Twin Peaks (TV Program)

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    The ‘Twin Peaks’ Theme Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Portal.

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    Angelo Badalamenti, who died at age 85, left behind the bum-bommm that feels like home.Suffering from a case of middle age, I recently decided to learn the piano as an adult. The lesson I played on Monday was the theme from “Twin Peaks” — well, the idiot-proof, one-hand version that my iPad teaching app prepared for me, built around that low, hypnotic pattern. Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM.Later that day, in the sort of coincidence that seems to happen only in dreams and in small, spirit-afflicted logging towns in Washington, came news that the song’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had died at age 85.Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with a long résumé, including the scores for David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” But his memory is secured by those mesmeric notes, which opened the red curtains on Lynch and Mark Frost’s eerie mystery, and which stand above and apart from most music written for television like an ancient evergreen in an old-growth forest.In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV themes ever, Rolling Stone ranked “Twin Peaks” at 35. It would be unfair to use Badalamenti’s passing to dunk on that choice. (Counterpoint: Come on.) But whether or not it is the best theme of all time, it may be the most otherworldly, the most unlike anything that came before it.TV themes before 1990, when “Twin Peaks” premiered, tended to be come-ons or introductions. They whipped up a sense of excitement and adventure, like the theme from “Mission Impossible.” Or they outlined characters and told a story, like Waylon Jennings’s “Good Ol’ Boys” from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”Badalamenti’s theme is not a synopsis. It is not a fanfare. It is a passageway, a portal. It is slow, spare and meditative, even by the relatively languid TV pacing of three decades ago. It tells you to reset your pulse, abandon your expectations and step for an hour into a dark wood where the owls are not what they seem.Angelo Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with multiple film scores to his name. His memory is secured by the opening notes of the “Twin Peaks” theme.Nancy Wegard for The New York TimesThat opening motif seems to be plucked on the strings of an instrument that no human ever played, because in a way it is. According to Badalamenti, it began as a sample on a synthesizer, pitched lower and doubled with another guitar sound. “There’s no synth that has that sound, and it’s much too low to be an electric guitar, and it’s not a bass,” Badalamenti told Vulture in 2016. “We kept that quiet because we didn’t want anyone else to use it.”The resulting sound is simultaneously twangy and chthonic. It seems to vibrate from the earth, from your bones, from inside a tree trunk. It is, like the series, both filled with ghostly dread and saturated with romantic emotion.The theme couples that figure with a wash of dreamy synthesizers. Their interplay sets up contrasts that Lynch and Frost built into their supernatural murder mystery. It’s spooky but also naïve. It’s retro, with echoes of a rockabilly riff, and space-age. (The synthesizers, the critic John Rockwell wrote in The Times in 1990, “invest everything with an electronic glow, as if the music were radioactive.”)The music for “Twin Peaks” had to make realistic and surrealistic sense. It needed to work in a cherry-pie all-American diner and in the anteroom of the underworld. Badalamenti met the challenge in his playful and minimal score for the rest of the series, from the wistful “Laura Palmer’s Theme” to the seductive “Audrey’s Dance” to the jazzy, twitchy “Dance of the Dream Man.”The score played with Americana and pop history, but despite coming out at the dawn of the age of TV irony — “Seinfeld” had premiered a year before — it never winked. Like “Twin Peaks” itself, it meant what it said, even if you could spend your life grasping after that meaning.When Lynch and Frost brought “Twin Peaks” back for a revival in 2017, it was in many ways a different series with a different sound: even more gorgeously and truculently experimental, with an audio palette that leaned heavily on Lynch’s eerie, mechanical sound textures.But as the opening sequence began, there it was again: Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM. TV series are rituals, and those opening notes feel quasi religious, like an “om,” the one true bass line thrumming under eternity.Those notes live somewhere deep in my brain; I could feel that as I clumsily plunked them out on my piano. This is the power of a great theme: However disorienting things might get, on the screen or in life, you can always return to that musical mantra. Angelo Badalamenti is gone now. But his song remains, pulling me ever deeper into the woods. More

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      Angelo Badalamenti, Composer for ‘Twin Peaks,’ Is Dead at 85

