Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch and Laura Palmer
February 7, 2010 3:41 PM   Subscribe

 
Excellent.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 3:52 PM on February 7, 2010


Quietly awesome.
posted by Sparx at 3:56 PM on February 7, 2010


Because I have nothing intelligent to add to this bit of beauty, here are some weird remixes:

* Falling dance mix - David Twins 1991
* D. Twins - Falling Twin Peaks (DJ Herbie Re-Re-Remix) (So damn tough!)
* Twin Peaks - Euphorics bootleg
* Twin Peaks FWWM D'n'B remix (Go! Go!)
* Moby - Go (DnB remix)
* Child Support - Twin Peaks (2003)
posted by filthy light thief at 4:06 PM on February 7, 2010 [2 favorites]


I saw this a few months ago and had a week-long obsession with this theme.
posted by azarbayejani at 4:08 PM on February 7, 2010


Sigh. I beg forgiveness for misremembering and mistaking the main theme music for this one, the Laura Palmer / Love Theme.
posted by Anything at 4:13 PM on February 7, 2010


I'm glad you apologized Anything because I was very mad at you for essentially promising me a solid silver walking stick and then delivering a solid gold one instead HAMBURGER this is the greatest YouTube video since that kid who got all excited about seeing lobsters for the first time NOT HAMBURGER
posted by No-sword at 4:28 PM on February 7, 2010


Man. I haven't watched Twin Peaks since it aired (and missed a good portion of the horrid second season), but this theme gives me chills.
posted by eyeballkid at 4:34 PM on February 7, 2010


One of the best lunches of my life:

about 20 years ago, I had occasion to interview Tim Booth, the lead singer of the british band JAMES, on his entirely forgettable first solo album. It had been produced by Badalamenti, and to my delight he showed up for the interview as well. He wasn't saying much, but after getting a few perfunctory "all about the new album" questions to Tim Booth out of the way, I warmed him up by asking about some of his relatively obscure early production credits. He warmed up a lot more when he found out my father had also been born in New York City. We went on to have an awesome discussion, and to Tim Booth's credit he seemed quite happy to take a backseat and let Angelo hold court and tell tales of growing up on the streets of NYC. He called his publicist and had the next interview scheduled delayed, so we got an extra hour of conversation out of the now very garrulous Angelo.

The (tiny, unremembered) magazine published 3 paragraphs worth of "new album" quotations from Tim Booth, and couldn't have been less interested in the remaining 90 minutes of conversation.
posted by the bricabrac man at 4:50 PM on February 7, 2010 [4 favorites]


That was great. Thanks.
posted by defenestration at 5:38 PM on February 7, 2010


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
posted by frankbooth at 5:40 PM on February 7, 2010


thebricabracman - Do you own the interview? It would be great if you could publish it!
posted by nosila at 5:45 PM on February 7, 2010


And also - nthing the greatness of this. I got chills. They're multiplying.
posted by nosila at 5:45 PM on February 7, 2010


Whew, yeah, chills. Thank you. That is one of my favorite soundtracks. I should mention that it's really fun to play on accordion.

Also, I was thoroughly impressed that he could talk and play the piano at the same time.
posted by Benjamin Nushmutt at 5:56 PM on February 7, 2010


This is fantastic. I spent about two weeks at the end of December mainlining all of Twin Peaks, and have been constantly on the hunt for, well, anything related. God, Badalamenti is great.
posted by punchdrunkhistory at 6:04 PM on February 7, 2010


Twin Peaks? Bah. If I'm going to listen to Angelo Badalamenti talking, I want to hear about what it was like to do the music for The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage.
posted by koeselitz at 6:49 PM on February 7, 2010


This is from the Twin Peaks bonus material DVD. I watched it a couple of weeks ago. There's a lot of really interesting material on there. I just started reading Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, too. Fascinating so far, if you like critical theory. Anyhow, I love the Twin Peaks score and I think Badalamenti is a fantastic film composer. Thanks for this post.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:22 PM on February 7, 2010


Though I haven't seen the film, I like his work on The Beach, which yielded a score and a collaboration with Orbital. There are some other pleasant tracks.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:32 PM on February 7, 2010


I managed to avoid Twin Peaks when it was originally on the air...I was a bit young for it, though not *too* young. Anyhow, years later my friend says, hey, I have all the Twin Peaks episodes on VHS. He says, hey, we should go to my family's lake house and watch them all in one weekend.

The "lake house" was a clapboard firetrap on Elephant Butte in New Mexico. We...my friend Gabe, myself, and my now-wife Laurea...we drove up there, middle of the night on a Friday. Started watching the tapes that night. Two episodes per tape, one after another.

Nothing quite as bizarre as falling asleep while watching Twin Peaks. Now when I hear that song, I see the opening sequence, and the Laura Palmer yearbook picture, I seen them perfectly in my head. And I remember that house, and that weekend spent submerged in the strange world Lynch made, so perfectly at odds with my reality at the time. Spent a lot of time half-asleep, half-awake, watching the show, hearing that song, and avoiding spiders. That last bit has nothing to do with the song or the show...the house had all these spiders. Goddamn spiders. You'd be asleep and wake with one on your foot and flip out, and there would be Laura Palmer. Gah.

