David Lynch was telling a story. It was 1989 and the director was sitting next to the composer Angelo Badalamenti at the keyboard of a Fender Rhodes in the latter’s Manhattan office. Lynch and screenwriter Mark Frost were about to start making Twin Peaks, a through-the-looking-glass soap opera in which a murder exposes the secret life of a small town in the Pacific north-west of the United States, and they needed a soundtrack.
In Lynch’s head, music, imagery and narrative were inextricably intertwined, so he told Badalamenti to imagine he was alone in woods at night. The wind was blowing, an owl was hooting. Badalamenti picked out an ominous, low motif. Slower, said Lynch. “Just slow things down and it becomes more beautiful.” Now, he said, picture a distressed teenage girl emerging from the darkness, getting closer. Badalamenti steadily climbed the keyboard, resolving the melody on an ecstatic high before falling back into the night. It took just 20 minutes and Badalamenti suggested developing it further, but Lynch replied, “Don’t change a single note. I see Twin Peaks.” They had just written “Laura Palmer’s Theme”.
Debuting on 8 April, 1990, Twin Peaks was a pioneering example of unorthodox, auteur-driven event TV and arguably the first pop-culture phenomenon of the new decade, with fans including Steven Spielberg, David Bowie and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The soundtrack album, an international hit, infiltrated pop to an unprecedented degree, homaged by artists from Anthrax and Marilyn Manson to the KLF and Moby, who launched his career by folding “Laura Palmer’s Theme” into his rave track “Go”. To love Twin Peaks was to love Badalamenti’s music, which he has called “my defining work as a composer”.
“If you hum the first notes of the opening theme you’re immediately transported into another world,” says Jamie Stewart of Los Angeles-based band Xiu Xiu. “Apart from the timpani in 2001: A Space Odyssey, almost nothing else is as evocative.”
Twin Peaks’s mainstream success lasted only a few months. A confused second season and a divisively strange movie prequel without Frost’s involvement, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, returned it to the cultish realm that Lynch’s work usually inhabited. Nevertheless, in recent years it has cast its spell over pop yet again. You can detect it, whether implicit or explicit, in Lana Del Rey’s doomed prom queen persona, Bastille’s song “Laura Palmer”, the gothic pop of Sky Ferreira’s Palmer-quoting “Night Time, My Time”, the sweet yet sinister ambience of the band Beach House, and much more. A benefit concert organised by Lynch in Los Angeles in 2015 featured the Flaming Lips, Karen O, Zola Jesus and Duran Duran playing the music of Twin Peaks and of his movies. So although Twin Peaks is returning in May for a third season, it has never really gone away.
“It’s timeless, isn’t it?” says Clare Nina Norelli, an Australian musician and author of the new book Soundtrack from Twin Peaks. “A few weeks ago, I went to see Fire Walk With Me in Melbourne and there were 18-year-olds clamouring to buy the soundtrack on vinyl. Every generation discovers it and falls in love with it.”
Angelo Badalamenti turned 80 this week. He grew up in a musically inclined Sicilian-American family in Brooklyn and began composing on the piano when he was 10, already drawn to the “beautiful darkness” that would define his career. After graduating with an MA from the Manhattan School of Music, he built up a diverse CV under the anglicised alias Andy Badale, writing songs for Nina Simone, composing musicals, scoring crime movies and working with the French electronic music pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey.
In 1985, a mutual colleague introduced Badalamenti to Lynch, who needed a voice coach for Isabella Rossellini, the star of his new film Blue Velvet. Lynch was so impressed that he hired him to compose the score. Unable to afford This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren”, Lynch gave Badalamenti some lyrics and asked him to write something in the same dream-pop vein as a theme for the film. “Make it like the wind, Angelo,” was his typically Lynchian brief. “It should be a song that floats on the sea of time.”
The song, “Mysteries of Love”, was sung by Badalamenti’s friend Julee Cruise, who had been a gutsy belter working in musical theatre, but the “white angel” vocal persona she developed made her for ever synonymous with the enigmatic and ethereal.