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      The filmmaker David Lynch turned to his haunting work again and again, for “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and other neo-noir films.Angelo Badalamenti, an internationally sought-after composer who wrote the hypnotic theme to “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch’s 1990s television drama series, and the music for five Lynch films, including “Blue Velvet” (1986), died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. He was 85.His niece Frances Badalamenti confirmed the death. She said she did not know the cause.Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano behind Isabella Rossellini when she sang “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club in Lumberton, N.C., a flower-filled, picket-fence kind of town with a very dark side. Aside from the title song, a Bobby Vinton hit from 1963, he had composed much of the film’s music.He also wrote the music for Mr. Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” and had a small role in the film as one of two mobster brothers who spits out his espresso in a conference-room scene.His best-known work was the “Twin Peaks” theme, recognizable from its first three ominous, otherworldly notes. He won the 1990 Grammy for best instrumental pop performance for the number, which was, according to the Allmusic website, “dark, cloying and obsessive — and one of the best scores ever written for television.”In 2015, a Billboard writer described the theme as “gorgeous and gentle one second, eerie and unsettling the next.” It was, according to Rolling Stone, the “most influential soundtrack in TV history.”Mr. Badalamenti didn’t really disagree.“Music and composing — I almost feel a little guilty about it — come so easily for me,” he told the north New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2004. “It’s like the well doesn’t seem to run dry.”Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was born on March 22, 1937, in Brooklyn. A second-generation Italian-American, he was the second of four children of John Badalamenti, a fish market owner, and Leonora (Ferrari) Badalamenti, a seamstress.Growing up in the Bensonhurst section, he started piano lessons at 8 but quit because he preferred playing stickball outdoors with his friends. He took it up again at his older brother’s insistence and came to appreciate the piano when girls admired his playing. He was soon accompanying vocalists and other acts at Catskills resorts during summers off from high school and college.Mr. Badalamenti attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960.His first job was teaching the seventh grade in a public school, but when he wrote a musical Christmas program for his students, members of the Board of Education saw the production and told the local public TV station Channel 13 about it. The station videotaped and broadcast the show, and the Monday after Christmas, Mr. Badalamenti got a call from a Manhattan music publisher with a job offer.Nina Simone recorded some of his first songs, including “I Hold No Grudge,” in 1965. Nancy Wilson sang “Face It, Girl, It’s Over” (1968).Mr. Badalamenti got started in films by writing music for “Gordon’s War,” a 1973 blaxploitation film. Ossie Davis, the director, wanted an all-black crew, all “brothers,” he said. Mr. Badalamenti pointed to Sicily on a world map. “You do seven strokes from Sicily, and you’re in Africa,” he said he told Mr. Davis. “I may not be your brother, but I’m certainly your cousin!”Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano when Isabella Rossellini sang “Blue Velvet” in the 1986 David Lynch movie of the same title. De Laurentis Group/Courtesy Everett CollectionHe and Mr. Lynch met when Mr. Badalamenti was called in as a vocal coach for Ms. Rossellini on the set of “Blue Velvet.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu did an album of “Twin Peaks” music, saw Mr. Badalamenti’s Lynchian work in a historical midcentury context: a postwar world where everything appeared to be sunshine and pastels but where the evil unleashed by World War II still lurked.“It’s very romantic but can be terrifying,” Mr. Stewart said of the music, speaking to The Guardian in 2017. “It has a violence and a sincere sentimentality — sadness but not despair.”Mr. Lynch, who described Mr. Badalamenti’s work as having “a deep and powerful beauty,” said that he and the composer would be entirely in sync in expressing Mr. Lynch’s vision for a film. “I sit next to him and I talk to him, and he plays what I say,” he said in an interview with the American Film Institute.As Mr. Badalamenti explained on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” that’s how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme” for “Twin Peaks.” Sitting beside him at his Fender Rhodes keyboard, Mr. Lynch began talking.“It’s the dead of night,” Mr. Badalamenti said. “We’re in a dark wood. There’s a full moon out. There are sycamore trees that are gently swaying in the wind. There’s an owl.”The words became notes that evoked the story of a murdered homecoming queen in the Pacific Northwest.They collaborated again and again, on the films “Wild at Heart” (1990), “Lost Highway” (1997) and “The Straight Story” (1999), in addition to “Mulholland Drive.” There were five iterations of “Twin Peaks,” including the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) and an 18-episode sequel series (2017).In between, Mr. Badalamenti wrote for a wide variety of movies, among them “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987), “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), “Naked in New York” (1993), “The City of Lost Children” (1995), “A Very Long Engagement” (2004) and “The Wicker Man” (2006).He used what he called his “classical chops” to score “Stalingrad” (2013), a wartime love story set against that pivotal 1942 battle. It was an enormous box office success in Russia, where it was produced.One of his longest-running projects was the music for the PBS program “Inside the Actors Studio,” which was on the air from 1994 through 2019, hosted by James Lipton.Writer’s block was rarely a problem for Mr. Badalamenti, but composing a torch-lighting theme for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona had him stumped. The notes finally came to him in the shower, he recalled, and he hurried downstairs to his piano. “I wrote it in half an hour,” he said.He received the Henry Mancini Award from Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a Lifetime Achievement honor from the World Soundtrack Awards.Mr. Badalamenti is survived by his wife, Lonny; his daughter, Danielle; and four grandchildren. His son, André, died in 2012.His niece Frances interviewed him for a magazine, The Believer, in 2019. He remembered being drawn to film noir in his youth, telling her, “The haunting sounds have been there, the off-center instrumentals, ever since I was a child.”Alex Traub More

