Angelo Badalamenti: an Appreciation
With the return of Twin Peaks, it's high time to republish this essay, which appeared elsewhere when it was first written in 2008 and has been greatly expanded and updated for its appearance here. -- J.J.P.
“Few know
Angelo Badalamenti by name. Probably even fewer by face,” Eunnie Park wrote in
the Dec. 5, 2004 Bergen Record, for which she interviewed him on
the occasion of the U.S. release of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long
Engagement (2002). “But millions know him by sound.”
If
Badalamenti still isn’t a household name, it must be largely because –
unlike John Williams or Howard Shore – he hasn’t done any scores for
blockbuster movies like the Stars Wars or The Lord of
the Rings. Well, Stalingrad (2013)
was a blockbuster in Russia, but not here... Just as important, however is the
fact that his work is so eclectic.
One John
Williams score is pretty much like any other John Williams score –
although there are exceptions, as witness Catch Me If You Can.
Badalamenti’s are so far ranging that casual listeners might not realize that
the same man composed the music for Twin Peaks, The City of Lost
Children, Holy Smoke, The Beach, Secretary and A Very Long
Engagement.
It was with
“Mysteries of Love” and his incidental music for Lynch’s 1986 Blue
Velvet that Badalamenti first came to wide notice, and only with Twin
Peaks four years later that he gained some measure of popular success.
If we didn’t know better, we might think that he had been a young composer at
the time, like Jon Brion when he produced his precocious orchestral score for
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
But in fact,
Angelo Badalamenti was nearly 49 when he began working with Lynch. He had been
a professional composer for more than 20 years, with dozens of songs and two
movie scores to his credit. His pre-Lynch music is rather hard to find now, and
while he worked in a number of genres – light pop, country, soul,
even electronic – none of it seems anything like his post-Lynch
work.
“My
(musical) world is a little bit dark. . . a little bit off-center,” he
said after Twin Peaks (1990-91) had put him on the musical map
even more than Blue Velvet. “I think of it as tragically beautiful.
That is how I would describe what I love best: tragically beautiful.”
The story of
how Badalamenti met Lynch in connection with Blue Velvet – first as a voice
coach for Isabella Rosselini, then as a composer – has been told a
number of times. Here’s one of his tellings:
This led to
“Mysteries of Love,” a song he wrote for the movie after Lynch couldn’t get
rights to another song he wanted. It was sung by a new discovery – Julee
Cruise, previously a talent scout:
And that in
turn led to Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990), doubtless
the strangest musical stage show ever, as witness this production number with
Cruise:
Then
came Twin Peaks, as Badalamenti explains:
Cruise had
already been collaborating with Badalamenti and Lynch (who wrote the quirky
lyrics) on an album, Floating into the Night (1989), which
became a cult hit. She appeared several times on Twin Peaks, the
oddball 1990-91 TV series about a small town and its secrets that Lynch
co-produced with Mark Frost. Several songs from the album were used on the
show, for which Badalamenti composed the incidental music, and one of them,
“Falling,” was adapted as its opening theme:
Twin
Peaks was known for
its weird situations and weird characters, like the dwarf played by Michael J.
Anderson, who dances at the end of a dream sequence to a jazzy piece titled
(what else?) “Dance of the Dream Man:”
A strange spin-off
from Twin Peaks was “Black Lodge,” a song Badalamenti wrote
for the thrash metal band Anthrax that appears in their album Sound of
White Noise (1993). The Black Lodge was an evil cult in the TV series,
and Badalamenti and the band wanted to catch its essence. The opening bars are
stylistic riffs from the series:
Another
collaboration, much later, was Booth and the Bad Angel (1996),
with Tim Booth, the British rocker then with a band called James, who had
admired Badalamenti from afar and spent years trying to hook up with him.
