Varieties of Badalamenti

An Appreciation of a Favorite Composer

By Brantley Thompson Elkins

"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 work for blockbuster movies like the Stars Wars and The Lord of the Rings. But just as important 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 scores are so far ranging that casual listeners might not realize that the same man produced the music for Twin Peaks, The City of Lost Children, Holy Smoke, The Beach, Secretary and A Very Long Engagement.

A Google search brings up nearly 500,000 references to his name, and yet he doesn't have a single entry in encyclopedias of popular music -- and hardly any Who's Who listings. He has his own website (http://www.angelobadalamenti.com), but rarely updates it; other sites by his admirers recycle pretty much the same information -- mainly familiar details of his collaboration with David Lynch.

It was only 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 movies to his credit. His pre-Lynch music is 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 (1986) "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. He himself retold it once more in an interview occasioned by the release of Mulholland Drive (2001).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_9D5PiOjog

“Mysteries of Love,” the song that started it all, was performed by Julee Cruise, a singer few had heard of at the time but who went on to collaborate with Badalamenti and Lynch (who wrote the quirky lyrics) on an album, Floating into the Night, that became a cult hit. She is heard here in a clip from Blue Velvet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBoXNket2pQ

Cruise appeared several times on Twin Peaks, the quirky 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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBdH6SjBEX8

But the piece Badalamenti is playing on the piano at the end of the interview is the love theme from Mulholland Drive, a decade-later collaboration – by which time Cruise had gone her own way, a second album with Lynch and Badalamenti having failed. Lynch had once planned Mulholland Drive as a spin-off of Twin Peaks, and then as an independent TV series, but it finally ended up as a feature film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmuoQ6L9Exk

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 below to a jazzy piece titled (what else?) “Dance of the Dream Man:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMXjjHFz__A

Born in Brooklyn in 1937, Badalamenti grew up in a household of both opera and jazz fans, 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, here used as a cover for clips from Bunuel movies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omFgnjko6cc

Another strange spin-off from Twin Peaks was “Black Lodge,” a song he 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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUP7NSKXftE

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwmdRnkdGHg

But Badalamenti was a composer long before any of that. Although they are hard to find on YouTube, there are examples of his work from before he met Lynch – and when he still went by the name Andy Badale. Many “ 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. Nancy Wilson, in the clip below, sings “Face It Girl, It’s Over” (1968) -- composed by Badalamenti, with lyrics by his frequent collaborator at the time, Frank Stanton:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x29u9i_nancy-wilson-face-it-girl-its-over_music

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 “Roberta’s Theme” from that score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcbUfahvslU

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 below only to Perrey, although Badale shares credit in the album notes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDZc-ONMOPA

In 1999, Badalamenti composed an opening theme 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 used if Stravinsky had ever composed electronic music. Moreover, it actually helps dramatize the scene. I found a Japanese site that has put up at least 55 minutes of the movie, beginning with that theme, “Bloody Boy” -- which segues into a piece called “Neon Reprise” by the British techno band Lunatic Calm. Be advised, this may be a very slow download:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cc00XMTkyNTAwMzI=.html

“Bloody Boy” is just one example of how Badalamenti has transformed electronic music from a novelty to an art form. You may hear more if you can play the Japanese video, and there are also examples in Badalamenti’s score for The Beach (2000). I haven’t found online videos of those, but there’s this lush orchestral theme, “Swim to Island,” that is reminiscent of vintage Miklos Rosza:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCHjM1EMOo

Badalamenti has done much else in classical vein, but some of his pieces are truly unique, as in a cut called “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, produced by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=1532512803

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, and commissioned Badalamenti to score both of them. 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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNI2Pxgkazg

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxeDBgEhvoE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgEB5Pvygjo

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. I can’t find any performances from that, but here’s a clip of Mulholland Falls, an amateur video using “Who Will Take My Dreams Away” from The City of Lost Children:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hXxqg7WhUI

Most recently, Badalamenti has been working on an album with Delores O’Riordan, late of Cranberry, with whom he had already collaborated on songs foe Evilenko (2004), a film (based on a true story) about the hunt for a child murderer in Soviet Russia, Another online videophile created his own video to go with O’Riordan’s “Butterfly:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP8mXcVmngQ

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 (See “In the Penile Colony”) and Ravel did with the Viennese waltz in “Masquerade” and “La Valse.” Mulholland Drive, for example, opens with a piece called “Jitterbug,” and both the musical form and the movements of the dancers are instantly recognizable. Yet the tonality is somehow different, like nothing composed and played in the thirties or forties:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWcVim_kVPA

Just compare that to a 1935 jitterbug performance by the legendary Cab Calloway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKT1R2jQ2aM

Badalamenti has worked in a medium I call “film noir jazz,” with the opening theme for Fire, Walk With Me: very slow, very moody – it is the first track heard on a trailer for the German release of the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyvhr7Ekm6Q

I can relate this to other examples of that jazz form, like John Barry's opening theme for Body Heat (1981), which was being marketed as a ringtone at YouTube but was taken down a day after I first posted this essay. But where did it come from in the first place? A friend of a friend who teaches music at college had argued this sort of music grew out of the modal jazz school of Miles Davis, whose signature album was Kind of Blue (1959). I was skeptical, after listening to that album – there didn’t seem to be a connection. But then I found a tribute to film noir at YouTube that features an excerpt from Davis’ score for the 1958 Louis Malle film Elevator to the Scaffold (aka Frantic) – and felt a thrill of recognition:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGScj8pXFMA

There must be a lot of musical history behind this, just as with Badalamenti's other work in classical, jazz and electronic music, but I don't know how to explain it in musical terms. I never learned to read music, let alone play it. I can sense the patterns – one thing I’m good at is pattern recognition in literature and music. I can easily sense the influence of Gershwin in Ravel’s “Piano Concerto in G,” for example (Some can’t, which puzzles me.) – but I don’t know the words for the patterns. For now, I can only share my appreciation.

Angelo Badalamenti turned 71 on March 22. His next film score, including several songs, is for The Edge of Love, a film by John Maybury (perhaps best known for his work on the TV series Rome) coming out sometime this year.