serious death stare and just goes, “Fuckin’ A, this is killer.”


Trent Reznor

Nine Inch Nails; composer/soundtrack producer for Lost Highway, set to feature in the new “Twin Peaks” series

Around the time I was starting to formulate Nine Inch Nails I went back to really examine the sound effects and music of Eraserhead, which had a huge impact on our sound and how it makes you feel a certain way. Listening to Eraserhead, I remember thinking to myself, Why do I feel so fucking edgy? The sound of the room noise was incredibly loud. These were lessons that as I learned applied to my own arranging and songwriting around the time I did The Downward Spiral.

I had a white noise generator that became pretty musical when you tuned it; you normally used to tune rooms, but it had a pitch in it and it was weirdly soothing. So I was messing around on that, and we ended up scoring a couple of scenes to Lost Highway based on those noises. 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.” I thought, All right, he’s either really weird, or it’s some sort of test to see what happens, but it set the tone. He was very accommodating and I remember him saying, “Wow, that’s a beautiful sound” in that real loud, hard-of-hearing way he talks. It was like being inside a Lynch film in a strange way.

A few years after Lost Highway I finally got my shit together and got sober. When I think back, that was one of my regrets—I wasn’t at 100 percent during the time I spent with him on Lost Highway. I was struggling to keep my shit together, convincing myself that it was business as usual. Looking back I know that I could have been better. That’s also when I was around David Bowie, another one of my greatest heroes. But that’s how life unfolded for me. I’m not complaining.


Marek Zebrowski

*Composer/pianist; Lynch’s collaborator on the 2007 album *Polish Night Music

David has this heavy ability to take people out of their comfort zone. That’s his secret. I don’t know how he makes me do things, but he did. A lot of artists like to think about form and convention, but David wants to explore the intuitive side of art. He succeeds.


Zola Jesus

Singer-songwriter; performed at the David Lynch Foundation concert last year, recorded her album Taiga at Lynch’s studio, and Lynch has remixed her work

Eraserhead was my first experience of David Lynch, and the score really stuck with me. I was fascinated by how it created an incessant tension and uneasiness that felt both totally alien and as familiar as a construction site. I covered “In Heaven,” and it is a very special song to me. Eraserhead is forever in my marrow, and that song flows through me like blood.


Wayne Coyne

Flaming Lips; performer at 2015 David Lynch Foundation concert

For me it started with Eraserhead—the wind or the sound of whatever is rumbling outside. His movies have such an unsettling effect on you because of the sound effects and the soundscapes—it’s a strange way to use music in a film. We’ve seen that film as many times as anybody can watch a film.

The trailer for Lynch's 1977 feature debut Eraserhead, which featured sound design that was as revolutionary as it was disorienting.


Nick Rhodes

Duran Duran; Lynch directed the band’s live concert film Unstaged in 2014 and also remixed their track “Girl Panic!”

We saw Eraserhead and were so stunned by it. It had a real, lasting impact. And I love everything Angelo Badalamenti has done with David—notably “Twin Peaks.” The fact that the music had this creepiness—yet a sort of lightness to it as well—was intoxicating.


Angelo Badalamenti

*Composer for every Lynch film from 1986 onwards, except *Inland Empire

When David couldn’t get “Song to the Siren” for Blue Velvet, the producer asked me if I could write a song to possibly replace it. I said I could try, but we needed someone to write a lyric. I recommended the director should do it since he would know the concept best. David agreed to work with me on it, all the while knowing how ludicrous it was that we could come up with a song that would ultimately replace one of his all-time favorites—it was like a joke to pacify the producer.

So I was about to record Isabella Rossellini doing “Blue Velvet,” and she hands me a little piece of yellow paper that David had given to her and it says, “Mysteries of Love.” I’m reading it and saying to myself, This is not a happening lyric. There were no hooks. There wasn’t even a rhyme. I was so sorry that I recommended he do the lyric, to be honest. I called David and said, “Your lyric is really something.” I didn’t say good or bad. I asked him what kind of music he heard for the song, and he said, “Angelo, just let the music float like the ocean tide, just put it in space, make it timeless and endless.” I then played the song to David, and he loved it. He said, “Find us a singer who sings like an angel.” In walked Julee Cruise, and the rest is history.

From then on I had a very unusual way of working with David. So much of the pilot music for “Twin Peaks” was composed without seeing any video, only David’s descriptions of various characters and moods. When I first saw the images married to the music, well, what can I say? It was, and still is, a beautiful thing. It’s incredible how he took isolated pieces of work and placed them. The recording sessions for “Twin Peaks” were all done at a funky little studio in New York called Excalibur with the great engineer, Art Pohlemus. It was this dark place where there wasn’t a comfortable chair to sit on and the mice were running around hunchback, but David loved that. He said so much music [in general] would sound better if it were played slower. So the opening deep-in-the-forest “Laura Palmer’s Theme” became ominous, dark and low. During one of the sessions, a drummer said, “Every time I come to a David and Angelo session, I play in two tempos: slow and reverse.”


