Exploring the Musical Universe of David Lynch

To truly understand the signature weirdness of a David Lynch movie, you need to pay attention to the music.

So many movie directors treat a soundtrack as an accessory to a film, something that simply supports or enhances a performance or dialogue, or a shortcut to creating a mood. But Lynch understood that the sound of a movie was as important, and at times more so, than the images onscreen. More than that, beyond the viewing audience, he knew the impact a song could have on the characters in his films, who moved through his stories transfixed and haunted by musical performances to which they themselves were witnesses.

A song sync in a David Lynch movie was never, ever a shortcut to any easy feeling or vibe — it was a long, dark layover from which you’d emerge into a completely different movie than you thought you were watching, unnerved and a little thrilled. Often, music brought Lynch’s films to a screeching halt, as it did for the gangsters of Blue Velvet during a lip-sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” or in Mulholland Drive, when Rita and Betty are devastated by a performance at Club Silencio. Sometimes, as when Twin Peaks‘ Audrey Horne danced absent-mindedly in the Double R Diner to her personal theme, you could tell that his characters were as moved by music as he was, in their own quirky, mysterious way.

Songs and scoring communicated layers of meaning in Lynch’s films that critics and fans still delight in unpacking, and stand out today in a world where TV shows and movies under-curate and overstuff soundtracks with flashy, expensive music. His legacy as a music fan and maker is vast; collected here are just a few of his most significant — and weirdest — moments and collaborations.

“In Heaven” from Eraserhead

In Lynch’s 1977 breakthrough film, lead character Henry Spencer, struggling to care for his sickly, alien creature of a newborn child, envisions a deformed woman in his radiator who sings a creepy little song: “In heaven, everything is fine / You’ve got your good things / And I’ve got mine.” Lynch wrote the lyrics and gave them to artist and later TV personality Peter Ivers, whom he met at the American Film Institute, to compose and perform.

The Lady in the Radiator was missing from the original script; Lynch was inspired to draw her one day, and the scene materialized after he looked at a radiator on set and noticed it “had a little kind of chamber, like a stage in it.” The scene marked the beginning of Lynch’s habit of mining simple, sweet music for moments of ominous tension and mystery, and “In Heaven” inspired a cult following of artists covering the track, including Pixies, Bauhaus and Devo.

“Blue Velvet” from Blue Velvet

So many of Lynch’s characters, whether homecoming queens or struggling actresses fresh to Hollywood, are performers forced to reconcile what’s demanded of them with what they truly want to express. You can see that conflict in Isabella Rossellini’s sultry but somber performance as Dorothy, the terrorized nightclub singer in this 1986 film, who is forced to perform the namesake song by the mobster who has kidnapped her family.

The popular 1963 version of “Blue Velvet” by Bobby Vinton, a song Lynch previously said he never really liked, was the seed of inspiration for the movie’s premise. “I started with the idea of front yards at night,” he told Time in 1990 of coming up with the story, “and Bobby Vinton’s song playing from a distance. Then I always had this fantasy of sneaking into a girl’s room and hiding through the night. It was a strange angle to come at a murder mystery.”

With its use of “Blue Velvet” and other romantic retro pop songs by Roy Orbison and Ketty Lester, Lynch turned 1960s Americana idealism into suburban horror in ways other artists and filmmakers would imitate for decades.

Lost Highway‘s Trent Reznor-produced soundtrack

Ahead of 1997’s Lost Highway, Lynch reached out to Nine Inch Nails frontman and future two-time Academy Award winner Trent Reznor, who at that point had scored only one other film, 1994’s Natural Born Killers, to produce the soundtrack for his paranoid neo-noir. Connected through a mutual friend, the two didn’t initially click. “He’d describe a scene and say, ‘Here’s what I want. Now, there’s a police car chasing Fred down the highway, and I want you to picture this: There’s a box, OK? And in this box there’s snakes coming out; snakes whizzing past your face,’” Reznor told Rolling Stone in 1997. “…And he hadn’t brought any footage with him. He says, ‘OK, OK, go ahead. Give me that sound.’”

After kindly telling Lynch he didn’t work that way, Reznor was nonetheless enlisted. Save for a Lou Reed cover of “This Magic Moment,” the soundtrack’s syncs were a major swerve from the subverted ’50s and ’60s pop that had dominated most Lynch movies, instead filled with blockbuster contemporary industrial and rock artists like Marilyn Manson (who appeared in the film), David Bowie and Smashing Pumpkins (who recorded an original song). Paired with Barry Adamson’s slinky, cartoonish jazz scoring, Lost Highway‘s mash-up of retro sounds and distinctly ’90s alternative radio staples mirrors the movie’s uber-contemporary approach to film noir, its voyeurism mediated through modern technology.

