You got your good things / You got mine

I was fifteen years old. Life was the space between CCS catalogs, Fat Wreck Chords compilations and sleepovers. On one fateful evening, my father changed our lives forever by assuming he’d given us a movie he watched a few years previous. Instead, he introduced us to David Lynch. The obsession started with Fire Walk With Me. Then we started at the beginning… Eraserhead. I can still picture the first time I watched the Lady in the Radiator sing the words, “In heaven, everything is fine. You got your good things, and I’ve got mine. In heaven, everything is fine. You got your good things, and you got mine.” The Elephant Man… Dune… Blue Velvet… Wild at Heart… all our lives would keep moving forward until the moment when another film was unearthed. Whether it was finding the pilot episode of Twin Peaks on VHS at Video Video, or an old friend visiting from Bolivia with a bootleg of all Lynch’s collected short works, or using every “all-nighter” in college watching the 32 hrs of Twin Peaks as many times as we could get through, or driving to the nearest “arts cinema” to see the premier of Mulholland Drive—we always made the time. Time for the seemingly haphazard scenes, the ominous cuts to the flickering death of a neglected filament, the interconnected stories riddled with brilliant dialogue and executed with below average talent—and the music. Somewhere between 50’s teen romance and some dark blues record that isn’t afraid to play all the black keys. The guitars of Dave Jaurequi and the jazz and orchestral arrangements of Angelo Badalamenti. This would be just one of the numerous elements of a Lynch film that I’d carry with me for now almost 15 years later.

Long story short, to mark this year’s end I decided to make a mixtape of “the work as resembled in the films and singing voice of David Lynch.” After putting hours and hours of effort into researching rarities, outtakes, EMI lawsuits and revisited collections, I decided the mixtape needed design to go with it in order to truly finish this project properly. Below are some photos of the final product.

The mixtape itself is split into three “breaths.” A) Opening with an introduction to Lynch’s fairly recent venture—singing. And continuing on to some classic Jaurequi guitar and rhodes driven tracks. Intentionally leaving out the Twin Peaks theme and some of the heavy hitters on Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, as this is not a collection of “our favorite Lynch tunes,” but rather, hopefully capturing tracks that provoke the same senses his films do. The second breath, B) enters into a series of more dark and experimental works. It opens with a short song by Brian Eno that squeezed onto the Dune soundtrack (although rumored that Eno had actually already scored the entire three hour version of the film and it was never used). Some of the classic Julee Cruise pieces were intentionally left out here. Instead, “Mysteries of Love” from Blue Velvet is your Julee fix. The mix closes with C) the slightly more aggressive section that works its way into the only track off of the original Twin Peaks score, “Bookhouse Boys.” The mix concludes with what was actually among the opening tracks on David Lynch’s “Music of Twin Peaks” revisit in 2004, “Shelly.”

Tracklist:

A

1 “Dark Night of the Soul” by Dangermouse & Sparklehorse feat. David Lynch
from Dark Night of the Soul

2 “New Shoes” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks S2

3 “Blue Frank” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks S2

4 “Imaginary Girl” by David Lynch
from Ghost of Love EP

5 “Hook Rug Dance” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks S2

B

6 “Prophecy Theme” by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanoise & Roger Eno
from Dune

7 “Mysteries of Love” by Angelo Badalamenti feat. Julee Cruise
from Blue Velvet

8 “Star Eyes (I Can’t Catch It)” by Dangermouse & Sparklehorse feat. David Lynch
from Dark Night of the Soul

9 “I’m Hurt Bad” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks S2

C

10 “The Pink Room” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Fire Walk with Me

11 “Ghost of Love” by David Lynch
from Inland Empire

12 “Night Bells” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks S2

13 “Walkin’ on the Sky” by David Lynch
from Inland Empire

14 “Bookhouse Boys” by Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks

15 “Shelly” by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti
from Twin Peaks S2