Angelo Badalamenti, composer of ‘Twin Peaks’ and other Lynch masterpieces, dies at 85

Italian-American composer Angelo Badalamenti, a regular collaborator of filmmaker David Lynch and creator of the “Twin Peaks” melody, died of natural causes on Sunday at the age of 85, the Los Angeles Times reported. “The family of composer Angelo Badalamenti confirms that passed away on December 11 by natural death accompanied by his family“, Laura Engel, her agent and friend to the American media, commented to the newspaper.

Badalamenti’s career was closely linked to Lynch’s work, having collaborated with his music in films such as “Blue Velvet” (1986) and “Mullholand Drive” (2001), as well as the television series “Twin Peaks” (1990). With this last work, the musician won a Grammy in 1991 and obtained three Emmy nominations, and the sale of the album was a commercial success in at least 25 countries.

The meeting between the filmmaker and Badalamenti occurred when a producer recommended the composer as singing teacher for Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet”. Badalamenti composed the orchestral score for the homonymous theme song and appeared in the film as a pianist. Since then they have not stopped collaborating together, the album “Thought Gang” being released in 2018, one of their latest projects in which they recovered the music from the film “Twin Peaks: Fire walks with me” from 1992.

But Badalamenti -who trained as a classical musician- also worked with a wide variety of singers from Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson and Shirley Bassey to David Bowie and Paul McCartney, to name a few.

In addition, his work went beyond cinema, as he also composed the soundtrack of the video game “Fahrenheit” and several of the Olympic fanfares from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. So far, Lynch, who uses social media to deliver weather reports and weekly announcements about the arrival of Fridays, has not made any public statement about the death of his friend.