The Roadhouse from Twin Peaks: The Return

Badalamenti’s soapy, surrealist score for the original Twin Peaks is unquestionably one of Lynch’s best musical collaborations, and in the years since its finale, the show’s eerie, unplaceable sound and style have inspired pop artists such as Lana Del Rey and Sky Ferreira and bands like Mount Eerie and Xiu Xiu. When Twin Peaks returned to TV in 2017, it celebrated that legacy directly, featuring a different artist singing at the show’s seedy bar the Roadhouse at the end of nearly every episode. Modern Lynch favorites like Au Revoir Simone, Sharon Van Etten and Chromatics performed, as did former collaborators like Julee Cruise, Nine Inch Nails and Mulholland Drive opera singer Rebekah del Rio, amounting to the most literally Lynchian playlist one could ever assemble.

Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive

In Lynch’s 2001 film, characters Betty and Rita are compelled by a dream to go to Los Angeles’ Club Silencio, where they’re privy to a performance by a magician who instructs the audience to listen to a taped recording of a band playing, insisting there is no real band in the room. But the truly incredible music moment comes shortly after, when Rebekah del Rio arrives onstage to sing an emotional Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” She faints during her performance, but her voice is heard continuing to sing, adding a dramatic new layer to the magician’s trickery. Much of Mulholland Drive is about Hollywood’s propensity for corruption and illusion, but the Club Silencio scene embodies Lynch’s approach to music and sound as a way to teach the audience that, even if they think they know what they’re hearing, it often isn’t what it seems.

Toto’s score for Dune

Many Lynch stans, including the director himself, have chosen to leave his critically panned, oddball 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune out of his canon. But he took its music seriously, recruiting the rock band Toto, then largely known for its hit “Africa,” to make the score.

“He had a Walkman, and put this set of phones on me and said, ‘Tell me if you can make this kind of music for my movie?’” Toto’s David Paich said in Max Evry’s book A Masterpiece in Disarray. “He put on two Shostakovich symphonies. He made me listen and said: ‘I want this music low, and I want it slow.’ I thought, ‘Well, I can handle that.’” The resulting score is plucky and orchestral, ditching the more futuristic, synth-driven scoring trends for sci-fi at the time (the likes of Vangelis’ Blade Runner score or Ennio Morricone’s for The Thing), save for one piece of music on that wasn’t Toto’s — a beautiful Brian Eno ambient track titled “Prophecy Theme,” which Lynch fell in love with and felt Toto couldn’t replicate.

His own recording career 

David Lynch didn’t only love music; he made music. In 1998, he produced a collection of Hildegard von Bingen songs from his own recording studio with the vocalist Jocelyn Montgomery. In 2001, he put out his own recorded debut, BlueBOB, a collaboration with the engineer John Neff, which he would follow with 2011’s Crazy Clown Time and 2013’s The Big Dream — atmospheric, blues-inspired albums featuring collaborations with artists like Karen O. and Lykke Li.

Over the last two decades, he also released several moody dream-pop albums with the artist Chrystabell, who appeared in Twin Peaks: The Return as agent Tamara Preston. Their last album, 2024’s Cellophane Memories, was inspired by a burst of red light Lynch saw in the trees while out walking one day. He never considered himself a true musician: “I’m not really a singer, but my voice is treated like any other instrument; you can tweak it and manipulate it in so many ways these days,” he told The Guardian. “I was nervous about recording, but felt comfortable in the studio. I wouldn’t perform live. What do I sing in the shower? I don’t shower too often.”

“Love Me” from Wild at Heart

Lynch’s 1990 film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor and Lula, a chaotic, deeply in love young couple trying to run away to California. Early in the story, not long after Sailor’s release from jail for killing a man, he halts a metal show by the band Powermad to serenade Lula with a surreal rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me.” Canned recordings of girls screaming flare up and glitch in the mix, while the metalheads in the audience swoon over the performance.

In his soupy coupling of extreme riffing and Cage’s sentimental heartthrob turn, Lynch illustrates how quickly young love can turn aggressive and reckless, then corny and sweet. “You may love many, many songs but they’re not necessarily going to marry,” Lynch once said in 2007 of using the right pop songs in movies. “A lot of times, it’s a big experimentation to find the thing that marries — how the thing enters, how it grows, how it moves and how it exits. You get it to feel correct.”

Julee Cruise

For many years, one of Lynch’s white-whale music syncs was This Mortal Coil’s version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” a track he cited often as one of his favorites. He wanted it for Blue Velvet and couldn’t afford the rights, but commissioned Badalamenti to make a song that sounded like it. The composer hired the singer Julee Cruise as the vocalist, and the three created “Mysteries of Love” for the film’s surprisingly happy ending, a song that emerged not as a facsimile of This Mortal Coil but something with its own distinctive, ambient beauty.

“I was a belter, and he turned my voice around and created that angelic sound,” Cruise said in 2005 of working with Badalamenti. It led to the three landing a deal to make a full-length album, 1989’s Floating Into the Night, as well as collaborating on the music for Twin Peaks. For the show, Cruise created the mournful “Falling,” an instrumental version of which served as the main theme music. With her haunting, reverbed vocals representing the voices of Lynch’s tortured female characters, “Falling” and “Mysteries of Love” solidified Cruise as the most emblematic voice in Lynch’s musical universe.