The voice of love

Note: I can’t wait to write about the return of Twin Peaks, which already feels like the television event of my lifetime, but I won’t be able to get to it until tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m reposting my piece on the show’s indelible score, which originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on August 10, 2016.

At some point, everyone owns a copy of The Album. The title or the artist differs from one person to another, but its impact on the listener is the same: it simply alerts you to the fact that it can be worth devoting every last corner of your inner life to music, rather than treating it as a source of background noise or diversion. It’s the first album that leaves a mark on your soul. Usually, it makes an appearance as you’re entering your teens, which means that there’s as much random chance involved as in any of the other cultural influences that dig in their claws at that age. You don’t have a lot of control over what it will be. Maybe it begins with a song on the radio, or a piece of art that catches your eye at a record store, or a stab of familiarity that comes from a passing moment of exposure. (In your early teens, you’re likely to love something just because you recognize it.) Whatever it is, unlike every other album you’ve ever heard, it doesn’t let you go. It gets into your dreams. You draw pictures of the cover and pick out a few notes from it on every piano you pass. And it shapes you in ways that you can’t fully articulate. The particular album that fills that role is different for everyone, or so it seems, although logic suggests that it’s probably the same for a lot of teenagers at any given time. In fact, I think that you can draw a clear line between those for whom the Album immersed them deeply in the culture of their era and those who wound up estranged from it. I’d be a different person—and maybe a happier one—if mine had been something like Nevermind. But it wasn’t. It was the soundtrack from Twin Peaks, followed by Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night.

If I had been born a few years earlier, this might not have been an issue, but I happened to get seriously into Twin Peaks, or at least its score, shortly after the series itself had ceased to be a cultural phenomenon. The finale had aired two full years beforehand, and it had been followed soon thereafter, with what seems today like startling speed, by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After that, it mostly disappeared. There wasn’t even a chance for me to belatedly get into the show itself. I’d watched some of it back when it initially ran, including the pilot and the horrifying episode in which the identity of Laura’s killer is finally revealed. The European cut of the premiere was later released on video, but aside from that, I had to get by with a few grainy episodes that my parents had recorded on VHS. It wasn’t until many years later that the first box set became available, allowing me to fully experience a show that I ultimately ended up loving, even if it was far more uneven—and often routine—than its reputation had led me to believe. But that didn’t really matter. Twin Peaks was just a television show, admittedly an exceptional one, but the score by Angelo Badalamenti was something else: a vision of a world that was complete in itself. I’d have trouble conveying exactly what it represents, except that it takes place in the liminal area where a gorgeous nightmare shades imperceptibly into the everyday. In Blue Velvet, which I still think is David Lynch’s greatest achievement, Jeffrey expresses it as simply as possible: “It’s a strange world.” But you can hear it more clearly in “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” which Badalamenti composed in response to Lynch’s instructions:

Start it off foreboding, like you’re in a dark wood, and then segue into something beautiful to reflect the trouble of a beautiful teenage girl. Then, once you’ve got that, go back and do something that’s sad and go back into that sad, foreboding darkness.

And it wasn’t until years later that they realized that the song had the visual structure of a pair of mountain peaks, arranged side by side. It’s a strange world indeed.

If all forms of art, as the critic Water Pater famously observed, aspire to the condition of music, then it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Twin Peaks aspired to the sublimity of its own soundtrack. Badalamenti’s score did everything that the series itself often struggled to accomplish, and there were times when I felt that the music was the primary work, with the show as a kind of visual adjunct. I still feel that way, on some level, about Fire Walk With Me: the movie played an important role in my life, but I don’t have a lot of interest in rewatching it, while I know every note of its soundtrack by heart. And even if I grant that a score is never really complete in itself, the music of Twin Peaks pointed toward an even more intriguing artifact. It included three tracks—“The Nightingale,” “Into the Night,” and “Falling”—sung by Julee Cruise, with music by Badalamenti and lyrics by Lynch, who had earlier written her haunting song “Mysteries of Love” for Blue Velvet. I loved them all, and I can still remember the moment when a close reading of the liner notes clued me into the fact that there was an entire album by Cruise, Floating Into the Night, that I could actually own. (In fact, there were two. As it happened, my brainstorm occurred only a few months after the release of The Voice of Love, a less coherent sophomore album that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.) Listening to it for the first time, I felt like the narrator of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” who once saw a fragment of an undiscovered country, and now found himself confronted with all of it at once. The next few years of my life were hugely eventful, as they are for every teenager. I read, did, and thought about a lot of things, some of which are paying off only now. But whatever else I was doing, I was probably listening to Floating Into the Night.

Last year, when I heard that the Twin Peaks soundtrack was coming out in a deluxe vinyl release, it filled me with mixed feelings. (Of course, I bought a copy, and so should you.) The plain fact is that toward the end of my teens, I put Badalamenti and Cruise away, and I haven’t listened to them much since. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t give them a lifetime’s worth of listening in the meantime. I became obsessed with Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted, the curious performance piece, directed by Lynch, in which Cruise floats on wires high above the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, not far from the neighborhood where I ended up spending most of my twenties. Much later, I saw Cruise perform, somewhat awkwardly, in person. I tracked down her collaborations and guest appearances—including the excellent “If I Survive” with Hybrid—and even bought her third album, The Art of Being a Girl, which I liked a lot. Somehow I never got around to buying the next one, though, and long before I graduated from college, Cruise and Badalamenti had all but disappeared from my personal rotation. And I regret this. I still feel that Floating Into the Night is a perfect album, although it wasn’t until years later, when I heard Cruise’s real, hilariously brassy voice in her interviews, that I realized the extent to which I’d fallen in love with an ironic simulation. There are moments when I believe, with complete seriousness, that I’d be a better person today if I’d kept listening to this music: half of my life has been spent trying to live up to the values of my early adolescence, and I might have had an easier job of integrating all of my past selves if they shared a common soundtrack. Whenever I play it now, it feels like a part of me that has been locked away, ageless and untouched, in the Black Lodge. But life has a way of coming full circle. As Laura says to Cooper: “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years. Meanwhile…” And it feels sometimes as if she were talking to me.