From Chris Isaak to Karen O, David Lynch’s musical collaborators recount his sonic mysticism

In 2013, David Lynch was in his home recording studio late one morning, surrounded by electric guitars of different shapes and colors. With effects pedals scattered at his feet, he opened a case with an orange, sunburst slide guitar inside. “This is the guitar Ben Harper gave me,” Lynch said with a smile and genuine awe in his voice, wearing a black jacket and shirt, gray hair piled high on top. “This thing makes a hell of a sound.”

The occasion was the launch of his second solo album, “The Big Dream,” but it was not the first or last time we talked about his music. He was a self-taught guitar improviser and trumpet player in high school, but was drawn to any sounds that meaningfully tapped into feelings of heartache, tension, beauty and noise.

Over a half-century of work, he has built a reputation as a surrealist auteur and accomplished director. But Lynch Who died last week at the age of 78was equally enthusiastic about other creative media, from Drawing and photography to designing furniture, and nothing held his imagination more powerfully than the music that filled his life and work.

We were in his fully-equipped recording facility, called Ametrical Studio, built inside the house he once used as a filming location for his 1997 film “Lost Highway.” He spent a lot of his time there, and it was just one sign of his obsession with sound All his life. She played an integral role in his life as a film director, and eventually a recording artist, songwriter and producer.

Lynch was a rare director with a distinctive musical aesthetic, created with the help of composer and close friend Angelo Badalamenti, among many others. He was drawn to smoky electric guitar tones and more abrasive industrial sounds, to rich female voices and lush layers of strings and organ. The dividing line was sounds that leaned toward the smoldering and distinctive—from his use of emotionally aching heartbreak songs by Roy Orbison and Chris Isaak to his mystical recordings with contemporary torch singers Julie Cruz and Christabel.

Among his musical collaborators was Yes Yes Yes singer Karen O, who appeared on his first solo album, “Crazy Clown Time,” in 2011, and remembers Lynch’s voice as tense and emotional. “There is eroticism, there is urgency, there is mystery, there is darkness, there is intensity, there is rebellion,” she says. “It’s all in David’s musical taste.”

They recorded an ominous, tense, thunderous tune called “Pinky Dream” which features Karen O’s breathy vocals. “I’ve never met Pinky before,” she says now, laughing. “It’s a character inhabiting David Lynch’s dreamscape. The music crescendos and you feel like you’re on one of those lost highways.

“I think I like soft, slow music, but I also like many kinds of music,” Lynch told me during a 2015 visit to the painting studio behind his home in the Hollywood Hills. “I love what sound can do, what music can do, and marrying the image and making the whole thing greater than the sum of the parts.”

As a director, he has demonstrated a knack for setting music to stunning effect, from Samuel Barber’s deeply emotional “Adagio For Strings” in 1980s “The Elephant Man”, to Powermad’s raging 90s metal riffs in “Wild at Heart”, and reading Rebecca del Rio’s hot Spanish a cappella rendition of “Llorando” in “Mulholland Drive.”

In “Blue Velvet,” Lynch creates an uncanny moment of romance and nostalgia in an unsettling scene in which actor Dean Stockwell, wearing a paisley jacket, lip-syncs to Orbison’s 1963 hit “In Dreams.” The use of the song in the film helped revive Orbison, and Lynch soon co-produced a new version of the song with the singer and T-Bone Burnett for the 1987 retrospective “In Dreams: The Greatest Hits.”

This love of music eventually led the director to begin creating some of his own works, beginning with his signature collaborations with Badalamenti, which spanned from “Blue Velvet” in 1986 until the composer’s death in 2022. A particularly close relationship was between the director and the composer whom he compares to Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran with Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, who scored all of the Italian director’s films from 1959 to 1959. 1979.

Likewise, Lynch and Badalamenti were “so closely connected that they could almost feel each other’s heartbeat,” says Rhodes, whose band of hitmakers also worked with Lynch on a few occasions, including remixing two of their songs.

“I always say Angelo Badalamenti was the one who got me into music,” Lynch said. “I played the trumpet when I was young and I understand the music, but I loved the sound effects. So I wanted to build a studio to experiment with sound, but I knew I wasn’t really a musician. “David, I need lyrics,” Angelo said. So I started writing lyrics for Angelo, and we worked together. And that was a combination of a combination of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, and it brought that stuff to fruition. This gave me more confidence.”

By the late 1980s, this drive led the duo to Excalibur Sound Productions in New York City, where they worked on music with an unknown young singer, Julie Cruz, who recorded their song “Mysteries of Love” for Blue Velvet. 1989’s Floating into the Night appeared after a year and a half of sessions, and launched the hit single “Falling,” which had a second life as the theme to “Twin Peaks.”

In 2017, with the unveiling of Showtime’s popular third season revival of “Twin Peaks,” Cruz-Lee recalled Lynch’s original directions during her sessions. “He said to me, ‘Julie, you’re a child full of wonder,'” said Cruise, who also performed the dreamy, sad song “The World Spins” in the series.