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      in Music

      Julee Cruise, Vocalist of ‘Twin Peaks’ Fame, Dies at 65

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      In projects for the director David Lynch, she brought an eerie, otherworldly style to “Falling” and other songs.Julee Cruise, a singer who brought a memorably ethereal voice to the projects of the director David Lynch — most famously “Falling,” whose instrumental version was the theme for Mr. Lynch’s cult-favorite television show, “Twin Peaks” — died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. She was 65.Her husband, Edward Grinnan, said the cause was suicide. He said she had struggled with depression as well as lupus.Ms. Cruise was building a career off Broadway in the early 1980s when serendipity struck: She met the composer Angelo Badalamenti when they worked on a show together.“I was in this country-and-western musical in the East Village,” she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I was a chorus girl with a big skirt and a big wig, singing way too loud. Angelo was doing the music for the show, and we became friends.”A few years later, Mr. Badalamenti was engaged by Mr. Lynch, who was still early in his career, as a vocal coach for Isabella Rossellini in the 1986 Lynch movie “Blue Velvet” and ended up writing the score for that film as well. Mr. Lynch and Mr. Badalamenti had written a song for the film that needed a vocalist.“Angelo asked me to find someone to sing a song for the soundtrack called ‘Mysteries of Love,’ but he didn’t like any of the singers I recommended,” she told The Chronicle. “He wanted dreamy and romantic. I said, ‘Let me do it.’”Ms. Cruise had always thought of herself as “a belter,” as she often put it (she had once played Janis Joplin in a musical revue called “Beehive”), but the voice she came up with for “Mysteries of Love” was something else entirely, enigmatic and wispy. It suited that and other Lynch-Badalamenti compositions perfectly. One writer called her style “angel-on-Quaaludes vocals.”The three were soon collaborating on Ms. Cruise’s first album, “Floating Into the Night,” which featured songs by the two men, including “Mysteries of Love” and “Falling.” They also collaborated on a stage production called “Industrial Symphony No. 1,” performed at the New Music America festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1989, with Ms. Cruise performing amid an elaborate set that included an old car.“Often, Ms. Cruise floated far above the stage, like a prom-gowned, bleached-blond angel,” Jon Pareles wrote in his review in The New York Times. “At one point, her body plummeted to the floor and was packed into the car’s trunk by helmeted workmen; later, she re-emerged to face a video camera and sing ‘Tell your heart it’s me,’ as 10 chorus girls in gold lamé danced next to her image on television screens.”Ms. Cruise achieved a longtime goal when she performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2003 in “Radiant Baby,” a musical about the artist Keith Haring. She played his mother (among other roles).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNational exposure came the following April when “Twin Peaks” premiered on ABC, with an instrumental version of “Falling” serving as its theme. Ms. Cruise appeared in the pilot and subsequent episodes as a roadhouse singer.The show quickly became the talk of television, and in May 1990 it led to an appearance by Ms. Cruise on “Saturday Night Live.” She wasn’t in the original lineup, but the controversial comic Andrew Dice Clay (he called himself “the most vulgar, vicious comic ever to walk the face of the earth”) was the scheduled host, which led to protests from at least one cast member, Nora Dunn, who refused to appear in that episode, and caused the original musical guest, Sinead O’Connor, to drop out at the last minute.Ms. Cruise was one of two acts summoned to replace her. Mr. Grinnan said in a telephone interview that Ms Cruise, who was still not well known, was working as a waitress at the time and had to skip out on her job. But, he noted, she didn’t call in sick.