Falling Faster and Faster into "Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me" by Angelo Badalamenti
Falling Faster and Faster into "Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me" by Angelo Badalamenti
Drumming Upstream 26
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each of them as I go. Once I’ve learned them all, I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 453 songs left to go!
Now, let’s pull back the red curtain and take a look at “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me”.
Side A
“Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me”
By Angelo Badalamenti
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Released on August 7th, 1992
Liked on June 30th, 2015
One of Angelo Badalamenti’s favorite stories to tell in interviews was about the time he wrote “Laura’s Theme” for the TV series Twin Peaks with director David Lynch. You might have seen Badalamenti tell this story seated at a Fender Rhodes piano, narrating Lynch’s instructions as he plays the theme. That clip has gotten a lot of burn, especially in the wake of Badalamenti’s passing at the age of 85 last December, but it was far from the only time the composer told the story. He repeated it at the piano for a Canadian TV interview, in print, and for a Criterion Channel retrospective on the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. In each telling the details remain the same. Lynch comes to Badalamenti in his office in Manhattan and tells him he’s working on an idea for a TV show. Badalamenti sits down at his keyboard with a tape-recorder as Lynch prompts him with a description of a beautiful girl in danger, wandering through dark woods at night. From this vague outline and instructions from Lynch to slow down, build up, etc, Badalamenti delivers “Laura’s Theme”, exactly as you know it, on the spot. “Don’t change a single note” says Lynch via Badalamenti. TV history made in a single sitting.
The Laura Palmer that arrived wrapped in plastic on America’s television sets in 1989 wasn’t far off from the sketch that Lynch gave Badalamenti at his piano. Already dead at the start of the show, Laura is more of a mirror than a character. As Detective Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) investigates Laura’s life and the circumstances of her murder, she reflects back all the vice and virtue in the town of Twin Peaks. So much tumbles out of Laura Palmer’s yawning absence in the first two seasons that you’d be forgiven for overlooking her for characters still living. Watch deep enough into season two and you might find yourself forgetting that Twin Peaks is about the murder of a sexually abused teenage girl at all. This helps explain, at least in part, the wide and enduring appeal of Twin Peaks. Another one of Badalamenti’s favorite stories involves Queen Elizabeth skipping out on a private Paul McCartney concert to watch the latest episode of Twin Peaks as it aired. I can picture the late monarch enjoying the quaint absurdity of the show’s first two seasons. Try as I might, I cannot picture her majesty enjoying anything about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, winner of the 1992 “Booed at Cannes” award, does not let you forget about Laura Palmer. Set in the days leading up to Laura’s death, Fire Walk With Me fills the donut hole at the center of the show’s narrative. The unified pastry does not go down easily. Fire Walk With Me is a steep plunge into a nightmare of drug addiction, rape, and incest. By the time Laura, played with burning intensity by Sheryl Lee, reaches her inevitable final moments, Lynch makes her murder a mercy compared to the life she was trapped in. The film was not received well. If only fans and critics had taken the warning that Angelo Badalamenti hid in the film’s opening theme. “It’s going to be cool,” Badalamenti told Criterion, referring to the theme’s jazz style, “but watch out!”.
Angelo Badalamenti, a second generation Italian-American, was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He learned to play the piano as a child, kept accountable by his older trumpet-playing brother. Badalamenti attended Eastman School of Music, where he and bassist Ron Carter would skip class to play pool. After graduating he taught music at Dyker Heights Junior High School until he got his big break on PBS. From there he built a career on his versatility, writing both film scores and pop songs, comfortable in both classical and jazz idioms.
