David Lynch [photographed by Ben Cope]
“I started off only wanting to be a painter—since the 9th grade,” says David Lynch, sitting in an open air art studio perched atop his Hollywood home on a steep canyon hillside. The view is commandingly pastoral, and there are several paintings out on easels, which I am not supposed to look at because they aren’t done yet. Lynch is preparing for a September show of new paintings, and possibly sculptures, at his longtime gallery, Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles. It’s the house from Lost Highway, the concrete one with the rectangular windows. And there’s a fully equipped recording den called Asymmetrical Studios on the ground floor, where he recently completed production on his second album of original music, The Big Dream, slated for a mid-July release. Claiming to have abandoned cinema in favor of more satisfying pursuits, these days the Oscar-nominated director of The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet splits his time between the studio above and the studio below. That’s in between running an internet-based music and art archive and pursuing the Transcendental Meditation practice and advocacy that has changed his life.
So just how does one of the world’s most prolific, influential, and iconic filmmakers end up turning to painting and recording music instead? “Painting will never die. Cinema will never die. All these things are magical. There are all these different mediums, and each is unique and beautiful and infinitely deep. Painting led to film, and film led to sound, and sound led to music. You know the thing they say about cinema is that it contains lots of individual art forms within it.”
It seems like now Lynch is going through a creative passage where instead of putting all of them together, he’s pulling them all apart—the better to explore each element à la carte and with more fullness of attention. Asked how he came to focus on music specifically as being worthy of its own devoted pursuit, he says, “That’s a damn good question. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it happened in stages. Working [on Twin Peaks] with Angelo Badalamenti brought me into the world of music, but I came into that world as a talker with lyrics. I wasn’t a musician.” Then somewhere along the line, maybe while working with Jocelyn West on the 1998 Hildegard von Bingen project Lux Vivens, things started to change. “I wanted to make sound effects with a guitar. There are very few things in the world more beautiful than the sound of an electric guitar, but I don’t play it in a normal way. I like to think of it as a motor or an engine, rough-running and gasoline-powered engine that coughs out smoke and fire but purrs like a kitten sometimes too.”
Lynch uses the unusual voice of this “reverb-drenched guitar” to great effect. Coupled with the voice filters he applies to his own spoken-word vocals, as well as guest singers like Chrysta Bell and Lykke Li who are gifted with soaring, unsettling soprano skills, his music has an eerie, romantic, graceful strangeness and an undercurrent of enigmatic tension that places its aesthetics squarely along his familiar artistic continuum. Like his cinematic vision, his songwriting is haunting, and it takes you to a place, or rather a series of places, that are every bit as affecting and evocative as his moving images. Lynch enthusiastically describes his style of music as “a hybrid, modernized form of low-down Blues,” and his liner notes certainly bear that out. “It’s about a guy coming to grips with losing his girl and drinking and going a little bit crazy. It deals with lost love and a man who feels like he’s the loser. When things go bad, you go to the wishing well to make a wish that things get better. This guy is in love with a girl who broke his heart, and she’s the only one that can mend it.” And certain lyrics from individual tracks tell the stories of love, loss, and fugue-state poetry familiar to fans of both Blues music and his films. Love is the name/In the wind/The wind blows through/The trees and stars. This night/When we dream/Together/We’ll remember. The line it curves/A certain way/Bend back to the start/Cause you’re the woman/Who broke my heart.
David Lynch [photographed by Ben Cope]
Except for the cover of the Bob Dylan-penned/Nina Simone-covered hard-luck classic “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” Lynch wrote 11 out of the album’s 12 tracks and directed the music video for the 13th, a bonus song by Lykke Li. What’s the difference between song writing versus dialogue or story treatments? He describes an intuitive process whereby the song lyrics are born out of the music. “As it starts coming together in the experimental jamming phase, the sounds signify a mood which signifies the words, and you keep working until you get something that’s married to the music. A character enters your mind and starts talking, and all you’ve got to do is write it down. People say the music sounds like different characters are singing and I think that’s true. A personality gets born, you figure out what they say and how they’d say it, and it’s the same in cinema.” And it’s the same when he paints. “You need an idea to get you out of the chair. Then after that it’s all action and reaction, because the painting talks to you just like the music talks to you, and one thing dictates the next thing and you go on like that.”
When Inland Empire came out in 2006, it was the first major feature that had been shot all on digital, and everyone pretty much freaked out about the death of film. Lynch, who had also at around that same time embraced the website as a pioneering and unprecedented evolving creative platform, realized that it was up to him to use it wrong, to work in its uncomfortable places, to make it into something new on its own terms. “The digital has its own quality, and its own tools to help make a world that people can go into.” Yet still, he has understood that “the digital also makes you crave, yearn for, something you can hold onto.” Around this same moment he launched the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace to promote the techniques of Transcendental Meditation among at-risk populations like inner-city school students and teachers, or soldiers with posttraumatic stress disorder, or really anyone who is suffering, which is most of us. And after all, along with painting, meditation is just about the most analog thing in the world.
He was somewhat surprised and extremely thrilled to see people embracing his work in T.M. right from the start, and it’s only grown since. “Things are going well; a lot of people are getting happy! There’s been a huge shift in receptivity. T.M. as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is more and more being proven to be a mediation that truly takes us to that place we all yearn—there’s that word again—to experience, which is the eternal level of life, unbounded consciousness, unbounded love, peace, energy, intelligence, creativity, and the base of all matter and mind. It’s easy and effortless because the nature of the human mind is to seek greater happiness. And then you hit the border of the intellect and whoosh, you transcend! You are in the big reality, the eternal reality, the source, the course and the goal of human life and you are there. You unfold more and more of your potential as a glorious human being every time you experience that field.”
Lynch doesn’t hesitate to credit his own T.M. practice with allowing him to work in the fearlessly intuitive mode that has liberated his creativity. “Sure! Look at what intuition is, it’s a knowingness. There’s this field called the Absolute, it’s a field of being and pure consciousness that grows and grows and grows. It’s a problem-solver, it lets you see solutions, it’s a treasury of knowingness that’s within every person. The full potential of a human being is supreme enlightenment. That’s in every one of our futures.” With the triumph of The Big Dream and its passion for the beautiful, mysterious, and the essentially, fundamentally, wonderfully human, he has clearly seen that future up close. As he asserts regarding the album’s title track, “The big dream has got to be love, that’s what it’s all about.” When he says it like that, you believe him.