CW65
In the first week of the Los Angeles fires I wondered about David Lynch. I pictured him choosing to stay in the city, merging with the flames. I restrained myself from texting this to a friend who was fleeing the disaster.
Twin Peaks came out in April 1990, when I was in 8th grade. I had no idea who Lynch was, but the disquieting trailers for the pilot enchanted me. I just knew: This is for me. It was, and I was not alone. I picked out Angelo Badalamenti’s theme on my mother’s piano and would play it while I waited for showtime each week.
It went on from there, in high school and beyond: renting tapes of his movies with friends, watching new ones when they’d hit the theater, talking “backwards.” David Lynch made sense. He was clear-eyed, unpretentious, precise. He saw the auras, overlaps, and gaps we saw. His ear for language drove us wild. He gave the occult roar in the ether that binds us—like John Cage did with silence—a place at the table. He struck me like a tuning fork and I never stopped ringing. There’s sometimes a buggy.
And he was FUNNY.
His effect on me as an artist, on my whole realization that that’s what I was, is too great to attempt to say. And my work says it anyway. I hear the influence all the way through, maybe most markedly on my last two albums.
Here’s something. For over three years, from sometime in 2015 until the fall of 2018, I wasn’t writing or recording albums. I thought I might be done. But as Twin Peaks: The Return unspooled in 2017—which beamed into me so vividly and completely that I haven’t dared watch it since—I decided that if I went back to recording I was going to go digital.
The Return didn’t go in for a warm, retro aesthetic in line with the original show, shot on film and so often watched on video. (A taped-off-TV VHS of Twin Peaks wobbling as the intro drops is perhaps the Platonic ideal of analog fetishism.) Rather, it is baldy digital, especially the hilarious CGI effects.
So if I ever got going again, instead of sticking with my cassette 4-track, with my lo-fi brand, I’d cut hard into the icy, gross expanse of zeros and ones. (Like Miles Davis told Keith Jarrett: he quit playing ballads because he loved them so much.) When the songs came back the following year, I made one more cassette album and then Merrill Garbus hooked me up with a free iZotope Spire 8-track. I bought an iPad mini so I could use it—I’ve never owned my own computer and I didn’t have a phone (besides a landline) then—and I was good to go. (For years well-meaning people, trying to help me bust out of obscurity, suggested I might make some conventionally “good” recordings—maybe that would make me more attractive to record labels. Now people tell me I should go back to 4-track! Whatever. 💕)
David Lynch, in this little way (as if he hadn’t given enough already), showed me a way forward. How to let go to find it.
“Through The Night,” from my 2011 album Beatleboro, was an obvious choice for today—if you don’t know it, go listen and you’ll hear why. I had a different song planned, but I switched on Thursday. I actually came across a “through the night,” reading a book (but which?) in the early hours of 1/16/25, and got a weird feeling. I believe—Wikipedia lists Lynch’s death as 1/15/25—my hero was gone, was everywhere forever now.
He already was. 💕
“Through The Night” I saw you Shining in the light Wouldn’t it be crazy If we died tonight I saw you Coming through the night I saw you Angry like a storm Windows flashing With your baby corn I saw you Coming through the form Nobody knows what he wants to Nobody knows what is [backwards] But you can call me the Devil, too I saw you Smoking in the dark Wouldn’t it be crazy If we ate a shark I saw you Flashbulb make a spark I saw you Crying in the moon Panicking disorder We could bend the spoon I heard her Whistling this here tune Nobody knows what he wants to Nobody knows what is [backwards] But you can call me the Football Kid I saw you Shining in the light Wouldn’t it be crazy If we died tonight I saw you Coming through the night