“She said that she called in famous,” he said.Though “Twin Peaks” brought Ms. Cruise wide exposure, Mr. Grinnan said she found a stint touring with the B-52’s in the 1990s to be particularly enjoyable. She replaced Cindy Wilson, an original member, when Ms. Wilson took a break from the band.“It was probably the happiest performing of her life,” Mr. Grinnan said.Julee Ann Cruise was born on Dec. 1, 1956, in Creston, Iowa, to Wilma and Dr. John Cruise. Her father was a dentist, and her mother was his office manager.Ms. Cruise was something of a musical prodigy on the French horn, her husband said, and received a music degree in the instrument from Drake University in Iowa. He said she had applied the delicacy and phrasing of classical French horn to the voice she came up with for the Lynch projects.But once she graduated, she thought that acting and singing would be more appealing than playing in an orchestra. She went to Minneapolis, a good city for theater, and spent several years performing with the Children’s Theater Company there before moving to New York in about 1983.After “Twin Peaks,” Ms. Cruise made another album with Mr. Lynch and Mr. Badalamenti, “The Voice of Love” (1993). She also continued acting. Mr. Grinnan said it was her performance in an Off Broadway musical, “Return to the Forbidden Planet,” in 1991 that caught the attention of the B-52’s. Mel Gussow, reviewing that show for The Times, said she stood out.“Only Julee Cruise invigorates the show with musical personality,” he wrote. “Well remembered for her singing on ‘Twin Peaks,’ she is spunky as well as amusing, although the script unwisely keeps her offstage for most of the first act.”Ms. Cruise later toured with Bobby McFerrin and worked with electronic musicians like Marcus Schmickler. In 2003 she fulfilled a longtime goal of performing at the Public Theater in New York when she was cast in the musical “Radiant Baby,” about the graffiti artist Keith Haring.Ms. Cruise as Andy Warhol, one of four roles she played in “Radiant Baby,” with Daniel Reichard, who played Keith Haring. The hardest part of performing in that show, she said, was “the costume changes.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was a demanding assignment. As The Times wrote, she played “Andy Warhol, Haring’s mother, a demonic nurse and a critic who resembles Susan Sontag.”Which of the roles was most difficult, a reporter asked?“The costume changes,” she said. “I’m the oldest person in this cast.”Ms. Cruise alternated between homes in Manhattan and the Berkshires. In addition to her husband, whom she married in 1988, she is survived by a sister, Kate Coen.Ms. Cruise reprised her “Twin Peaks” role in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” Mr. Lynch’s 1992 film, and, a quarter-century later, in an episode of Showtime’s reboot of the TV series. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2017, she reflected on her long “Twin Peaks” ride.“It was so much fun to be part of something that just went ba-boom!” she said. “You didn’t know it was going to do that. What a nice surprise life takes you on.” More

