Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch’s Composer on ‘Blue
Velvet,’ ‘Twin Peaks’ and More, Dies at 85
He also wrote songs recorded by Nina Simone, Nancy
Wilson, Shirley Bassey and Mel Tillis and themes for 'Inside the Actors Studio'
and the Barcelona Summer Olympics.
The Hollywood Reporter
By Mike Barnes
December 12, 2022
Angelo Badalamenti, the acclaimed David Lynch composer
who went from teaching in junior high school in Brooklyn to creating haunting,
ethereal music for the filmmaker’s Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland
Drive, has died. He was 85.
Badalamenti died Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, New
Jersey, his niece Frances Badalamenti told The Hollywood Reporter.
The classically trained composer also collaborated with
an eclectic mix of singers in virtually every genre during his long career,
from Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Shirley Bassey, Patti Austin, David Bowie, Paul
McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Liza Minnelli, Mel Tillis and Roberta Flack to
Pet Shop Boys, Anthrax, Dolores O’Riordan, Tim Booth and LL Cool J.
Badalamenti composed the theme music for ABC’s Twin
Peaks, NBC’s Profiler and Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, and for the 1992
Summer Games in Barcelona, his “Torch Theme” during the opening ceremony
accompanied an archer’s flaming arrow that ignited the Olympic cauldron.
When Lynch needed a vocal coach for actress Isabella
Rossellini on Blue Velvet (1986), then filming in North Carolina, he turned to
Badalamenti, who had developed a reputation for working with singers.
“I met with Isabella and after a couple of hours with a
piano and a little cassette recorder, we got a decent vocal [on the Bobby
Vinton song ‘Blue Velvet’],” he recalled in a 2015 interview for Spirit &
Flesh magazine. “So we go over to the set where David is shooting the last
scene. … He puts on the earphones, listens to the recording and says, ‘Peachy
keen. That’s the ticket!'”
Badalamenti was tasked to write another tune — Lynch told
him, “Oh, just let it float like the tides of the ocean, make it collect space
and time, timeless and endless” — and that became the memorable torch song
“Mysteries of Love,” performed by Julee Cruise, who was recruited by the
composer.
Lynch turned over all the music for Blue Velvet to
Badalamenti, who went on to collaborate with the filmmaker on Twin Peaks — he
created themes for several characters in the 1989-91 drama — Wild at Heart
(1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight
Story (1999) and Mulholland Drive (2001).
“I sit with Angelo and talk to him about a scene and he
begins to play those words on the piano,” Lynch told The New York Times in 2005
in explaining how the duo made music. “Sometimes we would even get together and
make stuff up on the piano, and before you know it that leads to the idea for a
scene or a character.
“When we started working together, we had an instant kind
of a rapport — me not knowing anything about music but real interested in mood
and sound effects. I realized a lot of things about sound effects and music
working with Angelo, how close they are to one another.”
Added Badalamenti: “David’s visuals are very influenced
by the music. The tempo of music helps him set the tempo of the actors and
their dialogue and how they move. He would sit next to me at a keyboard
describing what he was thinking as I would improvise the score. Almost all of
Twin Peaks was written without me seeing a single frame, at least in the
pilot.”
Badalamenti said he would often come to Lynch’s set and
play live music during filming so the actors “could feel the mood.”
In 1990, Badalamenti received a Grammy Award for his
evocative Twin Peaks theme and three Emmy nominations for his work on the
series. The show’s soundtrack album went gold in 25 countries.
About that Twin Peaks music — which Badalamenti composed
on an old Fender Rhodes electric piano — Michael Tedder wrote in 2017 in
Esquire: “Together they created a score that was often as serene and beautiful
as the images of the waterfall that we see in the opening credits — but one
that could quickly go to a macabre place. Music oozed out of every pore of the
show, whether we were watching The Man From Another Place dance, checking out a
performance at the Roadhouse or discovering Laura Palmer’s body, wrapped in
plastic.”
Badalamenti was born in Brooklyn on March 22, 1937, and
raised in the Bensonhurst section of the borough. His father, from Sicily,
owned a fish market. An uncle, Vinnie Badale, played trumpet with bandleaders
Benny Goodman and Harry James.
When Badalamenti was young, there was one song, Irving
Berlin’s “What’ll I Do,” that always brought him to tears, and he played it
over and over.
As a teenager, he played piano and French horn in the
Lafayette High School orchestra before attending the Eastman School of Music in
Rochester, New York, on a full scholarship. After two years there, he graduated
from the Manhattan School of Music with his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
1960.