Jim James

My Morning Jacket; performer at 2015 David Lynch Foundation concert

David’s music with Angelo has had a deep impact on me, starting with the “Twin Peaks” soundtrack. It’s a reminder to me to always try and push as hard as you can towards the fantastical and surreal.


Jamie Stewart

*Xiu Xiu; recently released *Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks

Blue Velvet made me realize that this was a different level of using music in a movie. Shortly after that I saw “Twin Peaks” and obviously the music in that is the best music that’s ever been in a television show. Before we started Xiu Xiu, I had watched all of the episodes for the second time, and we were trying to decide what we wanted the band to be like. Thinking about the elements of “Twin Peaks”—being romantic and very frightening at times, the social commentary, the weird sexuality of it, and how it can be very funny and sweet but never ironic—we realized those elements were something we wanted to try to translate into our own music and apply to Xiu Xiu. The trajectory of that band is very deeply informed by our early-perceived thoughts of what “Twin Peaks” was. It is always present in our aesthetic consciousness.


Julee Cruise

Singer-songwriter; Lynch and Badalementi produced her 1989 debut album Floating Into the Night, much of which went onto become the “Twin Peaks” soundtrack

My collaboration with Angelo would have been horrible without David Lynch, let me tell you. Angelo and I are both classically trained, and you need to be malleable, which David certainly is. For “Falling” [which became the “Twin Peaks” theme] the lyrics by David were written on a napkin. When we were recording Floating Into the Night, it was more about moods than scenes, and that’s all I needed. He’d say, like, nine words to me and then I would be like, “Oh, I got it.” It was that quick.

David would say things like, “It’s so smooth and delicate and pure” and these sorts of directions. Although on the track “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart,” David would scream, “big chunks of plastic!” to the sax player over and over again to get that great sax section in the song. That’s a pretty outrageous thing to say to a professional saxophone player, yet he understood. However, on the track “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears,” the Elvis song we did for the Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World, the only direction that he gave me was to imitate Elvis—but then he gave me this additional direction by whispering in my ear: “This is sexual, you are coming.” That was one of the best—and most shocking—directions he ever gave me.


David Paich

Toto; composer for Dune, collaborated with Lynch on uncompleted project in 2011

David had two requirements for Dune. He said, “I want the score to be low and slow… very slow.” After we stopped working on the film, he took music that was written for certain places and moved them to others in the movie, and experimented with a lot of the material. He slowed down a lot of what our band and the symphony did to make it even lower and darker.

When we worked together in 2011, he was directing me as a composer almost as we were doing this improvisational, avant-garde, urban hip-hop, weird, strange, dark stuff that David calls “inky”—one of his favorite words. He would say, “I want you to make it sound inky right here.”


John Neff

*Lynch’s ex-studio engineer and collaborator on various projects such as the 2001 album *BlueBOB

During the BlueBOB sessions, David would bring up a box of typewritten poems from his office, select a sheet, hand it to me, and say it was time to sing. I initially thought I would have time to go home and come up with a melody, but no—he wanted my raw ideas and I had to sing it as soon as I saw the lyrics. He would have me sing through his director’s megaphone into a ten thousand dollar mic with nothing but echo returns in my headphones. This had the effect of making me stutter a bit, which he called “money in the bank.” He wanted to treat the voice as an instrument or effect, not as a regular vocal. When I was singing, David would be on the talkback mic, giving me directions, trying to set a mood. Mostly he wanted a real flat read with no emotions. He said we were factory workers, churning out a product for others to use as they saw fit.


Stephen Hodges

*Drummer on “The Pink Room” from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and on *Fox Bat Strategy: A Tribute To Dave Jaurequi

There’s a feeling in the air that he creates before you even start playing—even the silence is intensified. I remember he would keep saying, “It’s too normal, it’s too normal!” When we filmed playing “The Pink Room” on set it was pretty intense. David was just saying “more smoke, more smoke,” and people had to get naked on stage every time we did a take. It was a very altered universe.

"The Pink Room" plays in the background of this scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.


Chrysta Bell

Frequent collaborator with Lynch, who has also produced and directed her work

When you discover that kind of musical chemistry when working with someone, it’s like striking gold. You want to keep digging. David fulfills the traditional role of producer, but he also brings something deeper. His intuition guides us. In his studio, David verbally sketches the vision and mood he wants for the track. He uses words like “fragile,” “angelic,” “strong.” I take all this to the vocal booth and let it simmer.


Barry Adamson

*Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Magazine; composer for *Lost Highway

I remember fixing a scene [in Lost Highway], and David was quite instructive with me, saying, “When you work to a scene like this, it’s a good thing to look at their eyes all the time rather than going on what’s being said or what can you hear.” And I wrote from that place. I actually felt more comfortable with him than any other film director because he had a confidence about what he was doing. Some people that I work with are so fickle, but there was an assuredness about what he does and who he is and what his art is, which I felt I could relax in.


David Lynch

Music is a strange thing. It does something to the brain and to the heart. Music goes into us and a whole bunch of things start happening. A lot of times it will form pictures and scenes—it’s like a gift. It can happen even with music you’ve heard before, but on this particular day you hear this particular thing and it does something different. It’s just magical.