That song is to the ear what the show was to the eye: this tiny moment in time where our reality dropped away into a dream. I hear it now and it drags me back to that weekend on the high desert, beautifully unaware of anything but that box of tapes and the world created therein.
posted by blixco at 7:40 PM on February 7, 2010 [10 favorites]


Do you own the interview? It would be great if you could publish it

No idea if I own the interview, as far as copyright goes. The editor of the magazine was a friend of mine, and knew I knew a lot more about JAMES than he did, so asked me to come along. But I'm pretty sure I still have the cassette tape of it rattling around in a box in the attic. hmmm.
posted by the bricabrac man at 7:52 PM on February 7, 2010


Do you know who else likes Twin Peaks? Cookie Monster. At least liked the pies. Darned fine pies.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:01 PM on February 7, 2010 [3 favorites]


shoot, that can't be too hard to play.
See?

I'm learning that this week if it's the last thing I do.
posted by inkytea at 8:24 PM on February 7, 2010


This table is Formica.

Twin Peaks is one of my favorite shows of all time and many T.V. shows on today are influenced by it. Lynch and Badalamenti always have good music and sound.
posted by Dick Laurent is Dead at 8:26 PM on February 7, 2010


This is the girl.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:47 PM on February 7, 2010 [1 favorite]


There's a fish in the percolator.
posted by MuChao at 9:14 PM on February 7, 2010 [1 favorite]


That was a great story told well. Thanks for sharing it, Anything. Really wonderful.
posted by paddysat at 10:23 PM on February 7, 2010


that was awesome, thanks
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:06 AM on February 8, 2010


if only lynch had been able to deliver fully on his vision. fuck ABC, and its desire to turn the show into a rabid elevator love song... i recall watching the final episodes, with my mind warbling in strange cyclical patterns, only to be short circuited by the abrupt ending.

Oh, broadcast television... why must you always be in opposition to true expression?

At any rate, great video.
posted by vantam at 1:09 AM on February 8, 2010 [1 favorite]


Great soundtrack for a great show.

For another cover version, I like the cheeky geeky rendition by Mr. Hopkinson's Computer & Audrey 3000.
posted by p3t3 at 3:07 AM on February 8, 2010


Wow, the guy who wrote the Critical Approaches Book to Twin Peaks was my intro to English language literature prof, freshmen year...I remember there being a Twin Peaks class and
an X files class too, excuses for some of the faculty to have some good fun I think!
posted by manwoo at 6:13 AM on February 8, 2010


I've seen this before but I think it's awesome you've posted it. It's such an absolutely fantastic video.
p.s. the bricabrac man, if you can be bothered to mp3 that interview it would be a marvellous effort to further humanity in general.
posted by debord at 6:50 AM on February 8, 2010


He says, hey, we should go to my family's lake house and watch them all in one weekend.

And I said, hey, we should rent a generator and buy a bootload of firewood and go watch them all in the shelter on Mt Donna Buang. We didn't get quite enough firewood, which is why that score still gives me chills.

David Lynch does odd things to people's minds.

Long may he continue to do so.
posted by flabdablet at 5:07 PM on February 8, 2010


Is Twin Peaks worth watching? I remember it being on as a kid, but was too young to watch it then. It sounds like the sort of thing I would really like but I've been told it goes off the rails a bit at the end. Should I put it in my netflix queue?
posted by jpdoane at 8:00 AM on February 12, 2010


If you ask me, the first season is still magic, one of most wonderful things ever broadcast. The show however disintegrates from the very beginning of the first season; the writers appeared content playing with the quirky surface elements of the show, neglecting any coherent thematic development.

So I would watch the first season and then just ride out the nagging curiosity left by the unresolved season finale.
posted by Anything at 8:41 AM on February 12, 2010


Eh.

The show however disintegrates from the very beginning of the first second season;

There.
posted by Anything at 11:23 AM on February 12, 2010


I watched the entire series for the first time recently and loved it. I think the beginning of the 2nd season is great, all the way up to the point where Laura's killer is revealed (which episode I thought was fantastic). Then it starts to go off the rails for sure, but I thought the last few episodes of season 2 got pretty interesting again. The movie was cool too, but it's only for fans of the series.
posted by ludwig_van at 11:31 AM on February 12, 2010


Yeah there's a long dry stupid period for about 2/3 of the second season. At one point there's an episode directed by Lynch after the other writers and directors had been running the teevee machine on the show, and the difference is striking-- all of a sudden, shots are interesting again, behavior stops being quirky and goes back to being unnerving (the episode I'm thinking of has Jerry Horne, and he's suddenly creepy and menacing instead of just zany, and you go 'Oh yeah, that's why this show is good!') and then the other writers and directors do a bunch more episodes in a row and the show keeps getting worse and worse until Lynch comes back at the end for a couple of episodes to rescue the thing.

To echo David Foster Wallace, one of the reasons Twin Peaks is basically my favorite show ever is because there's this kind of zany metanarrative that you can only get from paying attention to the opening credits. Who wrote this episode? Who directed it? And you can see that every now and then, Lynch wanders back onto set from directing Wild at Heart and goes 'What the fuck are you guys doing to these characters? This is stupid' and tries to fix it, and then he wanders off again. About halfway through season two it becomes apparent that the show is turning into a televised game of Exquisite Corpse, with the writer(s) of one episode advancing the subplots just far enough to count as 'quirky' without having any idea as to what the next guy will do next episode. The whole thing gradually gets dumber and dumber (Nadine's amnesia story, Ben's Civil War story) mostly because Lynch & Frost don't seem to have been able or willing to communicate their vision to anyone else on the show, so everyone else thought the point was to be weird instead of Lynchian.

Consistency of vision and tone is one of the reason that shows like Lost or Dexter are able to do long-form television narrative successfully, and after knowing and loving and loathing Twin Peaks, I am always fascinated to see how well these contemporary shows have integrated the lessons of Lynch's & Frost's mismanagement.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:43 AM on February 12, 2010 [4 favorites]


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