Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch’s composer on Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and more, dies aged 85

I cannot express how much Badalamenti’s collaborations with David Lynch meant to me. I listened to the Twin Peaks soundtrack over and over for years, and I had a VHS copy of Industrial Symphony No. 5 that I treasured but ultimately lost.

He changed the way I thought about music in film, largely by making me think about it at all… despite the emphasis that people like John Carpenter and Francis Ford Coppola placed on music, nothing about the audio ever moved me in their films. But Badalamenti’s music was an invisible, omnipresent character in every scene, either lurking at the margins or defining the rhythms of the characters we could see.

It’s impossible to watch Audrey Horne sway or walk around without hearing Freshly Squeezed. It’s impossible to see Sheryl Lee’s face without hearing Laura Palmer’s Theme.

And of course, this is doubly sad because we also lost Julee Cruise a few months back. And, I mean… The Nightingale is everything.