Again, there’s a Twin Peaks feel – but the good side of the
town – to “Fall in Love with Me.” Here’s Booth’s music video, which might
have been set in the Double R Diner from the show:
Born in
Brooklyn in 1937, Badalamenti grew up in a household of both opera and jazz fans
(His father was an opera lover and his older brother a jazz trumpeter) and that
is probably why classical and jazz-pop influences are often combined in his
work, as in “Moving Through Time,” one of the tracks for the 1992 movie prequel
to Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me:
But long
before he met Lynch, he had collaborated with Frank Stanton and others on
dozens of songs under the name Andy Badale. That came about because PBS had
broadcast a Christmas operetta he had composed for Dyker Heights High School,
where he was teaching in 1965. Although they are hard to find on YouTube, there
are examples of his work from this period. A number “Badale” songs were
commissions for, or at least sold to, major jazz, soul and country artists –
including Nina Simone, Melba Moore, George Benson, Mel Tillis, Pam Austin,
Roberta Flack, Barbara Mason and Nancy Wilson. The clip below is of a song he
wrote for Wilson but is performed here by a lesser known pop singer, Stormy
Wynters:
And here’s
Simone performing his “I Hold No Grudge:”
It was as
Badale that Badalamenti composed his first movie soundtrack for Gordon’s
War, a 1973 black film directed by Ossie Davis, who had intended to hire a
“brother” for the score, but liked what he was hearing from the white
Brooklynite (who kidded that because his ancestors were from Sicily, he was
likely a “cousin”); here is “Hot Wheels” from that score:
Other film
credits as Andy Badale included Across
the Great Divide (1974) and Law and
Disorder (1976). It was a year after he came out as Badalamenti for Blue Velvet that he did a little side
step, getting into one of his odder partnerships – with Norman Mailer, for a
movie version of Tough Guys Don’t Dance,
based on his 1984 novel. It was a flop at the time, but later became a cult
classic. Mel Tellis performed a song written by Mailer for that one:
During his
Andy Badale days, Badalamenti’s work also included collaborations with Jean
Jacques Perrey, French pioneer of electronic music. Back then, electronic music
was a novelty, a stunt – as in “switched on” classics and new works
like “E.V.A.,” which originally appeared in a Perrey album called Moog Indigo
(1970), and is credited here only to Perrey, although Badale shares credit in
the album notes:
In 1999, he
composed an opening theme, “Bloody Boy,” for Arlington Road that
is just as techno, but no longer just a novelty or a stunt: a piece that starts
off deceptively soft but builds to a percussive crescendo in a style Stravinsky
might have embraced if Stravinsky had ever composed electronic music. Here it
segues at 3:37 into a piece called “Neon Reprise” by the British techno band
Lunatic Calm:
“Bloody Boy”
is just one example of how Badalamenti has transformed electronic music from a
novelty to an art form. Another example is “Bizarre City,” from the score
for The Beach:
In the same
score there’s this lush orchestral theme, “Swim to Island,” that is reminiscent
of vintage Miklos Rosza:
But
“Beached,” a variation of the same theme in collaboration with British techno
band Orbital, turns it into something quite else:
Badalamenti’s
latest venture into techno is in collaboration with Lasse Martinussen and Johan
Caroe on some of the tracks for The Gold
Coast (2015), such as:
But in other
works, he can be quite traditional. The opening title theme of The
Comfort of Strangers (1990) is another example of Badalamenti at his
most classical – and in this case his most Italian:
Badalamenti
has composed a lot in familiar classical styles, but some of his classical pieces are quite offbeat, notably “Irvin’s Birthday” (Irvin is the brain in an
aquarium) for The City of Lost Children (1995) – one of the
oddest and most hypnotically charming science fiction movies of all time (now
seen as part of the steampunk subgenre), produced by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and
Marc Caro:
Another
track from that movie honors Tchaikovsky in both the music itself and its
title, “The Opium Prince.” One can imagine it as a rediscovered theme from The Nutcracker:
The City of Lost Children led to a continuing
relationship with Jeunet, who on his own directed the acclaimed Amélie and A
Very Long Engagement (2004) and commissioned Badalamenti to score the
latter. Linked below is the moving finale of A Very Long Engagement,
the story of a woman who – against all odds – has found her lover, a soldier
who went missing under fire during World War I. Manech has been through hell,
and doesn’t even remember her. But we can sense that he’ll fall in love with
Mathilde again, and it is the score that makes us certain of that:
The Jeunet
connection led to collabofration with another French directors, Nicole Garcia
for L’Adversaire (The Adversary, 2002):
You wouldn’t
expect to find classical music in a video game, but that’s just what
Badalamenti contributed to Fahrenheit, an X-box game released in 2005. Here are
two tracks from that which have been posted online:
Yet
Badalamenti’s range also extends to his country-influenced “Laurens Walking”
for The Straight Story (1999):
Or the light
love theme for the romantic comedy Cousins (1989):
Then there
are the songs. Besides Anthrax and Booth, Badalamenti has collaborated with
other singers since Julie Cruise. One is Marianne Faithful, the veteran British
rocker turned chanteuse with whom he worked on A Secret Life (1995),
an album thematically similar to Cruise’s Floating into the Night.
