by

Song of the Day #6,141: ‘Theme from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ – Angelo Badalamenti

Continuing my appreciation of filmmaker David Lynch’s career, the next film up is 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a big-screen prequel to the hit TV show.

The movie was greenlit after Twin Peaks was cancelled, its second season having ended on a grisly cliffhanger. But rather than resolve that story, Fire Walk With Me is a prequel to the series that depicts the week before Laura Palmer was found dead.

The film was a commercial failure, not surprising given that it’s a spin-off of a TV show that was cancelled due to low viewership.

Continue reading →

by

Song of the Day #6,140: ‘Rhythm of the Night’ – DeBarge

The week of April 27, 1985, found charity single ‘We Are the World‘ holding on to its #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, with Madonna’s ‘Crazy For You’ right on its heels at #2.

In the third spot was R&B group DeBarge with their most successful song, ‘Rhythm of the Night.’ It peaked in that position, unable to overtake the formidable duo above it.

Continue reading →

by

Song of the Day #6,139: ‘(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song’ – B.J. Thomas

Throwing back to the week of April 26, 1975, we find country crooner B.J. Thomas atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.’

This was Thomas’ second #1 hit on this chart, following his recording of ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On MY Head,’ which appeared in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Continue reading →

by

Song of the Day #6,138: ‘Wicked Game’ – Chris Isaak

After Blue Velvet, David Lynch had his greatest success to date in a different medium: television. His show Twin Peaks, a quirky mystery series, became an unlikely hit.

Riding high on that triumph, he chose as his next film as adaptation of a crime novel by Barry Gifford. Lynch was initially asked to produce the film for his friend Monty Montgomery to direct, but once he read the material he claimed it for himself.

The result, Wild at Heart, is a violent, erotic, sometimes goofily earnest thrill ride — a Wizard of Oz homage that Lynch described as “a picture about finding love in Hell.”

Continue reading →

by

Song of the Day #6,137: ‘In Dreams’ – Roy Orbison

The failure of Dune knocked David Lynch down quite a few pegs, and the budget of his next film was a meager $6 million, a far cry from the $40 million he spent on the sci-fi bomb.

“I was down so far that anything was up,” he said about his time in the cinematic doghouse. “So it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment.”

That experiment took the form of a story that had been percolating in Lynch’s brain for more than a decade, a seedy tale of suburban America’s dark underbelly. And with 1986’s Blue Velvet, he delivered an unsettling triumph that embodied the term Lynchian.

Continue reading →