During summers in his college years, he accompanied
singers at resorts in the Catskill Mountains. “I had to play a lot of the standards,
so I learned quite a wide range of music,” he said in a 2019 interview with his
niece. “I had to learn them very quickly, and learning so many different types
of music was a tremendous help later on in my career.”
While teaching music to seventh-graders during his fifth
year at Dyker Heights Junior High in Brooklyn, he composed a Christmas musical
for his students that wound up being telecast in 1964 by PBS station WNET.
That led to a job at a music publisher, and Badalamenti
(then going by the pen name Andy Badale) would arrange and write songs for
artists including Bassey.
He advertised for a lyricist in magazines and newspapers
and connected with John Clifford, and they wrote the songs “Hold No Grudge” and
“He Ain’t Comin’ Home No More,” which he blindly pitched and then sold to
Simone. She recorded both as well as 1969’s “Another Spring,” which one critic
noted is “as rousing and moving a song as you’ll find in the singer’s
repertoire.”
Badalamenti also wrote with Frank Stanton “Face It Girl,
It’s Over,” recorded by Wilson in 1968, and collaborated with French electronic
music pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey on tracks including 1970’s “E.V.A.,” which
would be sampled by Fatboy Slim, A Tribe Called Quest and others.
He even wrote a country song — with Norman Mailer, no
less — “You’ll Come Back (You Always Do),” recorded by Tillis for the 1987 film
Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
His first job in the movies was composing the score for
the Harlem-set Gordon’s War (1973), directed by Ossie Davis. Badalamenti said
Davis was all set to hire Barry White before he listened to his music.
He then scored the crime drama Law and Disorder (1974),
directed by the Czech-born Ivan Passer, but wouldn’t work on another film until
Blue Velvet.
Badalamenti, Lynch and Cruise also collaborated on two
albums, 1989’s Floating Into the Night (the unofficial soundtrack to Twin
Peaks) and 1993’s The Voice of Love, and a 1990 avant-garde concert piece
called Industrial Symphony No. 1, which featured Wild at Heart stars Nicolas
Cage and Laura Dern. He and Lynch also recorded a jazz album, Thought Gang, in
the early ’90s.
Lynch fans also know Badalamenti as the espresso-obsessed
gangster Luigi Castigliane in Mulholland Drive. (He also was seen at the piano
during Rossellini’s “Blue Velvet” performance).
The composer worked with other top-notch directors,
including Paul Schrader on The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Forever Mine
(1999), Auto Focus (2002) and Dominion (2005); Jean-Pierre Jeunet on The City
of Lost Children (1995) and A Very Long Engagement (2004); Jane Campion on Holy
Smoke (1999); Danny Boyle on The Beach (2000); Eli Roth on Cabin Fever (2002);
Walter Salles on Dark Water (2005); and Fedor Bondarchuk on Stalingrad (2014).
His music also is heard on Weeds (1987), A Nightmare on
Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
(1989), Cousins (1989), Naked in New York (1993), Arlington Road (1999),
Secretary (2002), The Wicker Man (2006) and A Late Quartet (2012).
Badalamenti was honored for lifetime achievement at the
2008 World Soundtrack Awards, then received the prestigious Henry Mancini Award
from ASCAP, presented by Lynch, three years later.
Survivors include his wife, Lonny, an artist whom he
married in 1968, and his daughter, Danielle.
In his Spirit & Flesh interview (and in this great
2018 video), Badalamenti describes how he and Lynch came up with “Laura
Palmer’s Theme”:
“David came to my little office across from Carnegie Hall
and said, ‘I have this idea for a show, ‘Northwest Passage.’ … He sat next to
me at the keyboard and said, ‘I haven’t shot anything, but it’s like you are in
a dark woods with an owl in the background and a cloud over the moon and
sycamore trees are blowing very gently …’
“I started to press the keys for the opening chord to
‘Twin Peaks Love Theme,’ because it was the sound of that darkness. He said, ‘A
beautiful troubled girl is coming out of the woods, walking toward the camera
…’ I played the sounds he inspired. ‘And she comes closer and it reaches a
climax and …’ I continued with the music as he continued the story. ‘And from
this, we let her go back into the dark woods.’
“The notes just came out. David was stunned, as was I.
The hair on his arms was up and he had tears in his eyes: ‘I see Twin Peaks. I
got it.’ I said, ‘I’ll go home and work on it.’ ‘Work on it?! Don’t change a
note.’ And of course I never did.”
BADALAMENTI, Angelo
Born: 3/22/1937, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.
Died: 12/11/2022, Lincoln Park, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Angelo Badalamenti’s western – lyric composer:
Across the Great Divide - 1976
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