When I posted my first little tribute to David Lynch, I could post something the moment I heard the news because the album had already been edited, and so had the album art, so I just needed to do my write-up and post the whole shebang. But I wasn't quite done, as with Françoise Hardy last year, where I did a stopgap release when I heard about her death, then got to work to do a home-cooked compilation. Though I must've had much more time then, as both posts were just 24 hours apart. It took me a good while longer to do a David Lynch project that would do the man, his work, and most of all the music in it justice.
I wanted to do essentially a mixtape-style compilation of the songs and score tracks I mostly associate with Lynch, in a sequencing that would hopefully weave and waver like Lynch's films did. Then, when I had a whole 25-track comp ready to go - tagged, bagged, artwork-stacked - I realized I had not included Connie Stevens' "Sixteen Reasons", a track featured in Mulholland Drive, but not on its soundtrack. So I went back to the drawing board, recovered a couple of other things from the cutting room floor and finally arrived at this, a 30 track, 78-minute trip through the musical mind and imagination of David Keith Lynch, In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land.
In dreams, David Lynch walked with us, but even moreso in nightmares. In the last weeks I rewatched two of his most lasting dreams-turned-nightmares (or nightmares-turned-dreams-turned-nightmares-again), Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, with interesting results. I hadn't seen Lost Highway in about 25 years, so I barely remembered anything besides freaky as shit Robert Blake, the fact that Bill Pullman transmorphs into Balthazar Getty and, for some reason, the tailgating scene, where gangster Mr. Eddie beats an asshole driver into a pulp because the one thing he can't abide is tailgating. But I had completely forgotten about the video tapes that start the, uh, mystery plot, for example, and realize that maybe Michael Haneke nicked these for Caché. So, while there was a ton of cool stuff to rediscover, the movie still makes not a lick of sense in any traditional way. But man, if Lynch can't keep your attention with the moving lurking camera in the first twenty minutes, or with a piece of pure cinema, set to This Mortal Coil's amazing version of "Song To The Siren". I can't embed a Youtube video here since it's NSFW stuff, but it's this scene.
The rewatch of Mulholland Drive was a bit of a letdown, though. I, like many, had it tagged as Lynch's masterpiece, as when I first saw it, it blew me away, and kept its spell even on a second viewing. I don't know, maybe I wasn't in the mood, but the magic didn't work this time. Don't get me wrong, the movie is still an amazing salvage job by Lynch, to turn what was an open-ended mystery full of non sequiturs into something making sense and holding up pretty well. But it can not hide the fact that it is a shaggy dog story. And while that makes a wholelot of sense considering Mulholland Drive's production history, I realized that after the relatively stringent and cohesive (by Lynch standards) Blue Velvet, every Lynch film apart from The Straight Story is a shaggy dog story. That's just how Lynch functions, he has no use or need for conventional plotting. Which of course makes him the 'take it or leave it'-proposition he is for most folks.
In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land covers every Lynch movie besides The Elephant Man and Dune, both of which aren't real Lynchian Lynch movies and whose scores I felt didn't mingle well with the rest, despite quite liking Toto's work on Dune. And of course I included a bunch of stuff from both Twin Peaks series. Despite being a mild dispappointment on rewatch, Mulholland Drive is the most represented Lynch project here with a whooping six selections, followed by the original Twin Peaks series with four, not counting spoken word segments. Yes, friends, I smuggled two recordings from Dale Cooper to Diane into the mix.
Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch's musical mstermind and partner in crime, is of course all over this collection, as the first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of Lynch's projects are Badalamenti's inimitable and lush synth scores. Hell, I even indulge Lynch's weird and thankfully shortlived romance with industrial rock/heavy metal in the mid-90s that was all over the soundtrack of Lost Highway. As the representative of that kind of music I have a snatch of Rammstein's "Rammstein", but only a snatch. Rammstein feels like the kind of band that's better to listen to as instrumentals, and I quite like the creeping menace of the song's intro, because as soon as Till Lindemann's teutonic rolling R's come around I usually switch the channel. Like a lot of score cues, "Rammstein" has been edited, this one more brutally than others, though, for only a taste of Lynch's weird industrial periods. Most other edits are score cues running a little long for my tastes concerning the flow of the selection, thogh I did edit two tracks from Lost Highway together as a little medley, Badalamenti's "Fred's World" and Bowie's "I'm Deranged". And I did a ton of work on transitions, fade outs, etc. to have a continuous and nicely flowing musical landscape.
In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land inhabits that sweet spot (I think) between Lynch's obsession with 50's and early 60's music (which no one could make sound as sinister as he did) and the lush scoring of Badalamenti, with a dash of Lynch's penchant for sultry female vocalists and retro rockabilly-era crooners. If I did my job right, and I think I did, this should take you away into Lynch Land for about an hour and twenty minutes.
In dreams and nightmares, Lynch walked with us. Walk with him for a while...