Julie Cruz sings the show’s theme song “Falling” in the pilot episode of “Twin Peaks.”

(CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images)

“I will always be known by that name, and I will always be proud of it,” Cruz said. Who died in 2022. Lynch also directed a one-hour concert film starring Cruise called “Industrial Symphony No. 1” which was released in 1990 by Warner Bros. Records.

In later years, Badalamenti was based in New Jersey, making occasional trips to Los Angeles. “Wherever we were, we would sit down and play music,” Lynch said. Last year, the director expressed his constant sadness over what happened 2022 Badalamenti dies, Who he called “my brother.”

“It doesn’t seem possible that he’s gone,” Lynch said. “Looks like I can call him and we can make music again.”

Over time, Lynch created multiple work spaces adjacent to his home in the Hollywood Hills: a recording studio, a painting studio, a wood shop and offices. He has performed the music live only once, with his band Blue Pop in 2002, an experience he described as a “shocking thrill”, something he was not keen on repeating.

“He wasn’t a musician. We didn’t speak that language,” says Isaac, whose “Wicked Game” became a hit after his appearance in the 1990s film “Wild at Heart.” Lynch directed the music video for “Wicked Game.”

Aside from composing music alongside Lynch, Isaac appeared in front of the camera in a prominent role in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. “I’ve definitely been lucky because of how the stars have aligned, that I’ve been able to work with him and hang out with him and get to know him a little bit. I’ve got to have someone watching out for me because what fun it is.”

Lynch was a director who cherished music enough to transform the Roadhouse Bar in the 2017 season of Twin Peaks into a world-class nightclub, and included performances of full songs in several episodes from the likes of Moby, Eddie Vedder and The. Nine inch nails. In 1997, he recruited NIN’s Trent Reznor to create a soundtrack for the song “Lost Highway,” and they appeared together on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. (Lynch later created a music video for NIN’s song “Come Back Haunted.”)

Trent Reznor arrives at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2019.

(Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Some collaborations were less expected but equally rewarding. In 2011, Duran Duran asked Lynch to direct a live broadcast of a concert from the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, as part of American Express’ “Unstaged” series that brought together musicians and filmmakers. The result was entirely personal, shot in murky black-and-white for a worldwide online audience, and layered with Lynchian imagery and juxtapositions: smoke, fire, strange objects, and dead animals superimposed over the band.

“When something magical like this happens, you accept it as quickly as you can,” says Rhodes Duran Duran. “I just love his vision and the world he creates. I knew that merging with Duran Duran was going to be something crazy, something surreal and beautiful and extraordinary that no one would ever expect. I felt like he had the same intention in what he was doing with us. It was an absolute joy.”

For several years, Lynch has used his musical connections to raise money and awareness for the David Lynch Foundation, created to promote the benefits of transcendental meditation. He has hosted a series of music and arts events on both coasts, including the popular Disturbance Festival, and a 2009 concert with former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at Radio City Music Hall.

For his next solo album, 2013’s “Dream Big,” he enlisted Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li shortly after she moved to Los Angeles. He handed her a coffee-stained letter with some written words and said, “Make this a song.” I accepted Lynch’s observation as a “clue, a puzzle, a question” toward something new. She reworked his words “I’m Waiting Here” as the title of the haunting bonus track “I’m Waiting Here.” Recording the track was different from a regular session.

“I never did it again with anyone else,” Lykke Li says now. “He stood next to me and it was like he was showing me how to sing. It was almost like a seance. It was really based on feeling and intuition.”

Lee also notes that Lynch “saved my life” by introducing her to transcendental meditation at a time when things were fast-moving and chaotic in her life. “It was as if when I started meditating I really found a center and it opened everything up to me,” she says.

A photo of David Lynch with singer Christabel, with whom he collaborated on his latest music project.

(David Lynch)

The final project that Lynch completed and released before his death was “Cellophane Memories”, a collaboration with Chrystabell, recorded at his home in 2023 and 2024. In contrast to the romantic songs from their previous work together, the record featured experimental layers of vocals and other influences that eased him deeper into the avant-garde.

“We were doing what we love to do, which is experiment and create,” Christabel says now, days after Lynch’s death. “His mind was always alive, always inspired. There were always things brewing.”

Along the way, the duo recorded several other songs in different modes, including an unfinished project that was to be called “Strange Darling.” But the director, painter and musician was already looking forward to the next round of songs together.

“David loved a great pop song,” the singer recalls. “That was the next thing we were going to do. It was like, ‘Christabel, should we write some hits next?’

Instead, Lynch’s musical friends and collaborators were mourning this week, grateful for their moments together, diving back into the work he left behind. Christabel says she coped with her best friend’s death by listening to the music she left behind.

“A lot of our music is tailored to these moments,” she says, recalling Lynch lyrics like “The Great Unknown,” “Angel Star” and “10 Trillion Miles of Darkness.” “It was there, and we explored that territory. The lyrics could be a nice, fun kind of evocative, cosmic, worldly, spiritual, almost hymn music. I used to marvel at that. Everything sounds different now.”