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‘Music,” David Lynch said when I spoke to him for the Guardian last year, “is a magic”. We were discussing the album Cellophane Memories, which he had produced with singer Chrystabell: a beautiful, dreamlike, archetypically Lynchian record, which – with his death this week at the age of 78 – would be his last.
While he started out as a painter and found global fame as a director through surrealist masterpieces like Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, Lynch maintained a passion for music all his life – from his bizarre sonic experiments for film, to his own albums, to his collaborations with the likes of Julee Cruise, Flying Lotus and Angelo Badalamenti.
As fans reel from the loss of this giant of the film world, his death invites reflection on his equally imaginative, committed, unique work in sound.
Throughout Lynch’s films, music often signals the crossing of a threshold, into some strange, alternate reality. In Blue Velvet, a lip-sync performance of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams transports the room – even Dennis Hopper’s malevolent Frank Booth – into a strange trance. The Twin Peaks episode revealing the origins of Bob – a fearsome interdimensional entity – trades dialogue almost entirely for music, including Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima.
In the strangest corners of Lynch’s cinematic universe, as the Man From the Other Place said of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, “there is always music in the air”.
Lynch’s fascination with sound dates back to his earliest short films, from the industrial drones in 1967’s Six Men Getting Sick to the warped voices in 1968’s The Alphabet. “Cinema is sound and picture both,” he told me: “50/50 really.” He teamed up with sound designer Alan Splet on the unique, alien score for his first feature film, 1977’s Eraserhead, followed by The Elephant Man, Dune and Blue Velvet.
After Splet’s death in 1994, Lynch resolved to continue these sonic experiments by building Asymmetrical Studio in Los Angeles, where some of Splet’s ashes now reside. As a musician in his own right, Lynch didn’t release a proper solo album until 2011’s Crazy Clown Time – a dark, smoky, experimental blues record – followed by 2013’s The Big Dream. While Lynch’s voice is largely processed through strange effects on these albums, including a vocoder, he let his strange, charismatic croon shine on tracks like Ghost of Love – a gem from the score for his 2006 film Inland Empire.
Most of his work in music, however, took the form of collaborations – from inviting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O to sing on the Crazy Clown Time track Pinky’s Dream to contributing guest vocals on Flying Lotus’ song Fire Is Coming. There’s his reimagining of compositions by 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen alongside Jocelyn Montgomery; his sparse ambient album Polish Night Music with Marek Zebrowski; and his team-up with John Neff on the gritty industrial blues record BlueBob.
Perhaps his best-known musical partnership was with Angelo Badalamenti, who scored screen projects for the director – including Twin Peaks’ haunting theme – spanning three decades. Lynch often adopted the role of producer and lyricist in this partnership, as in the Julee Cruise-sung tracks Mysteries of Love and Falling.
The two completed the free jazz album Thought Gang before Badalamenti died in 2022. When I spoke to Lynch, he’d recently listened back to Badalamenti’s score for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. “He was a genius,” Lynch said. “I miss him like crazy.”
While Lynch had not made a feature film since 2006’s Inland Empire, or any major screen project at all since 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, he continued to make music until near the end of his life. Last year he produced and wrote the lyrics for Cellophane Memories, working with Chrystabell – a Texan singer he had collaborated with on-and-off for 25 years and who starred as Tammy Preston in Twin Peaks: The Return.
Cellophane Memories was an album of ghosts, featuring many of the people who had joined Lynch in his strange adventures in sound. He described going to Asymmetrical Studio and unearthing long-lost recordings by himself, his former studio manager Dean Hurley and his old friend Badalamenti. Lynch collaged them together into the album’s music, wrote lyrics for Chrystabell – just as he’d once done for Cruise – and warped her vocal recordings in a manner reminiscent of his strange sonic experiments for the screen.
And the lyrics themselves? Filled with the dark forests, moonlit kisses, middle-American homes and violent nightmares that haunted his films and made his name a byword for surrealism around the world.
Lynch will doubtlessly be remembered as among the most important film-makers of all time, casting a strange new eye on the world’s horrors, transcendent beauty and mysteries – although “the big mystery,” he told me, “is life as a human being.” He should also be recognised, however, for championing music’s value, its own mystery, both inside and outside the cinema.
“Music can say intellectual things,” he told me, “but it can also speak to the heart in a wordless way that’s so powerful.”