Badalamenti’s stylistic range made him a perfect fit for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where he was asked to coach Isabella Rossellini’s performance of the Bobbie Vinton title song, compose orchestral themes in the style of Dmitri Shostakovich, and turn David Lynch’s abstract poetry into the dreamy ballad “Mysteries of Love”1. Badalamenti passed this gauntlet with flying colors and went on to score the rest of Lynch’s work to date. The duo must have made an amusing pair, Lynch’s gee-shucks-boy-scout hokiness and Badalamenti’s deep Brooklyn brio. Though working with Lynch pushed Badalamenti’s compositions into new and challenging directions (“I’ve never written such slow music in my life!”), the two clearly had common creative ground. Lynch’s whole thing, inasmuch as it can be boiled down to a single sentence, relies on the grinding tension between opposing tones, the saccharine and the horrific, often in the same scene. Badalamenti’s music relies on a similar tension. “I have the melody on top and the bass on the bottom”, Badalamenti told NME in 2011, “but what makes it distinctively Angelo Badalamenti is the middle stuff, beautiful dissonant things that kind of rub you wrong.”
This description fits “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” twofold. It fits the theme’s arrangement, Jim Hyne’s trumpet melody and Buster Williams’s acoustic bass below, to a tee. It also describes the building blocks of the song’s form.
Until now we’ve had no occasion to discuss jazz in Drumming Upstream. The word jazz gets tossed with confidant vagueness into all manner of conversations about music and beyond. No definition can endure such wide application. I want to be specific about what I mean when I say that “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” is a jazz tune. I mean specifically that the theme is structured the way a piece of jazz is structured. This means that the theme passes through a set form with a distinct and composed melody and then repeats that form while a member of the band solos in place of that melody. Without a clear grasp on that structure, jazz can sound like total chaos. But if you catch the melody the first time around and hold it in your mind as the form recycles you’ll be carried safely to the other side.
In the case of “Fire Walk With Me” the form is as follows: an intro with no lead melody, a main melody repeated twice, then a contrasting melody, and finally a return to the main melody. Excising the intro, a moody buffer between repetitions of the core form, the theme is a classic AABA composition. Badalamenti’s “beautiful, dissonant things” take center stage in the B section. Hynes’ muted trumpet, mournful and cool (in the Miles Davis sense) during the A section, barely marks out a melody here. Instead his sparse playing is swallowed up by the rumble of Kinny Landrum’s synthesized strings and Badalamenti’s Fender Rhodes. This B section, like the intro drone, is built on a dissonant harmony that resolves downward. Even when this suspension clears away, the tension it creates lingers on, “planting the seed”, as Badalamenti puts it, for the darkness in the film to come.
It doesn’t take long for that seed to flower. “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” plays over the film’s opening credits, which hover gently over the blue-white noise of TV static. Gradually the camera pulls out to reveal the edges of the television screen. Then, just as Hynes starts taking his solo, an axe crashes through the static, destroying the television. Badalamenti’s cool jazz is cut off by the sound of a woman screaming in mortal terror. The implication is clear: this ain’t your TV’s Twin Peaks any more. Watch out!
Even without the visual aid, Badalementi’s metaphor holds true. Once you’ve heard the darkness at the forefront of the B section, you can’t help but hear the same darkness lurking under the rest of the piece. The harmony in the A section is by comparison more stable, but it too resolves with the same downward motion. The music never stops descending. In fact, this downward resolution shows up all over the Twin Peaks score, starting from the first notes of demo that Badalamenti made for “Laura’s Theme”. It is the sound of Twin Peaks. Falling, falling. Faster and faster toward Laura’s inevitable end. The darkness at the heart of Twin Peaks will swallow you whole, leaving only the rustling of wind through the trees.
Speaking of which…
Side B
“Theme from Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me”
Performed by Grady Tate
Time Signature: 4/4 (swung)
65 BPM (approx)
Before beginning work on this entry I assumed that the most interesting part of my research would be learning about Angelo Badalamenti. I had a lot of fun reading about Badalamenti and watching him retell the same stories over and over to starry-eyed journalists. I got a real kick out of the distinct Brooklyn-ness of his upbringing. “I’d look out the window in Bensonhurst at my friends playing stickball, punchball, stoopball, ‘Johnny on a pony,’ laughing and having fun” Badalamenti said in an interview with Spirit and Flesh “and I’m going “do re mi…””. The guy went to Lafayette High School and taught in Dyker Heights! If there aren’t any plans to put a mural of Badalamenti somewhere in south Brooklyn2 then this city really has gone down the drain.
