The composer Angelo Badalamenti, who has died aged 85, first worked with the director David Lynch on the 1986 neo-noir movie Blue Velvet and scored many more of his projects, including the 1990s TV series Twin Peaks, the film Mulholland Drive in 2001 and Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. Their relationship, which Badalamenti called “my second-best marriage,” was a perfect synthesis of sound and vision.
Badalamenti was a storyteller, in music and in life. In a clip from the 2007 documentary Secrets from Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks, he sits at the piano explaining – or rather recreating – how he wrote Laura Palmer’s Theme for Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
The two men sat side by side at a Fender Rhodes keyboard, Badalamenti improvising with his eyes closed while Lynch described what he saw in his head. Narrating as he plays, Badalamenti appears transported by both the music and the memory. His voice cracks as he recalls Lynch hugging him and telling him: “Angelo, that’s Twin Peaks.”
Laura Palmer’s Theme epitomises the Lynchian aesthetic, combining innocence with menace and nostalgia with modernity. It sounds a little like love and a little like death. The show’s equally powerful title theme was an eerily tranquil invitation to surrender to the dream life. The soundtrack sold half a million copies, earning its composer a Grammy award and three Emmy nominations.
His work with Lynch came to define Badalamenti’s career but he was almost 50 when it began, already a seasoned composer.
Born in Bensonhurst, New York, he was the second of four children. His Sicilian-American father, John, ran a fish market and his mother, Leonora (nee Ferrari), was a seamstress. On Sunday afternoons, Leonora’s extended family would gather around the Victrola record player, drinking red wine and listening to opera, while his grandfather narrated the storyline. “He would become very emotional,” Badalamenti recalled. “It was a profound experience to witness how music could make someone weep.”
Angelo began taking piano lessons at the age of eight but came to love the French horn most of all. After two years at the Eastman School of Music, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. During the summer holidays, he played the piano for entertainers in Borscht Belt resorts. It was good training for the neo-50s soundworld of Twin Peaks, as was his love of film noir.
After graduating in 1960, Badalamenti taught music at a school in Brooklyn for five years. His musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol caught the attention of a local television station and landed him a job with a Manhattan music publisher.
Using the Americanised alias Andy Badale, he sold songs to Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey and Nancy Wilson. He worked with the French electronic music pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey, scored the 1973 film Gordon’s War, and had a chintzy country music hit, Nashville Beer Garden, in 1980. But it was a meandering, hand-to-mouth career in which his personal sensibility was hard to detect. By the 80s, he was struggling to support his family.
Badalamenti first drifted into Lynch’s orbit when he was hired to coach the actor Isabella Rossellini to sing Blue Velvet’s title song. Lynch wanted the movie’s musical centrepiece to be This Mortal Coil’s Song to the Siren but he could not secure the rights, so he wrote some sparse lyrics and asked Badalamenti to write “a song that floats on the sea of time”. Lynch was sceptical that “this guy I hardly know” could pull it off but Mysteries of Love, sung by Julee Cruise in an angelic soprano, proved him wrong. “She made that song float and David went absolutely nuts,” Badalamenti recalled. “And then he asked me to do the score for the film.” It was his cue to revert to his own name.
Even as Badalamenti took less auteurish commissions, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the three artists knew there was more where that came from. In 1989, they worked simultaneously on three overlapping projects: Cruise’s album Floating Into the Night, the theatre piece Industrial Symphony No 1, and the music to Twin Peaks, whose title theme was simply an instrumental version of Cruise’s song Falling. “I wouldn’t have a career without him,” said Cruise.
The three-way collaboration opened doors for Badalamenti, too. He wrote string arrangements for the Pet Shop Boys, Dusty Springfield and Liza Minnelli, and produced Marianne Faithfull’s 1995 album A Secret Life.
Fluent in pop, rock, jazz, classical music, old Hollywood and electronic music, he could work as confidently with the techno duo Orbital as with the heavy metal band Anthrax or David Bowie, with whom he covered a George Gershwin song. In 1992, Paul McCartney flew him over to Abbey Road on Concorde and informed him that the Queen was a Twin Peaks fan. That same busy period produced the themes for Inside the Actors Studio and the 1992 Summer Olympics.
In cinema, Badalamenti’s range was no less impressive. He worked with directors including Jane Campion, Danny Boyle, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and, on three occasions, Paul Schrader. He received a lifetime achievement award from the World Soundtrack Awards and the Henry Mancini award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
Badalamenti prided himself on serving each director’s needs while still retaining his own “off-centre” identity. He had a gift for creeping unease – something uncanny lurking beneath the elegant surface. He put it down to his love of “beautiful dissonant things that kind of rub you wrong. Sometimes they resolve, sometimes they don’t.”
Despite his popularity, Badalamenti saw himself as an outsider. He lived in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, and often wrote music between rounds of golf at the North Jersey Country Club. He enjoyed hearing that people in Hollywood assumed he was Italian: “It just added to this whole mystique.” He was not exactly a public figure, although Lynch fans will know him as the pianist in Blue Velvet and the fastidious gangster in Mulholland Drive.
Badalamenti was loved by his collaborators. Orbital remembered him as “a big and funny character”. Tim Booth said: “We laughed from the beginning to the end of the record we made together [Booth and the Bad Angel. 1996], never had a disagreement.”
He always came back to Lynch, though. “I have a very special way of working with David,” he said. “I always feel so guilty because composing all of his projects throughout all of these years has been so easy.” After Badalamenti’s death, the director said in the weather report he posts daily on YouTube: “Today – no music.”
Badalamenti is survived by his wife, Lonny (nee Irgens), whom he married in 1968, his daughter, Danielle, and four grandchildren.
• Angelo Badalamenti, composer and arranger, born 22 March 1937; died 11 December 2022
