December 2022 saw the loss of Angelo Badalamenti, the great Sicilian-American composer for film and television. A gentle, outgoing, and passionate man, Badalamenti leaves behind a storied legacy of wondrous music, and, though it risks sounding trite and reductive, his most lasting work will be that which he recorded with director David Lynch. The first scored where he's credited under his full name is with Lynch (Blue Velvet), and the last full score he worked on was with Lynch (Twin Peaks: The Return).

All the scores are phenomenal, deeply emotive, but it is specifically Badalamenti’s three overlapping interpretations of Twin Peaks – the original series, the film Fire Walk with Me, and the Showtime revival The Return – which together form one of the great unsung masterpieces, not just for film music, but for music period.

Is it pop? Classical? Jazz? Ambient? Could it be hip hop? Or elevator music? Like the program that he composed it for, Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks is as indefinite and ever-shifting as Lynch’s.

Peaks was never a guaranteed recipe for success. Retrospectively, at all three stages, Lynch’s show (co-created with the under-appreciated Mark Frost) seems beset by widespread skepticism and impossible-to-meet expectations. There was never a way to satisfy everybody, so in due course, Lynch, Frost, and their kooky cabal of cast and crew resolved to satisfy no one – save, perhaps, for themselves, but even then, one is doubtful.

The result is an ambitious, unwieldy, often infuriating saga of aborted stories and meandering labyrinths, hypnotic mystery, and, especially in its latter days, several instances of what can generously be described as cinematic inertia. Twin Peaks is a living, breathing ecosystem, but it is also the detritus that litters the ground and the smog that obliterates the horizon. It’s safe to say that without music, Twin Peaks is dead on arrival; and without Badalamenti, well, it might as well not be made.

Angelo Badalamenti Is Twin Peaks

A scene from Twin Peaks
ABC

Simply put, the show is Badalamenti. He made Twin Peaks what it is. And anybody who hates Twin Peaks can still be seduced by its soundtrack, a long series of varied moods and movements which somehow manage to stand on their own, while still being inseparable from the property for which they form the foundation. And whereas many of today’s filmic entities are scored using temp music, Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks is the exact opposite: not just an uninfluenced interpretation of the text, but text (and even pretext) itself.

Related: Best Horror Movie Scores of the '80s, Ranked

Just take a listen to the stunning, practically sleep-inducing opening theme – the resonant, downtuned guitar followed by gentle keyboards. The thing vibrates, and this Pacific Northwest wonderland erupts from it in slow motion. Unlike some of the shows that crib from it (like The Sopranos), the first two seasons of Twin Peaks are laid out with score rather than source music, and tones and motifs from the theme recur throughout the pilot episode, creating a world unified by a woozy, cinematic unreality.

In fact, the theme actually repeats itself about two-thirds of the way through the pilot – but in a non-instrumental capacity with lyrics sung by Julee Cruise (who also sadly passed away in 2022). The hypnotic, beautiful Cruise is seen onscreen performing at The Bang Bang Bar (or the Roadhouse), a divey nightclub frequented by the show’s characters – the theme used to present the show being performed within it suggests a drunken meta-blurring between the world’s reality and artifice. (This aspect of Twin Peaks would only become more pronounced as it went on, with particular attention paid to the character of Audrey, who would dance to her own theme more than once.)

How His Music Defined David Lynch

Sheryl Lee screaming in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
New Line Cinema

The original series finale begins the franchise’s descent into moodier, more nightmarish territory, in thanks, partly, to Badalamenti’s “Sycamore Trees,” sung by Jimmy Scott in the Red Room (with lyrics by Lynch) – a performance that helped cement this episode as one of the most artistically uncompromising in network television history.

Indeed, by the time we enter Fire Walk with Me, Badalamenti has foregone much of his warm tonality. The simple, often jaunty, melodies are left behind in favor of a more ambient, experimental, sometimes aggressive style. The jazz is still playful, but not as digestible and far less contained. And rock music also asserts itself, but this is an otherworldly, almost post-rock sound, heavy with distortion and reverb. The pieces “Blue Frank” and “Pink Room,” which lay the backbone for a key sequence in the film, feel like endless walls of gnarly, hypnotic sound, which seem to go nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Related: Explained: How Twin Peaks Changed Television

And then there is “A Real Indication,” which is very different from everything that had come before or since. Here, Badalamenti and Lynch play unhinged Rodgers and Hammerstein to bring us one of the most bizarre songs to occur across the entire franchise. Lynch’s words, talk-rapped by Badalamenti, sound like they’ve been ripped from an unproduced Tom Waits song:

Like the night my girl went away / Gone off in a world filled with stuff / Lights start changin' / And there's wires in the air / And the asphalt man / Is all around me / And I look down / And my shoes are so far away from me, man / I can't believe it / I got a real indication / Of a laugh comin' on

Twin Peaks: The Return of Badalamenti

David Lynch in Twin Peaks The Return
Showtime

With the arrival of The Return, the world of Twin Peaks becomes global, extending far beyond the confines of its sleepy northwestern town. We go to Las Vegas, South Dakota, New York City, and outer space. We venture further than we ever have into the world of the Red Room, and interact with more denizens of Lynch’s signature dreamscape. With this visual diaspora comes an aural one, and we are no longer limited to the work of Badalamenti and Cruise. Iconic pieces from artists such as Dave Brubeck and the controversial Phil Spector are brought in to score some memorable passages.

But the most noticeable indicator of this seismic change is the use of the Roadhouse location, staying true to the meta-shiftiness that it established in the pilot 25 years prior. Nearly every single one of The Return’s eighteen chapters concludes with a Roadhouse performance from a different real-life artist (and, in two cases, performances by fictional artists).

And yet Badalamenti’s melodies, both new and old, still take center stage. Largely without lyrics, his work is patient and emotive, filling in the fractured narrative with the glue of depth and longing. His music does not want, as John Williams’ and Hans Zimmer’s do, to tell a story as much as it wants to be the story. And the many musical performances featured in The Return are spawned from his. None of the sung music is necessarily striking in its cleverness or thematic relevance, though there is much to be mined from the lyrics on repeat viewings.

But the diverse array of music shares one thing with Badalamenti’s, and that is a thickness of mood. Sometimes the mood is beauty, sadness, or oppressive violence, but regardless, when the music comes on, we feel its pure weight, like some haunting entity in the corner of a room. It seems that all of Twin Peaks floats just beyond the rest of the television landscape – the late Badalamenti deserves full credit for its inescapable sensations.