But to my pleasant surprise, I had just as much fun learning about Grady Tate. Grady Tate’s drumming on “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” does not call attention to itself. From what I’ve read about Tate, who passed away in 2017 also at the age of 85, I imagine he’d prefer it that way. “I hate solos; I can’t play one to save my life,” Tate told Modern Drummer in 2001 “I think of myself as someone who can keep time.” Tate’s drumming is one of the American music industry’s great invisible support beams. The man drummed with everyone. Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Paul Simon, Roberta Flack, Quincy Jones, Stan Getz, you name it. He many not have any famous solos, signature licks, or name-brand gear, but he has quietly made more music possible than the first five drummers you could name off the top of your head.
You say the word “drummer” to most people and the image that pops up in their mind resembles Animal the muppet more often than it doesn’t. Grady Tate reached his level of silent ubiquity by embodying the opposite of that image. Tate played quietly, kept his parts simple, and never felt the urge to push the drums into the spotlight. Some of that might have been professionalism, but I get the sense that the guy genuinely loved simple drumming for its own sake. Though the majority of his prodigious credits come for his work behind the kit, Tate had a rich catalog of work behind the microphone as well. In fact, Tate was a singer before picking up the sticks, singing “light classical for ladies’ groups and family functions” as a preschooler in Durham, North Carolina. As an adult he released albums of vocal jazz and easy listening soul with his name at top billing (his take on “Windmills of Your Mind”? Pretty Badalamentian!) and recorded songs for the extended Schoolhouse Rock universe.
I don’t bring this up just because it’s fun to try and reconcile a guy singing songs about numbers to kids being even tangentially involved in Fire Walk With Me, but because I think Tate’s background as a singer had a tangible impact on how he approached the drums. In the same Modern Drummer interview, Tate describes embodying the “character” of “Killer Joe” in order to play the right drum part for the song. Considering how a song’s subject carries themselves and using that to inform your performance is a smart idea for any musician, but it’s essential for singers interpreting tunes from the songbook the way Tate did.
After I read Tate’s description of getting in character to play “Killer Joe” I couldn’t stop wondering what character Tate might have embodied for “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me”. Certainly not Laura Palmer. Nothing about Tate’s simmering brushwork resembles Lee’s dynamism in the film. Tate’s drums make a better fit for the cool detachment of Agent Chester Desmond, played by Chris Isaak in the film’s opening, but come on, that would be a pretty deep pull for a guy just trying to lay down some time on a jazz tune. No, if we’re to find which character Tate’s drumming represents we’ll have to stretch our definitions a bit.
David Lynch has a soft spot for white noise. Electrical hums, the whirr and whomp of a ceiling fan, radiator noise, and wind blowing through the leaves of trees, “Ominous whooshing” as the meme goes… this sort of stuff is all over Lynch’s movies, sometimes lurking in the background, sometimes roaring over the rest of the audio. If I had to guess, Lynch probably just has a fascination with the textures of these oft-ignored sounds, but their inclusion fits nicely into Lynch’s broader thematic interests. White noise is the sound we try, and fail, to repress. It buzzes in our ears even as we try to ignore it, nagging after us like unacknowledged guilt. Even when we succeed in thinking about something else it still lurks at the peripheral, whooshing indifferent to our facade. Grady Tate, whether he meant to or not, provides “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” its own bespoke ominous whooshing through the power of brushwork. In honor of both Tate and Badalamenti, I tried my own hand at whooshing through the theme.
Playing with brushes requires a whole range of techniques that only slightly overlap with using traditional sticks. Even after taking drum lessons for years and literally earning a degree in performing drums I still feel like I’m scratching the surface of how to use these tools. It’s only after playing a few musicals where brushes were required that I am remotely confidant using them. Nothing forces you to get good like checks that pay your rent in one go. For this track the right hand taps out quarter notes on the snare while the left hand drags across the snare’s surface, creating a “whooshing” white noise effect that hums under the whole song. I still need to work on my touch with both hands. I think the rock drummer in me needs to lighten up on the right, and just looking at the weird angle my left wrist is at makes me worried about my long term health.
