Angelo Badalamenti, composer for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, dies at 85

NEW YORK – Angelo Badalamenti – an internationally sought-after composer who wrote the hypnotic theme to Twin Peaks, director David Lynch’s television drama series (1990 to 1991, with a 2017 revival), and the music for five Lynch films, including Blue Velvet (1986) – died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, New Jersey. He was 85.

His niece Frances Badalamenti confirmed the death, but said she did not know the cause.

In Blue Velvet, Angelo Badalamenti was at the piano behind actress Isabella Rossellini when she sang the title song at the Slow Club in Lumberton, North Carolina, an idyllic town with a dark side. Apart from the song, a Bobby Vinton hit from 1963, Badalamenti had composed much of the film’s music.

He also wrote the music for Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir mystery, Mulholland Drive, and had a small role in the film as one of two mobster brothers who spits out his espresso in a conference-room scene.

Badalamenti’s best known work was the Twin Peaks theme, recognisable from its first three ominous, otherworldly notes. He won the 1990 Grammy for best instrumental pop performance for the number, which was, according to the Allmusic website, “dark, cloying and obsessive – and one of the best scores ever written for television”.

In 2015, a Billboard writer described the theme as “gorgeous and gentle one second, eerie and unsettling the next”. It was, according to Rolling Stone, the “most influential soundtrack in TV history”.

Badalamenti did not disagree. “Music and composing – I almost feel a little guilty about it – come so easily for me,” he told The Record in 2004, a newspaper based in New Jersey, the United States. “It’s like the well doesn’t seem to run dry.”

Born Angelo Daniel Badalamenti on March 22, 1937, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the composer was a second-generation Italian American. He was the second of four children of John Badalamenti, a fish market owner, and Leonora (Ferrari) Badalamenti, a seamstress.

Growing up in the Bensonhurst section, he started piano lessons at eight, but quit because he preferred playing stickball outdoors with his friends. He took it up again at his older brother’s insistence and came to appreciate the piano when girls admired his playing.

He was soon accompanying vocalists and other acts at Catskills resorts during summers off from high school and college.

Badalamenti attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960.

His first job was teaching the seventh grade in a public school, but when he wrote a musical Christmas programme for his students, members of the Board of Education saw the production and told local public TV station Channel 13 about it.

The station videotaped and broadcast the show. The Monday after Christmas, Badalamenti got a call from a Manhattan music publisher with a job offer.

American singer-songwriter Nina Simone recorded some of his first songs, including I Hold No Grudge, in 1965. American singer Nancy Wilson sang Face It, Girl, It’s Over (1968).

Badalamenti got started in films by writing music for Gordon’s War, a 1973 Blaxploitation film. Ossie Davis, the director, wanted an all-black crew, all “brothers”, he said. Badalamenti pointed to Sicily on a world map.

“You do seven strokes from Sicily and you’re in Africa,” he said he told Davis. “I may not be your brother, but I’m certainly your cousin.”

They met when Badalamenti was called in as a vocal coach for Rossellini on the set of Blue Velvet.

Lynch, who described Badalamenti’s work as having “a deep and powerful beauty”, said he and the composer would be entirely in sync in expressing a vision for a film.

“I sit next to him and I talk to him, and he plays what I say,” the director said in an interview with the American Film Institute.

As Badalamenti explained on NPR’s All Things Considered, that was how he wrote Laura Palmer’s Theme for Twin Peaks. Sitting beside him at his Fender Rhodes keyboard, Lynch began talking.

“It’s the dead of night,” Badalamenti said. “We’re in a dark wood. There’s a full moon out. There are sycamore trees that are gently swaying in the wind. There’s an owl.”

The words became notes that evoked the story of a murdered homecoming queen in the Pacific Northwest.

The pair collaborated again and again, on the films Wild At Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) and The Straight Story (1999), in addition to Mulholland Drive. There were five iterations of Twin Peaks, including the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and an 18-episode sequel series (2017).

Badalamenti wrote for a variety of movies, such as Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), The Comfort Of Strangers (1990), Naked In New York (1993), The City Of Lost Children (1995), A Very Long Engagement (2004) and The Wicker Man (2006).

He received the Henry Mancini Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a Lifetime Achievement honour from the World Soundtrack Awards.

Badalamenti is survived by his wife Lonny, his daughter Danielle and four grandchildren. His son Andre died in 2012.

His niece Frances interviewed him for a magazine, The Believer, in 2019.

The composer recalled being drawn to film noir in his youth, telling her: “The haunting sounds have been there, the off-centre instrumentals, ever since I was a child.” NYTIMES