With the launch of David Lynch and Chrystabell’s latest album, Cellophane Memories, there’s a palpable feeling in the air that we might be witnessing the world’s greatest living artist promote his last substantial work. At the age of 78, the painter, filmmaker, actor, musician, carpenter and beloved internet meme has hit a point in his life where each new release should be cherished more than the last, not least because they feel like the culmination of a master artist who’s spent almost a century honing his craft. 

The path Lynch has travelled in his films has always led him back to music, from the ominous drones of Eraserhead (1977) to the ironic sentimentality of Twin Peaks’ (1990-2017) iconic intro theme. Ben mimes Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ in a dank backroom in Blue Velvet and a strange sense of dread overcomes viewers. An opera singer collapses after a virtuoso performance in Mulholland Drive (2001) and the nature of song itself is cast into doubt. Lynch instinctively understands the mind’s subliminal response to music, and how he can use it to elude concrete meaning while awakening primal, barely understood segments of the human subconscious. 

Where his films use music as an invocation of mystery, his albums have excelled at conjuring narrative threads and cinematic landscapes. Usually made alongside his core collaborators, the albums he’s put his name to have sometimes placed him front and centre, sometimes as a driving force behind a production desk, and more often as the front-facing personality of fruitful songwriting partnerships. Either way, any album involving Lynch has felt intrinsically linked to his films and paintings, wandering through strange dreams of the mid-century American Midwest where everyday life is invaded by strange and evil resonances. 

His musical back catalogue is a knotted thing, consisting of soundtracks, experimental collaborations, one-off singles, and remixes. To get you started, here’s a brief primer of the key albums he’s worked on across his celebrated career. 

The dreams

Perhaps the most accessible entry point in Lynch’s music-making efforts lie with Julee Cruise and, later, Chrystabell, two ethereal female singers who helped him channel his fixations on Americana and 1950s dark balladry to produce swirling dream pop which often sounds like it exists on a long-forgotten spectral plain. 

Cruise’s Floating Into The Night (1989) emerged after Lynch and erstwhile composer Angelo Badalamenti worked with her on Blue Velvet, where she acted as vocal coach for the film’s star Isabella Rossellini and contributed to the soundtrack. With Badalamenti composing the songs and Lynch contributing lyrics, Cruise’s haunted vocals, both wispy and powerful, proved the perfect foil to their partnership. 

Like the best Lynch movies, these songs about love, night-time and strange fixations on death feel like they were composed in a waking dream that could at any moment dissolve into nightmarish screams. The trio’s follow-up The Voice Of Love (1993) doesn’t pack quite the same punch, lingering in a contented sleep without offering a tangible sense of drama, but it nonetheless contains some satisfyingly strange flourishes. 

A more long-lasting partnership for Lynch formed with singer-songwriter Chrystabell in 1997, when the pair met in the artist's recording studio and wrote a song together on the spot. After sporadic recording sessions across 14 years, the pair finally released This Train (2011), a slow-burn ambient trek through time and Lynch’s preoccupations with Manichaean light and darkness. 

According to Chrystabell, speaking in the Lynch biography Room To Dream, the pair approached the songwriting process in a manner similar to a director and an actor working out a scene. ‘We did a song called “Real Love”’, says Bell, ‘and I remember David saying, “Okay, you’re Elvis and it’s late and you’re driving a car fast and your lover’s done something bad and there’s a gun in the glove box and you don’t know what you’re gonna do, but you know something is fucked”’ […] David knows what he’s looking for, but he doesn’t bark orders. He creates a space where what he wants to happen can happen.’  

Bell’s voice, a few octaves lower than Cruise’s, packs the darker punch found in his post-Straight Story period, a more existentially fraught surrealness with little room for kitsch or faux-soap opera irony. After their initial collaboration, he told The Guardian, ‘Chrystabell is round and fully packed, and what comes out of her reminds me of a light blue songbird with extended wings, and a shining beak.’ That strange version of beauty is what Lynch captures here, both exquisite and delicate. 

The nightmares

With memories of his film career receding in the rear-view mirror, Lynch made a concerted effort in the 2010s to more fully realise his music making ambitions. Crazy Clown Time (2011), his debut solo work, was the result of this push, existing in the same crepuscular strangeness as his best films. With long-standing collaborator Dean Hurley on production duties, the songs slowly came together with Hurley beginning tracks and Lynch, according to Hurley, ‘Moving through the vibe of song’. The result is a work which stares into the same distorted funhouse mirrors as Tom Waits during his The Black Rider (1993) phase, a demonic imp of country music torn apart and reconstituted through a maleficent lens.

Lynch’s reedy voice exists in a high-pitched rasp throughout, while also exhibiting a curious sort of range (partly helped by augmenting his voice with distortion and synthetic effects); ‘Football Game’, for instance, finds him assuming a slurred midwestern drawl, a strange (and presumably accidental) approximation of Mark E Smith if he was born in Missoula. It may be a straining listen for less adventurous audiophiles, but Crazy Clown Time (and its 2013 follow-up The Big Dream) successfully brought Lynch’s unique vision to a new audience. 

The same can’t be said of Thought Gang (2018), a disturbed and strange exercise in free jazz experimentation abstract enough to make Ornette Coleman shrug his shoulders in exasperation. The album was born from a series of sessions with Lynch and Badalamenti during their most fertile period of collaboration in the early 1990s, and arguably the period when they indulged in the avant-garde as a breather from Twin Peaks’ exhausting popularity, with Lynch conjuring lyrical scenarios from thin air while Badalamenti and his band were pogoing between chaotic drones and prodigiously crafted ambience.

This furious soundscape feels like a battle between the myriad psyches of America, from businessmen racing lawnmowers to woodcutters trudging through the night. It’s not easy listening but it is a fascinating curio from a period when Lynch seemed to have boundless energy and a blank cheque from every exec in the film and music industry.

The liminal world 

At the other end of Lynch’s musical landscape are the compositions he co-wrote to complement his art pieces. While released commercially, The Air Is On Fire (2007) was originally composed alongside Hurley as an accompaniment to a 2007 exhibition of Lynch’s work. It lies in a world of complete abstraction but, thanks in part to the sheer force of Lynch’s personality, there are mysterious beats and flourishes packed with narrative suggestion. Gun shots, trains passing in the night, crackles of thunder; it’s all wholly intangible yet as thrilling as a Twin Peaks cliffhanger.

The same can be said of Polish Night Music (2015), made in collaboration with composer Marek Zebrowski. Minimalist in the extreme, each lengthy composition is a wander through the ominous noises that have littered Lynch’s scores since Eraserhead, offering a variation on Badalamenti’s style with less immediacy. Its standout piece is ‘Night (Interiors)’ which can transition from swirling romance to subterranean darkness with only a few skittering movements of Zebrowski’s piano. It's arguably the most total summation of Lynch's artistic project, dredging strange emotions from the forgotten swamps of human understanding. 

Cellophane Memories is out now on Sacred Bones Records.