As soon as Angelo Badalamenti's sustained synthesizer exhaled over the image of a pensive red bird in the opening credits of Twin Peaks, the way television moved, sounded, and felt had been suddenly altered. And 25 years later, that lo-fi warbling still hangs over modern music like a cocktail hour in the Red Room.
Before the premiere of Twin Peaks, the way a musical score worked in almost all of television (and in the majority of mainstream films, for that matter) was to move the audience along from scene to scene without ever drawing much attention to itself. If you never really noticed the music but felt that what you had seen hung together well, the composer had done their job. But David Lynch has never had much use for the conventional way of doing things.
For his second collaboration with the Brooklyn-born composer Badalamenti, Lynch wanted a soundtrack that sounded the way his show looked, and one that transmitted the subtexts and ideas the auteur had been exploring all his life. Together they created a score that was often as serene and beautiful as the images of the waterfall that we see in the opening credits—but one that could quickly go to a macabre place. Music oozed out of every pore of the show, whether we were watching The Man From Another Place dance, checking out a performance at the Roadhouse, or discovering Laura Palmer's body, wrapped in plastic.
The oft-told legend of Lynch and Badalamenti's working relationship is that the composer was brought in to act as Isabella Rossellini's voice coach for the actress's night club scenes in Blue Velvet. Lynch, an obsessive music fan that always seems to know what's percolating up from the underground, originally wanted to use This Mortal Coil's cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" for a scene. It would have been a choice completely within Lynch's wheelhouse; guest singer Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins's angelic voice swimming in an ocean of echo is sexy, sad, and heartbreakingly pure in a way that can only be described as Lynchian, but it proved too expensive to license. Instead, the pair recruited Julee Cruise to sing the film's signature number "Mysteries of Love," a new wave torch song that David Foster Wallace once called an underground make-out classic. (There's a reason why that man was considered a genius.)
The pairing went so well that the three later teamed up for the 1989 album Floating Into the Night, which saw Cruise glide across ballads written and produced by Lynch and Badalamenti. The album used the otherworldly, narcotic soundscapes that Fraser had perfected with the Cocteau Twins and the gothic drama of the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees as a starting point, and then blended in Lynch's personal obsessions. The director, once a literal boy scout, views the world through the prism of small-town, '50s-era Americana. It's always diners and boys who look like James Dean with him. He's always looking for the darkness beneath the happy surfaces, while also longing for the safety promised by those bygone happy surfaces. (At least this is the image he's sold to journalists and fans for about four decades. Lord knows what he's like in private.) When making an album of devotional dream pop ballads, he's of course going to want to make sure it's seasoned with more than a dash of reckless glamour and wounded innocence of girl-groups such as the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las.
Floating Into the Night set the template that Lynch and Badalamenti would use for the Twin Peaks score. The instrumental for the single "Falling" was used as the theme song, and Cruise performed "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" in a second season episode. But the pair expanded on what they created for the series, adding a generous dose of bossa nova-inspired cocktail jazz in the tradition of Dean Martin and Henry Mancini—particularly for any of the dream sequences or otherworldly interludes. Even the more traditionally "Lynchian" moments in the score often went for over-the-top, bombastic moments reminiscent of the theme songs for soap operas such as The Days of Our Lives, which was only fitting, as Twin Peaks always shared DNA with over-the-top, melodramatic soap opera. After Twin Peaks was canceled in its second season, most television networks backed away from the more artistically daring elements of the show, including its prominent use of music as a Greek chorus commenting on the action. Give or take an X-Files, television wouldn't value distinct television scores until the cable drama revolution of the '00s. (It's hard to imagine Dave Porter's distinctive, Western-influenced score for Breaking Bad without Twin Peaks paving the way.)
Lynch created a specific visual palette that artists having been using for a mood board ever since. Just a few years after Twin Peaks' cancellation, Anthrax recruited Badalamenti for their love letter to all things Lynchian: "Black Lodge." Very specific visuals from the show (BOB crawling across the floor, the strobe-light intensive journey to the Black Lodge) have cropped up in heavy metal videos for years, and Kanye West's unnervingly placid short film for "Runaway" showed the influence of Lynch's painterly eye. Lana Del Rey's penchant for combining classic Americana looks straight from the Double R Diner with lyrics about romantic turmoil and the cost of hard partying shows suggests she once owned a dog-earred copy of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. (Her actual music would need a lot more reverb to actual earn the sobriquet "Lynchian," though "Ride" comes close.)
Badalamenti's score changed the way television could sound, and it also influenced a generation of left-of-center artists. From lovelorn new dramatics the Chromatics to lo-fi folk deconstructionists Widowspeak to beguiling sound sculptor Julianna Barwick, a generation of artists have used the woozy noir of the Twin Peaks aesthetic as a launching pad into their own dreamscapes. On his latest album Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown, rap's number-one goth kid, favors darkly hued melodies and tones that out him as another high profile disciple. (At this point, it's honestly weird he doesn't wear eyeliner in public all the time.) Part of the reason this sound has proved so durable this decade is surely because these artists are young enough that the show was likely a formative teenage influence that seared into their brain—and also because the Lynchian template is a dependable way to make fashionable music one can brood or bone to.
Of course, having an easy-to-follow template means there's no shortage of lazy artists who have tried to pass off underdeveloped melodies and access to delay pedals as their key to the Black Lodge. But the best of these acts have found a way to take the signature elements of the Lynch sound (tons of tremolo, fragile sounding voices, slowly building swells of delayed synthesizers and an undercurrent of doomed romance) and create something new with them. The most high-profile (and arguably the best) act to emerge from this wave has been Baltimore's Beach House, who figured out how to turn the rising action of "Twin Peaks Theme" into arena-sized sulking soundtracks, becoming one of the most popular bands in indie rock in the process. They're not shy about their debt, and even nabbed Leland Palmer himself for a cameo in their Eric Wareheim-directed video for "Wishes."
Lynch's soundtrack for his 1997 film Lost Highway features a score from Trent Reznor and great songs from the Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson, and has even released two fittingly strange albums in the past few years, Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream. But it's fitting that his best-known work (if not quite his best) has had the most impact on the modern era of music. With Twin Peaks, David Lynch created a seductive world filled with moods and colors we'd never seen before. It was a world in which you were invited to get lost. Plenty of artists were only too happy to take him up on the offer.
