How David Lynch inspires the music of Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan
Natasha Khan, known as Bat For Lashes, has crafted a unique and immersive musical universe since her rise to prominence in the early 2000s. Her compositions invite listeners to surrender to the atmospheric landscapes she creates, a feat she attributes not to fellow musicians but to a director.
Listening back to ‘Daniel’, one of Natasha Khan’s early hits from 2009, reveals a timeless quality. Khan’s ethereal voice floats through the song with an angelic quality, simultaneously eerie and captivating. Similarly, ‘What’s A Girl To Do?’ draws listeners in with its unsettling yet seductive piano melody, evoking imagery of a sinister doll or eerie circus. Khan’s vocals have a magnetic pull, compelling listeners to immerse themselves fully in her atmospheric world.
Bat For Lashes’ music has a distinct vibe, existing in its own artistic world and building out the landscape with each album. Other than perhaps describing it as ‘Lynchian’, it’s hard to pigeonhole, reminiscent of David Lynch’s strange, sexy and offputting cinematic universe.
Khan would take that as the biggest compliment as she holds the director up as one of her biggest inspirations, turning to movies more than she turns to music for influence. “I find that cinematic score and film music are just as inspiring as, if not more, than other bands or other musicians,” she told Amoeba. A major part of her musical process extends beyond sounds as she crafts a more thorough experience. She said, “When I’m writing an album, I see characters in my mind. I create myths, I create landscapes and colours and they’re all living in this place and doing these things.”
It’s easy to imagine what those landscapes and colours look like. As I listen, my mind pulls up images of red-light-lit backrooms and seductive dark corners, vast open fields in the moonlight, or long empty roads where Bat For Lashes plays over a beat-up car radio. You can see elements of it in her music videos as Khan cycles through a suburban town, chased by creepy masked figures in the ‘What’s A Girl To Do?’ clip. It could be plucked directly from any number of Lynch projects, seemingly setting her own story in his world of small towns haunted by horror.
Kahn makes no secret of his influence as she said, “I have David Lynch to thank for a lot of that.” Lynch’s interaction with setting and music is a major influence on Khan, who stated, “I feel like in his work he leaves so much space and there’s so much atmosphere and so much that’s unsaid that leaves a lot of room for music and musical interpretation. He does stuff that I feel like is a kind of meditation on moving images.”
Specifically picking out the soundtrack to his 1997 surrealist flick Lost Highway, the heavy score stands as one of her favourite albums. Contrasting the atmospheric instrumental compositions of Angelo Badalamenti with raging rock tracks from Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails, the movie levelled up Lynch’s standard interaction with music. While he’s always been interested in music songs to off-set cinematic moments, such as the use of the song ‘In Dreams’ in Blue Velvet or Elvis’ ‘Love Me’ in Wild At Heart, Lost Highway contains some of his finest musical moments.
“I think where music and image cross, he’s a master of that with who he collaborates with,” Khan concluded, perhaps putting in her bed for soundtrack inclusion if he ever makes a return to feature films.
