Today, Trent Reznor is an Oscar-winning artist who’s composed some of the most evocative movie scores in recent memory, including the pulse-pounding electronic soundscapes for “Challengers,” “The Social Network” and the tranquil, Eno-esque “Soul.”
But the Nine Inch Nails founder didn’t have experience in Hollywood when David Lynch called and said he wanted Reznor to work on music for 1997’s “Lost Highway.” Lynch trusted him implicitly, though—and had a clear vision for what he wanted to hear.
“He’d describe a scene and say, ‘Here’s what I want. Now, there’s a police car chasing Fred down the highway, and I want you to picture this: There’s a box, OK? And in this box, there’s snakes coming out; snakes whizzing past your face. So, what I want is the sound of that – the snakes whizzing out of the box – but it’s got to be like impending doom,’” Reznor told Rolling Stone in 1997.
The kicker? “He hadn’t brought any footage with him,” Reznor continued. “He says, ‘OK, OK, go ahead. Give me that sound.’” The resulting music is suitably creepy, encompassing decaying jazz, abrasive industrial and the occasional section of ambient unease.
It should be no surprise that Lynch, who died January 15 at the age of 78, heard music in such a vivid way. After all, his movies and TV shows were visually stunning. But as his conversation with Reznor demonstrates, Lynch was committed to ensuring that any music he used enhanced the emotional impact of these visuals. No note was extraneous or wasted—and he understood more than most the mutually beneficial relationship between sound and vision.
“I used to say picture dictates sound, but sometimes it’s the other way around,” Lynch once told The Paris Review. “Sounds will conjure an image . . . to get it to marry to the picture is the trick. It’s not just a sound effect for a sound effect; it’s in that world, it marries to it, and you work and work and work until you get that.”
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This is certainly true for one of Lynch’s most famous soundtracks, for his 1977 cult favorite “Eraserhead.” The songs he composed with Alan R. Splet create a proto-industrial soundscape with haunting effects, unsettling dialogue and vocals, and roaring synthesized white noise — like Eno descending into hell. You didn’t even have to see the movie to glean the gist of its plot; the music started filling in the blanks.
Unsurprisingly, Lynch viewed the “Eraserhead” music as especially immersive, less like a discrete soundtrack and more like the noise of a daily existence. “I didn’t think of [these experiments] as music,” Lynch said in 2024, “but I thought of them as building a world. It’s more like room tones, tones of an industrial city, tones of a room in a certain kind of apartment building. Tones that paint a picture of how it is there in that factory area.”
Yet Lynch always had more than a touch of surrealism within these everyday sounds, something demonstrated by the way he wasn’t afraid of using space within his compositions. Lynch knew this approach amplified any unease, like the aural equivalent of weathering an uncomfortable silence in a real-life conversation.
Singer Julee Cruise performs during the sixth annual Twin Peaks UK Festival at Genesis Cinema on October 3, 2015 in London, England. (Amy T. Zielinski/Redferns/Getty Images)You hear this phenomenon especially in his work with frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti for “Twin Peaks” and elsewhere, notably “Mysteries Of Love” from the 1986 film “Blue Velvet.” Julee Cruise’s siren vocals intertwine with imperceptible grooves that swell like gentle ocean waves. Lynch’s own solo work also demonstrated more than a touch of shapeshifting temporal vibes. On the 2010 compilation “Dark Night of the Soul,” a collaboration with Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, Lynch contributes vocals to two songs. The title track sounded like a crackling victrola, while “Star Eyes (I Can’t Catch It)” resembles out-there psychedelic pop.
Lynch wasn’t just writing about women; his collaborations with women represented some of his most compelling musical works.
The specificity of Lynch’s music and imagery was also singular. On the collection “Twin Peaks Music: Season Two Music and More,” the songs named for the women in the TV show are rich and full of depth. “Shelly” begins like a drowsy jazz number before segueing into a lullaby-like song reminiscent of “Blue Moon”; “Audrey” is shapeshifting jazz with restless rhythms; and “Laura’s Dark Boogie” is aptly named, a skin-crawling, spidery lament full of shivering tension.
But Lynch wasn’t just writing about women; his collaborations with women represented some of his most compelling musical works. Perhaps most notable are two albums with Julee Cruise, 1989’s “Floating into the Night” and 1993’s “The Voice Of Love,” both of which featured Lynch lyrics and production and music from Angelo Badalamenti. The full-lengths reside at the intersection of haunted dream-pop, gothic rock, and burned-out western twang, but always center Cruise and her evocative vocals.
Elsewhere, “Pinky’s Dream,” a throttling western blues number from Lynch’s 2011 solo debut album “Crazy Clown Time,” features Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocalist Karen O. She coos, whispers, and wails the song, interpreting the tragic story of the enigmatic, erratic Pinky with empathy.
Singer Chrysta Bell, presented by David Lynch performs at The Hollywood Forever Cemetery on May 12, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)On his 2013 solo album “The Big Dream,” Lykke Li initially oozes gilded angelic sadness with “I’m Waiting Here.” But as the song progresses, her voice firms up and incorporates a knowing (if wistful) tone, matching lyrics that describe a narrator warning an ex-lover he’ll regret not being with her.
On that same solo album, Lynch covers “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” using distorted vocals, diffracted keyboards and plodding beats to create a disorienting effect. And while Dylan often feels like an apt comparison for Lynch’s solo work—particularly how the electronic music experiments cloak his askew worldview and unorthodox vocals—he had a different intention with the cover.
“It’s not really a cover of Bob Dylan as much as it is a cover of a Nina Simone cover of Bob Dylan,” Lynch told Billboard. “It was Nina Simone’s version that was sort of the driver of the boat.” It fit perfectly on the album, he added; the album didn’t feel right without it being in the sequence.
More recently, he collaborated with the artist Chrystabell, led by the 2024 effort “Cellophane Dreams,” a searing (and solemn) album reminiscent of PJ Harvey. “Before I was introduced to David by someone who suggested we collaborate musically, I had no idea that he was a composer or musician,” she once said. “Indeed he approaches creating music from a different angle than most. From my perspective, David sees the music as a path to the feeling. The feeling emerges during recorded improvisational sessions in his recording studio he calls ‘experiments.’”
Chrystabell hits on the essential qualities of Lynch’s music. More than anything, he had an uncanny ability to tap into the instinctual and ephemeral—and an uncanny ability to make the personal resonate in universal ways.
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