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The Music
Like the rustling wind in the trees, music is another invisible element that figures prominently in the Twin Peaks landscape. It's always in the air, as the Man From Another Place says. Twin Peaks is a work that's meant to be listened to as closely as it is watched. Angelo Badalamenti's cascading score is full of mysterious echoes, harmonic/melodic distortion, snappy rhythms and (of course) a swelling, soap-opera-esque love themes.
The Twin Peaks title theme -- with lyrics, titled "Falling" -- can also be found on the Julee Cruise album Floating Into the Night, which Lynch and Badalamenti produced [in 1989]. Lynch wrote all the lyrics, while Badalamenti provided the music and orchestrations. If Laura Palmer is both angel and devil (nobody's more into the whole Madonna-whore dynamic than Lynch), then Cruise is the musical embodiment of the angels. Her heavenly, ethereal voice can also be heard on Badlamenti's soundtrack to Lynch's Blue Velvet ("Mysteries of Love"), and her tone hearkens back to the "In Heaven Everything is Fine" refrain from Eraserhead. Cruise shows up as the biker-bar-band vocalist at the Road House in the first episode. [She returns in later installments of the series, and at the beginning of the hellishly protracted Road House sequence -- dressed in a pristine white dress -- in the 1992 feature prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Cruise's sweet, light voice is contrasted with the churning, swirling, pounding music that accompanies the first stages of Laura's descent into hell with Rona Pulaski.]
Click to buy this music from Amazon.com The jazzy, finger-snapping music that Audrey dances to on the Double R jukebox is usually associated linked on the soundtrack with her and Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook). Bobby sometimes uses a finger-popping gesture -- as do both Audrey and the Man From Another Place, when they dance. And Agent Cooper, upon awakening from his dream. And Leland Palmer, just before he dances with his daughter's portrait to "Pennsylvania 6-5000." A finger-snapping sound effect is also heard occasionally, as when Mike opens his switchblade or when Cooper opens his door to find Audrey's note. In Fire Walk With Me, the boy in the mask (the one who looks so much like a miniature David Lynch) snaps his fingers to create an acr between the dream-worlds of Laura and Agent Cooper. These two first encounter each other in Laura's dream, which takes place in the red-curtained room with the black-and-white zig-zag floor where the Man From Another Place dwells. What does it all mean? Maybe nothing. But the patterns are there. Twin Peaks, as the Man From Another Place says of his enigmatic, Laura Palmer-lookalike cousin, "is full of secrets."
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The Music
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