David Lynch’s Lost High­way sound­track is return­ing to vinyl

How does a mur­der­er kill his wife in a jeal­ous rage and then go and play golf? David Lynch and Bar­ry ​“Wild at Heart” Gif­ford wrote Lost High­way around the time of the OJ Simp­son tri­al, dur­ing which Lynch had become fas­ci­nat­ed with the poten­tial of the human mind to pro­tect itself from an hor­rif­ic, self-inflict­ed trau­ma like murder.

A jagged noir thriller where the pro­tag­o­nist is not the detec­tive but the vil­lain, Lost High­way stars Bill Pull­man, Patri­cia Arquette, Robert Log­gia and Balt­haz­ar Get­ty, and fea­tured the final per­for­mances of Robert Blake, Jack Nance and Richard Pry­or. Lament­ing the cin­e­mat­ic trend where every sin­gle ele­ment had to be under­stood at ​“the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor”, Lynch told Rolling Stone mag­a­zine, ​“there are so many places that peo­ple could go if they weren’t cor­ralled so tight­ly with those kinds of restraints.” Released in the win­ter of 1997, the film marked a return to Lynch’s love of the dan­ger and inten­si­ty of an unsolved, unsolv­able mystery.

A dis­ori­ent­ing nar­ra­tive of mur­der, obses­sion and the rel­a­tive nature of real­i­ty, Lost High­way pulls togeth­er dis­parate threads of betray­al, jeal­ousy, mem­o­ry and mad­ness. Lynch cre­ates a frac­tured and fuzzy con­text where his ideas feel at home and ful­ly realised. The same could be said of the film’s music. Pro­duced by Trent Reznor, the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the sound­track for Lost High­way eclipsed the film itself and it reached Gold sta­tus in the US.

Reznor had been court­ing Lynch for years to make a music video, but it wasn’t until Lynch heard Reznor’s cut-up col­lage sound­track for Oliv­er Stone’s Nat­ur­al Born Killers that he final­ly approached him for a col­lab­o­ra­tion. ​“I took a lot of the things I liked and kind of recy­cled and hope­ful­ly added some­thing to them” Reznor told Rolling Stone, ​“maybe that hook that they didn’t have before – and maybe that might reel in a lis­ten­er who wasn’t as in-tune with that sort of sound. Maybe it opens their eyes to a new thing.”

The Lost High­way sound­track illu­mi­nates the impor­tance of con­text. With Smash­ing Pump­kins sit­ting next to Ange­lo Badala­men­ti and Mar­i­lyn Man­son rub­bing shoul­ders with Anto­nio Car­los Jobim, book­end­ed by David Bowie; the Lost High­way play list might look incon­gru­ent on paper but in the con­text of the film and as a stand-alone lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence, Reznor’s assem­bly makes per­fect sense.

For Music on Vinyl, reis­su­ing Lost High­way was an easy deci­sion. As brand man­ag­er Toy­ah van der Stel explains: ​“This film is a cult clas­sic. We all loved watch­ing it and we still do.” Van der Stel also reveals that the colour­ing process on this release took a lit­tle longer than antic­i­pat­ed. ​“We want­ed to pro­duce a spe­cif­ic colour and so the press­ing com­pa­ny Record Indus­try had to try dif­fer­ent mix­es,” she says. ​“We tried to make them the same, but it’s hand­craft­ed and because of that, every copy will have its own unique colour pattern.”

Lynch has said that ​“music has to live inside the film,” admit­ting that while he enjoys lis­ten­ing to a lot of music, putting them in a film involves a dif­fer­ent mind-set. Respon­si­ble for the inclu­sion of the two Ramm­stein tracks, Lynch would have also had a hand in bring­ing his long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor Ange­lo Badala­men­ti along for the ride, but it was like­ly Reznor who enlist­ed British musi­cian Bar­ry Adam­son to con­tribute to the score. As Gif­ford bought the noir ele­ment to the film, so Adam­son bought it to the music with sleazy, bold and brassy jazz on ​‘Mr Eddy’s Theme 1 & 2’, ​‘Some­thing Wicked This Way Comes’ and ​‘Hol­ly­wood Sunset’.

Badala­men­ti deliv­ers some moody and mel­low jazz rem­i­nis­cent of his work on Twin Peaks, in par­tic­u­lar ​‘Red Bats with Teeth’ and ​‘Fats Revis­it­ed’, along with a few tracks radi­ant with his sig­na­ture style and orches­tra­tion that haunt and soft­en the edges of Lost Highway’s jar­ring men­ace. Mixed in with the indus­tri­al gloom of Smash­ing Pump­kins, Trent Reznor, Mar­i­lyn Man­son and Ramm­stein sits the jew­el in crown of this sound­track, Anto­nio Car­los Jobim’s ​‘Insen­satez’. An under­stat­ed and heart-break­ing ver­sion of this bossa nova clas­sic, ​‘Insen­satez’ acts like a release valve on the ten­sion of this grind­ing and epic soundtrack.

The Lost High­way sound­track vinyl reis­sue will be avail­able from 7 Novem­ber cour­tesy of Music on Vinyl.