One of my goals this year is to improve my brushes technique, and I’m grateful that Tate made this such a good track for working on the basics. The guy hardly plays anything but time. There’s what, two? three? fills in the whole seven minute run time? Tate barely moves from the steady two and four pulse he lays down with his left foot and right hand, only interrupting his comping to lightly graze a cymbal now and then. I didn’t bother memorizing Tate’s cymbal hits because I doubt he planned them that specifically in advance. Instead I tried to keep the spirit of his accents by playing off the rest of the music. Let me tell you, when Buster Williams starts wandering off into his own territory during Hynes’ solo it was hard not to follow him hit for hit. But Tate stays firm even as his bandmates stray, so I did my best to do the same.
One last note about the tempo. Badalamenti might have been looking for a laugh when he joked about Lynch’s preference for slow tempos, but he wasn’t kidding. “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” felt impossibly slow when I first started working on it, even compared to the other tracks that clocked in near a beat a second. Without the comfort of a rock back beat I wallowed in the open waters between measures. With practice however, that sensation faded. I believe I’ve mentioned before the NBA cliche of the game “slowing down” for players as they get more experience on the court. With enough practice, I had the opposite sensation with this theme. The song “sped up”. I started to hear how Tate managed shorter and shorter divisions of time, finding hidden fragments of groove that never made it to the song’s surface. This lines up with a bigger lesson I’ve been slow to learn over the years. Beneath the light touch, jazz drumming requires an assertive sense of time.
Now, where does “Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” assert itself on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard?
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
“Fire Walk With Me”3 presents me with many novel challenges. It is the first jazz tune I've covered so far. It is also the first tune written to score a film. It won't be the last in either of these categories to appear in the series, but as the first it begs a few difficult questions. Can I judge this track without taking into consideration my feelings about Fire Walk With Me as a film? And can I consider Fire Walk With Me without considering its place in the larger arc of Twin Peaks, which in-itself is only one part of the larger Lynch oeuvre?
To complicate matters further, I was predisposed to like “Fire Walk With Me” long before I ever heard Badalamenti’s original composition or watched a single Lynch film. I first heard “Fire Walk With Me” as interpreted by Mike Patton’s heavy metal supergroup Fantômas. Did that goofy cover, heard at a spongier brain-age, make my connection with “Fire Walk With Me” a foregone conclusion? I’d argue no. I have no such abiding allegiance with Night Of The Hunter’s score, for example.4 If anything, my affinity for the Fantômas cover is evidence of a connection with the raw composition, durable enough to survive even the most irony poisoned of Gen X posturing.
On top of that, it rules that when it came time to record a cool jazz tune for his opening credits Lynch recruited a team of legit jazz pros, not settling for anything less than the real deal. The investment pays off. I mean, good lord, that main melody is heartbreaking. One foot on the shoulder of a giant, another on its own merits, “Fire Walk With Me” sets the new bar for the top ten.
“Theme From Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me” by Angelo Badalamenti
Thanks for reading. As promised in one of the footnotes (you do read those right?) the next song in the series will feature a much shorter title and with it a much shorter song length. Until then, have a nice week.
Julee Cruise, who sang “Mysteries of Love” and many of the original songs featured in the first run of Twin Peaks, will also appear in this series. She will not be the last Twin Peaks musical guest to appear either.
Heck, the Brooklyn Nets are in desperate need of a brand overhaul, why not go full Twin Peaks? Badalamenti is at least as responsible for that aesthetic as the state of Washington. And what are Seattle fans going to do to stop it? They don’t even have a basketball team anymore!
I’m sorry, I can’t type all of that extra text every single time I mention the track name. It really cramps my style. I legit might push songs with shorter titles up on the queue because of how annoying this title was to type.
That movie fucking rips, though.
posted a comment under you playing drums to Badlalmenti's genius piece for Twin Peaks
I don't think I ever remembered the trailer ! It was a great and interesting read. Thank you