Throughout “Twin Peaks: The Return,” moody and unpredictable music was used to accentuate the show’s fractured timelines, inimitable characters, and countless moments of head-scratching multiplicity—matching them in both soothing harmony and rattled discordance. Primary composer Angelo Badalamenti, sound supervisor Dean Hurley, and others involved in the soundtrack recently spoke to us about the process of creating music for the series. And now, the creator, writer, director, sound designer, producer, and overall series architect, David Lynch, adds his wisdom about the sound world of “The Return,” including insights on David Bowie’s involvement and why we many never hear the show the way it’s meant to be heard.
David Lynch: Absolutely. I never even talked to him, but I talked to his lawyer, and they weren’t telling me why he said he couldn’t do it. But then, of course, later on we knew.
I sculpted that part of the machine that has that tea kettle spout thing, but I wish I’d just made it straight, because everybody thinks it’s a tea kettle. It’s just a machine.
No, no, no. He didn’t know that. We got permission to use the old footage, but he didn’t want his voice used in it. I think someone must have made him feel bad about his Louisiana accent in Fire Walk With Me, but I think it’s so beautiful. He wanted to have it done by a legitimate actor from Louisiana, so that’s what we had to do. The guy [voice actor Nathan Frizzell] did a great job.
He was unique, like Elvis was unique. There’s something about him that’s so different from everybody else. I only met him during the time I worked with him and just a couple of other times, but he was such a good guy, so easy to talk to and regular. I just wish he was still around and that I could work with him again.
There were a couple of pieces of music that I wanted in there from the beginning: The Platters’ “My Prayer,” the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me,” Booker T. & the M.G’s’ “Green Onions,” Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”
It’s the version from the Monterey Pop Festival. There was Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company doing “Ball and Chain,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Wild Thing,” and there was Otis Redding. When I hear those three things, it just drives me crazy how great they are. With Otis Redding, we reach this place in him, and I just couldn’t believe that version. It was so, so, so beautiful. So much feeling comes through that thing; it’s one of my all-time favorites. I just go nuts. I start crying like a baby when I hear that thing.
I was going to experiment with Angelo but that thing was, in my mind, made to order. I did chop it up a lot so that I could get different sections for the visuals, but it was just meant to be.
It felt real good. The problem is that, in the studio, we played it in the mix really loud, so it would be more like you’d hear it in a theater. Then the heartache comes when you have to dial it back for television, because they have these restrictions as to how loud these things can be and how long they can be loud for; many different rules, it’s really not so great. It’s like when you know what it can be and then you have to suffer that [dilution], and people see it on their computer or even, my god, on their phone—it’s like a nightmare. There’s so much fucking power in that scene, and in this world people would love to hear what’s there, but the machines [which we watch things through] aren’t there any more. It’s got to be full range and full loud.
What I really like to do is sit close to Angelo, I love him so much, he’s like my brother. I was on Skype with him, and it’s not a great image, but the sound was set up so that when he hit the keys, I heard exactly what was going down the line, and the quality was as though I was sitting next to him. I’d go through these different topics with Angelo, and he just started playing. If what he played wasn’t the mood I was looking for, then I’d just change the words and talk to him some more. It wasn’t like he made a mistake or goofed up, it was that he interpreted it that way and it required changing the words. He always gets into it and catches a thing. It just flows out of him.
This thing about sound designer, it’s a weird thing. When you see the credit up there, people automatically think that person did all the sound, so it’s misleading, but I want to take that credit because I’m the one who makes all the final decisions on sound. In actual fact, I picked sounds and I made a few sounds, but Dean Hurley was making tons of stuff, and [sound designer] Ron Eng was making a lot of stuff too. They were working their butts off, but I would tell them in our spotting notes what I wanted in regards to mood in different places. We worked together, but they were building a lot of sound. In a traditional way, they’d probably get sound design credit, but I don’t want to do that because that means that I don’t do anything. [laughs] I’m responsible for what people see and what they hear.
Oh of course, there are so many millions songs and bands. Michael Horse [aka Deputy Hawk] just turned me onto a guy called Justin Johnson. He’s on YouTube. He plays the shovel—a three-string shovel. He’s great.
