He's always looking for the darkness beneath the happy surfaces, while also longing for the safety promised by those bygone happy surfaces. It's always diners and boys who look like James Dean with him. The director, once a literal boy scout, views the world through the prism of small-town, '50s-era Americana. The album used the otherworldly, narcotic soundscapes that Fraser had perfected with the Cocteau Twins and the gothic drama of the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees as a starting point, and then blended in Lynch's personal obsessions.

The pairing went so well that the three later teamed up for the 1989 album Floating Into the Night, which saw Cruise glide across ballads written and produced by Lynch and Badalamenti. (There's a reason why that man was considered a genius.) Instead, the pair recruited Julee Cruise to sing the film's signature number 'Mysteries of Love,' a new wave torch song that David Foster Wallace once called an underground make-out classic. It would have been a choice completely within Lynch's wheelhouse guest singer Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins's angelic voice swimming in an ocean of echo is sexy, sad, and heartbreakingly pure in a way that can only be described as Lynchian, but it proved too expensive to license.

Lynch, an obsessive music fan that always seems to know what's percolating up from the underground, originally wanted to use This Mortal Coil's cover of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren' for a scene. The oft-told legend of Lynch and Badalamenti's working relationship is that the composer was brought in to act as Isabella Rossellini's voice coach for the actress's night club scenes in Blue Velvet. Music oozed out of every pore of the show, whether we were watching The Man From Another Place dance, checking out a performance at the Roadhouse, or discovering Laura Palmer's body, wrapped in plastic. Together they created a score that was often as serene and beautiful as the images of the waterfall that we see in the opening credits-but one that could quickly go to a macabre place. For his second collaboration with the Brooklyn-born composer Badalamenti, Lynch wanted a soundtrack that sounded the way his show looked, and one that transmitted the subtexts and ideas the auteur had been exploring all his life.

Twin peaks season two soundtrack