Angelo Badalamenti

Angelo Badalamenti passed away two days ago. Here's a man whose work has been a truly vital part of my life for thirty years. His work isn't just the music of my formative years. At different stages of my life, particularly his soundtracks for David Lynch movies and TV, his work took on new vitality and significance. We all have songs that take us back to certain points in our lives. But with Badalamenti's music, I can go back to my bedroom when I was in high school, to my college days, to driving late at night in the early 2000s, to the excitement around the Twin Peaks revival in 2017, to the seemingly solitary bright spot in a mad world Twin Peaks often seemed to be at that time. I could take it back to last year when I was showing Twin Peaks to students here in Japan.

Badalamenti did a lot more than collaborations with Lynch. He cowrote songs for the great Nina Simone early in his career:

I've always been fond of an arrangement of George and Ira Gershwin's "A Foggy Day" he did with David Bowie:

He composed scores for notable films like Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (the best of the franchise), City of Lost Children, and Secretary. But it is undeniably his work with Lynch that bore the most impressive fruit. His score for Blue Velvet is divine and luscious. His score for Mulholland Drive, in which he also acted in a brief role, is sad and eerie. In 2017, his contributions to Twin Peaks: The Return were limited, I always suspected due to health problems, but his work is a big part of the strange atmosphere of sorrow and mystery in this remarkable scene:

But if I had to pick a golden era of Badalamenti, I would say his best work spanned the time from the final episode of Twin Peaks season two through Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway. The Fire Walk with Me soundtrack is just simply one of the greatest soundtracks ever recorded. Its movement through different tones, from foreboding melancholy with a hint of panic, through gentle affection, through frightening mania, is all part of a tapestry of nightmare. It was spellbinding when I first heard it in the '90s, it's spellbinding now.

A great artist is gone and his music will be with us forever. I'll see you in the trees.