“Twin Peaks”
by Angelo Badalamenti
from the album Music from Twin Peaks
1990
Buy the album on Amazon

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”
by Angelo Badalamenti
from the album Music from Twin Peaks
1992
Buy the album on Amazon

Lance mentioned that Monday was craptastic in his last post, and I would upgrade that to the entire week shaping up to being pretty crapperific, However, the best thing I’ve heard all week was the reboot of Twin Peaks. Hell. Yes. That made me so happy. So then made me realize these two albums would make great entries for this month’s theme. Not entirely in the MNP vein (not that that’s ever stopped me) but they came out in the exact same formative time as most the other things we post here.

I was into this show big time when it came out (I didn’t have the Agent Cooper cassettes, but I did have and love the Laura Palmer diary). They changed the night it was on in the second season so I watched it a lot less then, because it was the weekend and I was usually out (plus it was a little tough to stick with it once they revealed the killer), but then Fire Walk With Me came out and blew me away. It was a movie where I stayed with my friend in our seats for a few minutes after, just trying to let it all sink in. Through both the show and the movie, the music was so incredibly important and well integrated and iconic. It veers from calming to haunting to beautiful to funky to heartbreaking and dread and foreboding. The tv soundtrack was mostly instrumental but with a few vocals by Julee Cruise (her vocals over the main Twin Peaks theme make the song feel more tragic). The film soundtrack, which I think I may prefer if I had to choose, though I used to listen to both of these a ton as far back as them being on cassette, is also largely instrumental, but includes some great weird vocals like on the unsettling “The Black Dog Runs at Night”.

Interesting article from earlier this year on the music and its origins:

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/dream-team-the-semi-mysterious-story-behind-the-music-of-twin-peaks-20140725

One great bit from the article is this description of “Laura Palmer’s Theme”, which totally nails it:

“David said, ‘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,'” the composer recalls. “Maybe it was luck, but literally, in one take, I translated those words into music.”

That article also serves as a reminder of how out of touch I am – I had no idea that big Twin Peaks box set came out. It was a lifetime ago when I would have known that.

Laura Palmer’s Theme:

Falling (vocals by Julee Cruise):

The Black Dog Runs at Night:

The full tv soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTp6d7Bw79A

The full film soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqg-vJFLtts