In 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch assembled a band of veteran session musicians, including jazz drummer Grady Tate and innovative guitarist Vinnie Bell, in a dingy studio off Times Square in New York to work on three symbiotically linked projects: Twin Peaks, Cruise’s album Floating Into the Night (with lyrics by Lynch) and the avant-garde stage musical Industrial Symphony No 1. Cruise’s song “Falling” mutated into “Twin Peaks Theme” (the unforgettable bassy twang came from Kinny Landrum’s Emulator II synthesiser) and she appeared in the show as a roadhouse chanteuse. “Julee Cruise was a muse figure in that collaboration,” Norelli says. “There’s always a duality in his films and she was a living embodiment of that Lynchian innocence.”
That duality is also represented in Badalamenti’s instrumental pieces, via techniques such as chord suspensions, evoking dissonance and longing. He scored the pilot episode before seeing a single frame, translating Lynch’s descriptions into music, which the director than used to inform the mood and rhythm of scenes and performances. Badalamenti produced several hours of musical “firewood”, including multiple versions of the key themes, that Lynch could rearrange to suit any scene.
“Badalamenti is a master storyteller,” says Rachel Zeffira of Cat’s Eyes, who open live shows with a reworking of “Twin Peaks Theme”. “He’ll be in the woods, really dark, really minor, and it’s almost suffocating. By the time he climbs up the major scale you can almost see the sun coming through. It’s so simple. He just goes up five notes on a scale and it gives you goosebumps.”
When Jamie Stewart and his bandmates were rearranging pieces from the TV show and movie for their 2016 album Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks they were “stunned by how extraordinarily simple the most famous and enduring pieces are”, Stewart says. “There’s almost nothing going on but you’re taken to this fantastical, emotional, dramatic place. It’s like a Rothko painting: three colours arranged in the perfect way.”
Stewart was too young to see Twin Peaks’ initial broadcast but has since watched the whole thing five or six times. So, too, has Bastille frontman Dan Smith, who became obsessed as a teenager, fascinated that something so surreal could have been a mainstream hit. “David Lynch was my idol,” he says. “Our whole aesthetic on the first album was heavily indebted to him. On Laura Palmer, I wanted to capture the urgency of the image of her coming off a motorbike and running through the forest. We reworked it with the riff from the theme song on one of our mixtapes. I enjoyed fans asking, ‘Who’s Laura Palmer? Is it your ex-girlfriend?’ I still get people saying, ‘Thank you for introducing me to Twin Peaks.’”
Badalamenti’s love of contrast extended to the instrumentation, using an unusual combination of 80s sounds (dream-pop, ambient, synthesised soap opera soundtracks) and 50s genres (teen-pop, cool jazz) to suggest timelessness. “If the show was a boat moving along, Angelo’s music was the river that carried it,” Mark Frost has said. “It gave you a very specific sense of time and place that felt outside of real time and real place. It helped elevate the show into the mythological realm.”
Snaking through that realm is an uneasy strain of nostalgia that blends sentimentality with menace; hideous secrets chafing against the illusion of innocence. Stewart sees Twin Peaks’ 50s references as a veiled commentary on the way postwar trauma was buried beneath an aggressive normality. “The world was destroyed and then immediately cemented over with pastels and new cars and bullshit. That’s essentially what Twin Peaks is showing: beneath a veneer of calm, the most horrible things one can imagine.”
Now a second layer of nostalgia, for the 90s, has deepened the show’s mystique. Over time, the sound of Twin Peaks merged with the music of movies such as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart (specifically Chris Isaak’s noirish “Wicked Game”) and Mulholland Drive to create the “Lynchian” quasi-genre. Norelli wonders if it’s merely “shorthand for a dreamlike quality and hipness”, but Stewart thinks it’s more specific. “It’s very romantic but can be terrifying. It has a violence and a sincere sentimentality. Sadness, but not despair.”
After Twin Peaks, for which he won a Grammy, Badalamenti was never short of work. He collaborated with Pet Shop Boys, Orbital and Bowie, wrote the opening theme for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and scored dozens of movies while his “beautiful” relationship with Lynch continued through three more movies and, inevitably, the new series of Twin Peaks. “I have an understanding of David and he has an understanding of me,” Badalamenti once said. “I listen to him and I start hearing things almost immediately.”
It may be impossible to think of Twin Peaks without hearing Badalamenti, but his score has taken on a consistently inspiring life of its own. “You could put that opening theme to a really bland piece of footage and that footage is suddenly going to feel more meaningful,” says Rachel Zeffira. “You could listen to it a million times and it would never get irritating or lose any emotion. How many times can you watch the show from start to finish? Music lasts longer.”
- Twin Peaks will be on Sky Atlantic.
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