Angelo Badalamenti
Master composer and arranger BORN 1937
WHEN DAVID Lynch couldn’t afford to license Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren for Blue Velvet’s haunted dancehall scene in 1986, the director turned to actor Isabella Rossellini’s singing coach Angelo Badalamenti.
Following Lynch’s request to create, “the most beautiful thing but make it dark and a little bit scary,” the Italian-American composer and arranger came up with Mysteries Of Love (as sung by Julee Cruise), and thereafter multiple Lynch soundtracks – Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and, most notably, the director’s incomparable TV debut Twin Peaks. It was music invested with an uncanny combination of lightness and eeriness that distilled and amplified the dark and dread-inducing undercurrents that typified Lynch’s work in the most beautiful way imaginable. Badalamenti said that when the director heard Laura Palmer’s Theme, he told him, “Angelo, that’s Twin Peaks.”
Before meeting Lynch, Badalamenti had made only small inroads into soundtracks, following an eclectic list of credits through the ’60s: many for female vocalists, including Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Patti Austin, Shirley Bassey and Christine Hunter’s Beatlesmania-era single Santa, Bring Me Ringo, but also novelty electronic pioneers Perrey & Kingsley and country crooner Ronnie Dove.
Having worked with Lynch, Badalamenti raised his game, his eloquent touch expanding through soundtracks such as City Of Lost Children, The Wicker Man, Secretary and several Paul Schrader films, the 1992 Summer Olympics and collaborations with rock and pop artists including Pet Shop Boys, Dusty Springfield, David Bowie (the heady and underrated Gershwin cover A Foggy Day (In London Town)), Orbital, Anthrax and more. He also recorded albums with Marianne Faithfull (A Secret Life, 1995) and Tim Booth (Booth And The Bad Angel, 1996).
When Lynch resuscitated Twin Peaks in 2017, Badalamenti returned. Finally, the pair released their early-’90s sessions of experimental jazz and spoken-word ambience under the name Thought Gang. They were to be Badalamenti’s final releases, suitably entwined with Lynch, his greatest collaborator and inspiration; “my second-best marriage,” the composer once noted. On hearing of Badalamenti’s death, Lynch said, “today, no music.”