Here’s a clip of “Who Will Take My Dreams Away” from The City of
Lost Children:
“The Stars
Line Up” is from A Secret Life:
An
unfinished Badalamenti project is an album with Delores O’Riordan, late of
Cranberry, with whom he had already collaborated on songs for Evilenko (2004),
a film (based on a true story) about the hunt for a child murderer in Soviet
Russia. Here is O’Riordan’s “Angels Go to Heaven:”
In an
entirely different vein, he worked with Siouxsie Sioux, formerly of the
Banshees, on “Careless Love,” a song in a Kurt Weill vein for The Edge
of Love (2008), a biopic about Dylan Thomas. She performed it again
when Badalamenti was honored in 2009 at the World Soundtrack Awards.
And for Holy Smoke (1989) he produced a folk
music chorus and a song for Annie Lennox:
One of the
things that Badalamenti does best is to recreate pop classic forms from an
ironic or nostalgic point of view – something akin, I think, to what
Khachaturian and Ravel did with the Viennese waltz in “Masquerade” and “La
Valse.” Mulholland Drive (2001), for example, opens with a
piece titled simply “Jitterbug,” and while the musical genre is instantly
recognizable, it is somehow different, like nothing composed and
played in the thirties or forties:
Here’s his
take on the classic tango for Holy Smoke:
And his
off-center version of 1930’s jazz piano in “Fats Revisited” (Fats Waller was a
legendary jazz pianist) for Lost Highway (1997):
Badalamenti
has also worked in a genre known as “film noir jazz,” with the opening theme
for Fire, Walk With Me (1992): very slow, very moody:
But he has
played about with a lot of other forms of jazz, as in “Red Bats with Teeth,” a
disturbing piece played by a severely disturbed jazz saxophonist in Lost
Highway:
For one
supernatural thriller, Witch Hunt
(1994), it was jazz again. But for another, The
Wicker Man (2006), Badalamenti composed a score reminiscent of his music
for Twin Peaks:
Yet one
could still expect the unexpected from Badalamenti, as witness 44-Inch
Chest (2010), which had to with gangsters but sure didn’t sound like it:
In addition
to film scores and songs, Badalament’s works include “The Flame and the Arrow,”
the theme for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics:
Yet another
of his was the creation of a suite based on his introduction for the TV
interview series Inside the Actors Studio:
But the score
for Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad
has to be his most ambitious ever. In an interview in 2014 for Film Music magazine, Badalamenti said he
had never asked Bondarchuk why he had sought him out, but thought it might have
been because of A Very Long Engagement
or the Russian flavor of some of his music for Blue Velvet and Mulholland
Drive. Whatever, he was drawn to the challenge:
It’s always a real pleasure to
work with a full orchestra. And that was the right choice for this film. I
really looked forward to the challenge of “Stalingrad.” The sheer amount of
score that we spotted and the number of cues was a bit daunting. There’s 1hr15min
of score and 36 cues in the final film.
Here’s the main theme:
And here’s
how it’s used in a breathtaking scene of Russian troops charging through fire
to attack German positions. It’s in a tradition of Russian filmmaking that
dates back to Sergei Eisenstein (and composer Sergei Prokofiev) but with the
all-out effects of Hollywood:
Badalamenti,
who turned 80 March 22, is being heard again, with the debut on Showtime
of the new Twin Peaks miniseries…
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