Buch: "A Dream Come True - David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti"

[Caldera Records]

A Message from Caldera's co-founder and producer Stephan Eicke:

On September 4, Bloomsbury will publish my third book, “A Dream Come True: The Collaboration of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti.” 

I wish I could announce this news under happier circumstances. Alas, David Lynch passed away on January 15. 

Fittingly, I had a dream the night before he died: my friends Gary, Matthew and I were attending an Oscar ceremony with David. We were early, and the auditorium was nearly empty. I took the opportunity to excuse myself. When I returned from the bathroom, David’s seat was empty. Gary, who had been sitting next to him, looked at me and held out his hand. “David left, but he asked me to give this to you.” Gary handed me a handcrafted bracelet, a skull made out of bones attached to a row of beads. I searched the room. David was gone. I closed my hands around his gift and woke up.

David Lynch has been an important person in my life. While I never liked any of his films when I first watched them as a teenager, I eventually noticed how they touched something deep within me. I returned to them and found more aspects to appreciate. I may not have understood the meaning of his symbols, but I felt curiously drawn to them. 

I was sucked in by their darkness.

The world is a scary place. As a young adult, I felt that finally an artist had accurately put on celluloid my anxieties and nightmares. At the same time I became aware that this was the reason why I had been put off by them initially.
I met David in 2011 for an interview. He was gracious, elegant and kind. Inspired by him, I took up Transcendental Meditation in 2019.

There are various ways to investigate Lynch’s creative approach. One is by examining music and its use in his films. Although David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s collaboration lasted close to 40 years and brought us popular themes such as ‘Falling’ from Twin Peaks, no book had been written about their work and their approach to it. It’s especially curious since Lynch has become an active, performing musician himself, and is one of the most-discussed American filmmakers of the 20th and 21stcentury. I felt eager to explore the works of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, who in interviews have often called themselves brothers.

A Dream Come True is a portrayal of Lynch the filmmaker through an analysis of his use of sound, of music in particular. The book will show how the scores by Angelo Badalamenti came to be, how they were recorded, inserted into the individual films, and mixed. Via analyses and exclusive interviews, I will examine how music and sound design not only set the required mood and enhance emotion, but also how they serve as aspects of storytelling that often gives valuable clues to the unlocking of a drama’s possible mysteries.

This is Bloomsbury’s official blurb:

A Dream Come True is an extensive investigation of the working relationship between two revered artists, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, as an insightful collage that bridges the gap between academic analysis and investigative journalism.

The working-relationship between director David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti is one of the most fruitful and celebrated in cinema history. Yet despite their success and fame, this is the first book written about their decades-long collaboration. It offers new, valuable insights to fans of both Lynch's and Badalamenti's work.

The book analyses David Lynch the filmmaker through the lens of Angelo Badalamenti's music via extensive creative biographies of both, in-depth investigations into how the individual music pieces and scores came to be, how they were altered and changed during the editing process, and what clues both music and sound design can give to unlock the mysteries of individual works. It includes several of their collaborations, including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive, among others. The result is an insightful collage of exclusive interviews with many of Lynch's and Badalamenti's colleagues and friends, transcribed music examples, direct quotes, previously unpublished photographs, dialogue taken from the films, and a careful examination of secondary-sometimes contradictory-sources.

More than 15 industry professionals, including Oscar-winning sound designer Randy Thom, music editor Lori Eschler, music editor and composer John Neff, musician Barry Adamson, PA John Wentworth and film director Mark Pellington share their experiences and insights in exclusive interviews. For each film, an analysis of both music and sound design reveals how the use of these twin elements helps establish and amplify moods and emotions, and how they serve as keys to interpret the individual films and TV shows.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dream-come-true-9798765129074/

[Caldera Records]

Das Buch erscheint diesen Donnerstag und wird auch von jeder Buchhandlung in Deutschland bestellbar sein (eventuell sogar vorrätig).

Zur Feier des Tages teile ich hier einen exklusiven Auszug aus dem Vorwort:

“[David] has that artist mind,” says John Wentworth. “His roots are in painting and abstraction and association. He can make associations that you can put on a piece of paper and that make sense. But it’s intuitive. You simply have to trust it.”1 Having made his point, he leans back in his chair. Wentworth worked with David Lynch on several projects, starting with Blue Velvet as the filmmaker’s assistant. He was sound effects recordist for Wild at Heart, associate producer and post-production supervisor on Twin Peaks, and co-producer on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and on Mulholland Drive.

Our interview has led us, inadvertently, to Lynch’s werdegang, his progression and development as an artist, his mindset and philosophy. Ever since Eraserhead premiered, scholars and fans have tried to make sense of his work, to decode it. Reading academic papers and internet forums, my impression has always been that disparate factions have established themselves—individuals or groups that claim to be the holders of the only valid interpretation of Lynch’s works. For their analysis it is, of course, irrelevant that Lynch operated from the subconscious and was often not able to explain the meaning behind his images. It is essential to point out this fact when ascribing a “definitive” meaning to his films, shows, songs, and paintings. The subconscious is an essential part of David Lynch the artist. He was fishing in the dark, experimenting until the final cut was locked. In the process, everything could change, long after shooting had wrapped. New possibilities opened up that Lynch reacted to intuitively. Nothing is definitive, nothing is set in stone.

Wentworth nods. “It’s very sad to engage with people who want to approach this kind of work with that kind of mindset. You are right, it’s about intuition and association. That’s a whole other conversation and it’s very particular to David’s era and the connection between art, the twentieth-century modernism, film, media,” Wentworth explains. After a brief pause, he continues: “He is right in this bridge that is just so interesting. It’s about using the tools of abstraction combined with a whole series of technical innovations that make it possible for him to maximize his talents with the tools he is using. It’s just phenomenal to watch it.”2 There are various ways to investigate Lynch’s creative approach. One is by examining music and its use in his films. This subject was the starting point of the conversation between John Wentworth and myself. Although David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s collaboration lasted close to forty years and brought us popular themes such as “Falling” from Twin Peaks, no book had been written about their work and their approach to it. It’s especially curious since Lynch became an active, performing musician himself, and is one of the most-discussed American filmmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I felt eager to explore the works of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, who in interviews often called themselves brothers.

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Dream-Come-True-Collaboration-Badalamenti/dp/B0DQG82DKM/