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Soundtrack from Twin Peaks (titled Music from Twin Peaks in some editions) is a soundtrack album composed by Angelo Badalamenti. It was the first of several soundtrack releases related to the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91) and its spinoffs. The album was released by Warner Bros. Records on September 11, 1990, several months after the broadcast of the show's first-season finale and a few weeks ahead of its second-season premiere.

Most of the album is instrumental, ranging in genre from ambient music to cool jazz. Three dream pop–style songs, featuring vocals by Julee Cruise and lyrics written by series co-creator David Lynch, had been previously recorded and released on the former's debut album, Floating into the Night (1989).

Background
Badalamenti and Lynch first worked together during the production of Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch's fourth feature film as a director. Initially hired as a vocal coach for actress Isabella Rossellini, Badalamenti was asked to compose music for the film's soundtrack. While shooting the film, Lynch became obsessed with This Mortal Coil's cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" and listened to it repeatedly on set. Decades later, he called it his favorite record: "That song does something to me, for sure." He wanted to use it in Blue Velvet, but the cost asked by Buckley's estate to license the song was too high for the independent film's comparatively modest budget. Instead, Lynch commissioned Badalamenti to write a song emulating the style and mood of This Mortal Coil's recording.

The result was "Mysteries of Love". To sing Lynch's lyrics for the song, Badalamenti chose Julee Cruise. The two had previously worked together in musical theater. At the time, Cruise was known for husky, powerful belting akin to Shirley Bassey and Janis Joplin, who she had played in a musical. Although her sound was far removed from the delicate, upper-register vocal tone used by Elizabeth Fraser for "Song to the Siren", Badalamenti trusted that Cruise had the range to match Fraser's performance. In preparation, Cruise quit smoking cigarettes to make her voice clearer and less raspy.

After "Mysteries of Love", Badalamenti and Cruise joined the ranks of Lynch's frequent collaborators. Badalamenti scored all of Lynch's subsequent film, TV, and stage productions with the exception of Inland Empire (2006). The composer later described his working relationship with David Lynch as "a marriage made in heaven" and compared it to other enduring filmmaker–composer partnerships like Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, and Tim Burton and Danny Elfman.

Cruise later recognized that she had wholly reinvented herself and adopted a new persona in her work with Lynch. He continued to cultivate this persona in all of their future collaborations. Lynch saw her as a "musical actress" whose voice would accompany his future projects, both onscreen and off. Other have described Cruise's Lynchian persona as a "floating lady" or "white angel".

Floating into the Night


Cruise's debut album, Floating into the Night, began production in 1988. The album further developed the dream pop style.


 * Badalamenti: "The music from Twin Peaks draws from the same sound and spirit. It was all done at the same time. As we were doing Julee Cruise, David told us about his plan to do a Blue Velvet kind of soap opera. He came into the office as we were onto this kind of mentality and feel. The plan was also to use some of the Julee Cruise music as well."

Three songs from Floating into the Night were later featured on Soundtrack from Twin Peaks: "Into the Night", "The Nightingale", and "Falling", which also became the "Twin Peaks Theme" in its instrumental version. Several other songs from Floating into the Night appeared in Twin Peaks after the first season.

Twin Peaks
Lynch returned to the studio to work on the soundtrack between casting the series and shooting the pilot episode.

Composition

 * David Toop, "Ambient torch songs"
 * "That mood is the specialty of Angelo Badalamenti. Before teaming up with Lynch on "Blue Velvet," Badalamenti wrote for R&B divas like Melba Moore and Nashville country bumpkins on the order of Mel Tillis. Learning to approximate different musical genres paid off. What makes Badalamenti's cool quasi-jazz so uncanny is that it feels familiar - and therefore its impact is immediate - and yet it has a subversive, otherworldly '50s quality, as if it came from a planet where Cadillacs with fins were still parked next to kidney-shaped swimming pools."
 * Contrast with Carl W. Stalling's scores for cartoons: "While Stalling, despite his flair for avant-garde invention, was working in an essentially straightforward manner, commenting directly on the action of his cartoons, Badalamenti, like a good post-modernist, likes to subvert expectations."

Soundtrack from Twin Peaks opens with "Twin Peaks Theme" and closes with "Falling".

Cruise said she believed the lyrics to "Falling", and other love songs on Floating into the Night, had been inspired by Lynch's girlfriend at the time, Isabella Rosellini. "David wanted me to sing about love," Cruise said, "but I didn't love people." Instead, she sang the song in tribute to her recently deceased Cocker Spaniel Rudy, who she described as "my true love" and the source of "the tears, the emotion of that song."

Release
Floating into the Night received positive critical notice upon release, but was ignored by the general public until after the premiere of Twin Peaks. According to Ned Raggett at AllMusic, Cruise's album "became more or less [the] unofficial soundtrack" to the show. The association with the show drove sales in the United States: after selling only 10,000 copies in its first four months of release, it sold another 65,000 in the month following the show's premiere.

Broader commercial trends:
 * Soundtracks in general
 * Non-musical television soundtracks
 * Merchandising around TV shows at the time and Twin Peaks in particular

Packaging
The album cover shows a sign reading "Welcome to Twin Peaks – Population 51,201" from the show's opening title sequence, filmed on a stretch of Southeast Reinig Road in Snoqualmie, Washington. The accompanying booklet of liner notes includes a portrait gallery of characters from the series.

