David Lynch, (Non-)Musician: The L.A. Weekly Interview

I thought Moby was solid electronics. But Moby is a killer guitar player, and his acoustic sets are really, really, really great. And he played with [his band] Little Death, [featuring singer] Laura Dawn, and her husband, I think, and the drummer is unbelievable, bass player is unbelievable. When they play live it's incredible, but when they record it, it's not the same power. Do you know that phenomenon? That's a real shame. It's like the difference between. ... Some live things, they cannot capture that, even to this day, on the digital thing or whatever.

In your musical and film experience, what was the closest you ever came to capturing the power of live music? You got some fantastic atmospherics in the album Lux Vivens, the Hildegard von Bingen medieval-chant project you produced for Jocelyn Montgomery in 1998.

PHOTO BY SEAN TEEGARDEN

"Happy accidents are real gifts and they can open the door to a future that didn't even exist."

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That's Jocelyn West, [then she was] Jocelyn Montgomery, she married Monty Montgomery [celebrated Hollywood indie producer for Lynch and others and the mysterious Cowboy in Mulholland Drive], and then they got divorced. Jocelyn is an incredible singer. We're gonna have a song by Jocelyn on the new site.

Monty is a producer and he was one of the producers of Wild at Heart. They had a place called Propaganda Films here in L.A. I was in New York working with Angelo, and I don't remember what we were working on, but we were in Artie Polemis' studio in New York, tiny little studio on Eighth Avenue, but it was like going back in time, like going back in time to Eastern Europe. It was the weirdest little studio. But it was so beautiful in there, so great. It's gone now.

So Monty called and he said he wanted me to meet this girl Jocelyn, who was coming to New York on her way to L.A. Well, it just so happened we had this extra track we made, and we wrote this kind of melody. Me and Angelo. And Artie's wife, Estelle, in the '60s was a really great lyricist, and she was there that day sitting on the couch, and I would write a line, then give the paper over to Estelle, she would write the next line, hand it back to me, I would write the third line and like that; in about 15 minutes we wrote this song. It's called "And Still." It's never been out, but it's in a documentary my friend Toby made on the making of Lost Highway.

So Jocelyn shows up and she was supposed to say hello and then leave, but I said, "Jocelyn, we got this song. Would you stay here and sing it?" And she said yes. And she also brought her violin. So it's beautiful what she did. And she sang and played the fiddle in this and it's a haunting, beautiful song.

Then remembering all that, Jocelyn, while floating down the Rhine River, or the Blue Danube, or I don't know, something, with her friend Heidrun [Reshöft] — now Heidrun is another special person — they went down the river, visiting monasteries, thinking only of Hildegard. And people would let them stay in the monasteries and Jocelyn would sing for the nuns in the morning. So beautiful she sang that many of the nuns were weeping. Imagine!

So they got this deal to make an album of Hildegard music, and that's the first thing we made in the studio downstairs [at Asymmetrical]. The very first thing. And I got to produce it and that was really, really fun.

The chants have this eerie, hazy, quiet feel reminiscent of yours and Badalamenti's influential work on the Twin Peaks score and your productions for the work of Julee Cruise. But your Blue Bob album [a Lynch obscurity from 2001], the very recent single "I Know" and your contributions to the Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse collaboration Dark Night of the Soul seem to come straight out of "Up in Flames," the scorching track you produced for blues legend Koko Taylor for the Wild at Heart soundtrack. To me, that track marks a before-and-after in your sound.

[Smiles] Yes. Combos is a magic thing. Combos. You put person A with person B, they're separate, but when together, they would do a certain thing. And then you put person A with person C, and another thing emerges that couldn't emerge with A and B. There's a magic in combos, who you're working with, and a certain thing emerges. It feels really good.

You know, the blues [chuckles]. This is, to me, real, real, real beautiful. But ... and it has a form, and it's traditional, but I like the idea of some kind of "modern blues." Just kind of ... breaking that. I don't know if you can break it, really, but ... "modern blues"! I just like that idea.

And I like the feeling it makes, and it marries in my mind with the smokestack industry, and so I've always loved factories and fire and smoke and electricity, and I think some music goes with that so powerfully well, and I think its home is real close to the blues. But I don't know exactly.