David Lynch: Artist, Storyteller...Singer!

David Lynch has landed up becoming more and more of a grassroots and alternative artist over the past few years. With his experience and fame he has been able to use it to continue to be an artist and I greatly admire him for this act. He is a yardstick for independent music and film makers. All hail Lynch! The entire article with Lynch is a perfect piece in conjunction with the Trent Reznor interview below. This is how it's done.

From Sight & Sound Magazine, July 2009 issue:

“Well, here's how it happened,” Lynch explains by phone from his home in the Hollywood Hills. “Danger Mouse told me that he had been working on this album with Sparklehorse and asked if I could do some still photos for it. I thought that was a cool concept. As he was leaving I said jokingly, 'You know, I thought you might be coming up here to ask me to sing.' I thought he would laugh, but he said, 'No, no, no, I want you to sing on a track.' So he started playing me tracks that didn't have anybody on them, one of them stood out, and that was the song 'Dark Night of the Soul'.”

Lynch had worked successfully on music in the past, among other projects writing lyrics for singer Julee Cruise for her two albums he co-produced with his regular composer Angelo Badalamenti in the early 1990s. But he has only recently begun to sing himself; the first time was on songs included on the Inland Empire (2006) soundtrack. Of the two songs he sings on the new album, 'Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It)' and 'Dark Night of the Soul', he says: “It was really a thrill. I am working on new music. I'm not a musician, but I play music. I started doing it just to make sounds, experimental sounds, and it's led to something. When you see real musicians and what some of them can do, it's mind-blowing; I love being in that world, it's just a thrill. Musicians depend on others, it's truly like a bonding, unity thing. It's magical.”

'Dark Night of the Soul' is sung by Lynch in a tremulous voice - imagine his distinctive speaking voice, with its unusual vowels, sung in a shy, higher pitch and you're getting close. The track gives the record its title, capturing the overall mood of the album. Although the different singers worked entirely independently of one another, all the songs ultimately seem thematically linked by suggesting a troubling, nightmarish - and typically Lynchian - journey through an urban night.

Lynch conceived the ideas for the three or four photographs that would accompany each song; all of the pictures in the book were shot especially for the project. As ever with Lynch, the initial process involved him 'fishing' for the ideas swimming around him. “I'd just sit and listen to those songs, images would come and I'd write those things down. And then Danger Mouse and his bunch and me and my crew, we organised two days of shooting, just like going out and shooting a film, but it was going out and shooting stills - that was a blast, such a great two days.”







Oh...I am so excited about this Interview Project!