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      in Theater

      Kenneth Welsh, Memorable as a Villain on ‘Twin Peaks,’ Dies at 80

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      In a long career onstage (including Broadway), in movies and on television, he ranged across genres, from sketch comedy to science fiction.Kenneth Welsh, a prolific Canadian stage and screen actor who was best known for his portrayal of the murderous, unhinged villain Windom Earle on the hit early-1990s television series “Twin Peaks,” died on May 5 at his home in Sanford, Ontario. He was 80.His longtime agent, Pam Winter, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Welsh appeared in 10 episodes of “Twin Peaks” in its second season, playing Earle, the vengeful, maniacal adversary and former F.B.I. partner of the protagonist, Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan).The series, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, follows Cooper as he investigates the murder of the high school student Laura Palmer in the seemingly sleepy town of Twin Peaks, Wash.Earle featured in some of the darker, more sadistic scenes and story lines in a series that was known for bending genres, mixing horror and surrealism with soapy and sometimes comic elements.In the years following its cancellation by ABC in 1991 and its cliffhanger ending, “Twin Peaks” developed a cult following and spawned a prequel film, “Fire Walk With Me” (1992) and returned for limited-series that premiered on Showtime in 2017. Welsh’s character did not appear in either project.Mr. Welsh was cast in the role after visiting the set in Washington State and meeting with Robert Engels, one of the show’s producers, and Mr. Frost.Mr. Engels “knew that I was a little eccentric, and he knew that as an actor I would go this way and that way,” Mr. Welsh said in an interview for the entertainment website 25YL, adding: “He just kind of knew that I was crazy and that I was perfect for Windom. I guess?”Mr. Welsh said it was he who successfully pitched the idea of having Earle wear different disguises as he stalked Cooper and various other characters.Mr. Welsh and Stockard Channing in the 1997 Lincoln Center production of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Welsh thrived playing off-kilter characters, like Larry Loomis, the Sovereign Protector of the Order of the Lynx, a dying fraternal order at the center of “Lodge 49,” a short-lived comedy-drama series seen on AMC in 2018 and 2019.But in his more than 240 movie and television roles, he ranged widely across genres, including sketch comedy (Amazon’s recent revival of “The Kids in the Hall”), science fiction (“Star Trek: Discovery” in 2020), family fare (“Eloise at the Plaza,” a 2003 Disney TV movie) and historical dramas; he played President Harry S. Truman twice, in the television movies “Hiroshima” (1995) and “Haven” (2001), and Thomas Edison in the 1998 TV movie “Edison: The Wizard of Light,” for which he received an Emmy nomination.His notable film notable roles included the vice president of the United States in Roland Emmerich’s “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004), about the onset of an ecological catastrophe, and the father of Katharine Hepburn (played by Cate Blanchett) in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Aviator” (2004).Mr. Welsh won five Canadian Screen Awards, four for his television work and one for his supporting role in the 1995 film “Margaret’s Museum,” a drama set in a coal-mining town on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. In 2003 he was named a member of the Order of Canada.Kenneth Welsh was born on March 30, 1942, in Edmonton, Alberta, to Clifford and Lillian (Sawchuk) Welsh. His father worked for the Canadian National Railway for more than 35 years, and his mother worked at a dress shop.Kenneth was the inaugural class president at Bonnie Doon Composite High School in Edmonton. He attended the University of Alberta, where he majored in drama, and then the National Theater School of Canada, graduating in 1965.He went on to rack up many credits on the stage, including, early on, in Shakespearean productions at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Notably, he starred with Kathy Bates in the original Off Broadway production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune” in 1987 and was seen on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” (1984), directed by Mike Nichols, and at Lincoln Center in a production of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” (1997), with Glenn Close.His last stage performance was in Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood” at the Coal Mine Theater in Toronto in 2021.Drawing on his encyclopedic memory of Shakespeare’s works, Mr. Welsh was a creator, with the composer Ray Leslee, of “Stand Up Shakespeare,” a “motley musical,” as it billed itself, that opened Off Broadway in 1987. The production, also directed by Mr. Nichols, involved audience members, who would suggest Shakespeare characters, scenes or plays for Mr. Welsh to recite from memory. In the following decades he would sporadically revive “Stand Up Shakespeare” as a signature piece in various locations in the United States and Canada.Mr. Welsh, right in a 2007 episode of the science fiction series “Stargate: Atlantis” with, from left, Joe Flanigan and David Hewlett. He ranged widely across genres in his long career.Sci Fi ChannelMr. Welsh’s marriages to Corinne Farago and Donna Haley ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Lynne McIlvride, a visual artist, and a son, Devon, a musician, from his first marriage.In the final phase of his career, Mr. Welsh shifted his attention to independent projects and young filmmakers. His last film was “Midnight at the Paradise,” a drama directed by Vanessa Matsui, now in postproduction. Alongside Alan Hawco and Liane Balaban, he played the key supporting role of a movie critic nearing the end of his life.On set, Ms. Matsui said, Mr. Welsh captivated his colleagues.“He was always telling the cast and crew funny stories from his life, and he blew us all away with his performance and grace,” she said in an email. “I’ll never forget shooting this one scene with him and Allan Hawco, and you could hear a pin drop because the crew was just so drawn in by his performance. It was one of those special, intangible moments on set where you knew you just captured magic.” More