The musician David Lynch loved most of all: “Nobody like him”
Music and film go together like cherry pie and black coffee. Going back to the earliest days of the silent era, grand orchestral arrangements were essential and even today, a soundtrack and score can make or break a film. So, it should come as no surprise that legendary director David Lynch was a music obsessive. With an expectedly eclectic taste, the Twin Peaks creator even recorded his own music at different points throughout his long and illustrious career, giving him the opportunity to pay homage to his musical influences.
Not only does Lynch’s filmography boast a wealth of works with incredible soundtracks, from the unnerving triumph of Eraserhead to Angelo Badalamenti’s pristine work on Mulholland Drive, but the director himself was a lifelong devotee of groundbreaking music. Early loves like The Flamingos’ ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ paved the way for an extensive record collection, placing equal importance on classic pop music as bizarre experimental records.
Along the way, Lynch directed a fair few music videos, working with the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Chris Isaak, Interpol, and Donovan, among various others. Most notably, however, Lynch recorded a variety of his own musical work. In 2013, the director unveiled The Big Dream, a blues-centric record which allowed Lynch to espouse some of his greatest musical influences, including Bob Dylan.
A lifelong fan of the folk hero, Lynch took on Dylan’s folk anthem ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ and, although he claimed the song was selected in order to improve the flow of the album, the cover version is reflective of his appreciation for the Minnesota-born songwriter. In truth, it would be difficult to find any Western artist, musician, or creative during the 20th century who did not take colossal inspiration from Dylan. The songwriter changed the landscape of artistic impression indefinitely, and Lynch was one of the legions of fans under his spell.
“I love Bob Dylan. Who doesn’t?” Lynch is quoted as saying. “He tapped into some kind of vein and it keeps on keeping on. There’s nobody like him. He’s unique and just way out cool.” The latter part of that quote could equally be said of Lynch, who always marched to the beat of his own drum, creating work that he enjoyed rather than what he thought would be commercially successful.
Dylan has constantly reinvented himself, refusing to bow down to the pressures of the music industry or the desires of record company executives, which is something that Lynch could certainly relate to within his film work. It seems likely that it was this dedication to originality and individualism that first drew Lynch to the celebrated discography of the folk singer, and he remained a staunch Dylan advocate for much of his time on Earth.
Despite this adoration for Dylan, one famous David Lynch anecdote saw him walk out of a Bob Dylan concert as a young man. As Lynch tells it, he was experimenting with smoking dope and ended up sitting next to his most recent ex-girlfriend in the cheap seats of Dylan’s arena show.
Bemused by how small Dylan appeared on the stage from these high-up seats, the director simply couldn’t handle the experience and walked out of the show, “I walk out on Dylan,” declared the filmmaker. Although seeing the folk hero in the flesh was a less-than-pleasant experience for Lynch, it did not damage his appreciation for Dylan’s music, which was always very close to the director’s heart.
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