Reception
Prior to the soundtrack's release, newspaper critics had remarked on the unusual style and mood-setting quality of the music of Twin Peaks. "Even nonmusic lovers who watched David Lynch's Twin Peaks this past season", wrote John Rockwell at The New York Times, "must have recognized music's role in its eerie impact." However, reaction was split between those who felt the music complemented and enhanced the series and those who found it monotonous. Paul Lomartire at The Palm Beach Post wrote that "Twin Peaks music can either cause listeners to become captivated or comatose." Two critics likened the show's sound to other musicians under the influence of depressants: one writer at the San Francisco Chronicle called it a "spooky soundtrack that sounds like Duane Eddy on downers", while another at the Los Angeles Times wrote that it "sounds like Cowboy Junkies on Valium".

The soundtrack was generally well-received upon release in the United States, where it was reviewed by regional daily newspapers but not music magazines. It received a perfect score from the Knoxville News Sentinel, whose reviewer Chuck Campbell wrote that it "has more of a universal appeal" than the series itself, "but it parallels the show in ingenuity." Some critics compared the soundtrack to Floating into the Night or the recently released soundtrack to Lynch's 1990 film Wild at Heart.

Other American reviews were less enthusiastic. J. D. Considine at The Baltimore Sun questioned why the soundtrack had "become such a hit" and speculated, sarcastically, that perhaps it had become popular because "Cruise's flat, emotionless vocals have become an inspiration for young singers who figure that if [she] can make it, anyone can", or because "Americans are so desperate for a dose of quirky cool that they'll settle for anything, including Badalamenti's windy atmospherics and cool-jazz cliches." Tom Marstaud of The Dallas Morning News wrote that "[s]ome of this is elegiac, some just plain silly", and he expressed skepticism of the wave of hype and merchandising around the series, of which the soundtrack was just one more component: "its release will surely feed the rekindling fire of Twin Peaks-mania as the new season approaches. I, however, am still holding out for a Twin Peaks breakfast cereal."

The soundtrack was well-received by the British and Australian press. It was favorably reviewed by the British magazine NME, which ranked it number 11 on its list of the best album of 1990—just below Floating into the Night at number 9. Vox. Lynden Barber at The Sydney Morning Herald called the soundtrack "[b]reathtaking" and proposed that "Badalementi is offering a serious claim to Ennio Morricone's crown as the contemporary soundtrack composer of near-genius."

Commercial performance
The soundtrack sold 40,000 copies in the US in its first two weeks of release. By the end of the third week, when the second-season premiere aired, it had sold 350,000 copies. It peaked at number 22 on the Billboard 200 and performed well on several international charts, even peaking at number 1 on the Australian ARIA Charts. By 2000, the soundtrack had sold at least two million copies worldwide.

By the end of the year, the soundtrack had been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), denoting shipments of more than 500,000 copies in the United States; Gold by the British Phonographic Industry, denoting shipments of more than 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom; and Gold by Music Canada, denoting shipments of of more than 50,000 copies.

Legacy
In the 1994 print edition of All Music Guide, Brian Mansfield hailed it as "one of the best scores ever written for television" and said the "dark, cloying, and obsessive" music would be "instantly recognizable to anyone who saw even one episode of the series."

Moby, Anthrax

Lana Del Rey, Sky Ferreira

Pitchfork ranked "Falling" as the 146th best track of the 1990s, while Fact named the soundtrack the tenth best album of that decade.

2016 reissue
Reissued by Death Waltz, a boutique independent record label.

US: UK:
 * Pitchfork
 * MTV News
 * The Quietus
 * The Independent
 * The Wire
 * Uncut

The reissue edition had sold approximately 36,000 copies as of January 2020, far surpassing Death Waltz's expectations. According to a label manager, sales of 3,000 copies marked the typical break-even point for one of their releases and sales over 5,000 would be a major success.

Personnel
Credits adapted from the liner notes of Soundtrack from Twin Peaks.

Musicians
 * Angelo Badalamenti – piano, synthesizers, orchestration, arrangement, production
 * Julee Cruise – vocals (tracks 4, 7, 11)
 * Vinnie Bell – electric guitars
 * Eddie Daniels – flute, clarinet
 * Eddie Dixon – electric guitars
 * Kinny Landrum – synthesizers
 * Albert Regni – tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute
 * Grady Tate – drums

Technical
 * David Lynch – production, photography
 * Art Pohlemus – recording, mixing (tracks 1–3, 5, 6, 8–10)
 * Jay Healy – mixing (tracks 4, 7, 11)
 * Howie Weinberg – mastering

Design
 * Tom Recchion – art direction, design
 * Kevin Laffey - coordination, A&R
 * Fredrik Nilsen – photography
 * Paula K. Shimatsu-U – photography
 * Marc Sirinsky – photography
 * Craig Sjodin – photography
 * Kimberly Wright – photography

Web sources
http://www.noripcord.com/features/top-100-albums-1990-1999-part-three-100-81 https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-02-19-9602190004-story.html https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/how-twin-peaks-beautifully-dark-music-left-a-lasting-impact/article35059842/