Chrystabell on David Lynch
Last year I interviewed American singer Chrystabell ahead of the release of Cellophane Memories, her third album in collaboration with David Lynch.
After the film maker’s passing last week I thought it would be interesting to go back and find what she said about Lynch. Her answers were fascinating. You can read them below or see the whole interview here. I also really recommend Cellophane Memories.
I will be back with a normal newsletter on Wednesday. But I hope you enjoy this special Sunday tribute.
Chrystabell on David Lynch
I asked Chrystabell - who also starred in Twin Peaks: The Return as Special Agent Tamara Preston - if it was a very different process working on music with Lynch than working on a TV series.
Chrystabell: “David's always David. He is just remarkably consistent. But yeah, it was different, because… Twin Peaks was this set full of so many people, so many elements, you know, so organised to the minute and all this just giant production team and crew. And there are these levels of pressure, which is great, and levels of like, you need to perform and do your thing and get your marks and know your lines and all of this, you know, really a certain kind of activity, very, very present, but then also, of course, lose yourself when it when the time is there to act, whatever that means.
“But in the process of making music with David, there's much more of an element of being in the moment and whatever the moment calls for. There's not nine people waiting for you to activate over here so that this can get done and we can move on and everything's on a schedule. [It is] that kind of that space of openness and ease.
“And our conversation leading up to whatever take I'm about to do, or whatever David's lyrics are about to be, that's just as important as the music itself. So, yeah, different flow but David is consistent in that he's just really lovely to be around and always in the captain's chair, but never overbearing, just, you know, holding it down.”
Towards the start of the interview we talked about the fascinating video for Sublime Eternal Love, which plays on the record’s use of multiple, interacting vocal lines.
Chrystabell: “This is the first music video that David and I have ever made together and after a full album and a full EP, it was just so nice that the stars aligned for this to happen this way. The process of creating it was absolutely wonderful and very intimate, low key and just a few people helping out. And so enjoyable because David's a really enjoyable presence and very funny. As a person, to interact with, the mood is always like… even if what we're endeavouring to capture is something quite in a state of reverence and a bit of a celestial quality, or whatever, how one might describe it. But it was always fun. It was like, ‘Okay we need a music video. And David, do you have any ideas?’
“It was all, I would say unstructured and has its own… I had no idea if the music video would happen. And it was almost like we just decided one night to do it and then people came over and and then we did it. It’s kind of in the way of the record. It really has been a dictation from some other place: we're kind of like, ‘Okay and now this is what's happening.’ And then also we activate to make it happen.
“It's very un-manufactured and un-calculated, which is I think a new way to approach things, from my perspective, as far as an album roll out. But it's also been really like opening opening presents and having these surprises, you know, because so much of it is how David feels inclined. If there's not an idea for something, if there's not a genuine, pure desire, then it doesn't happen, because that's just the artist that he is.
“So you're kind of like, ‘How is the wind blowing? Is the right scent walking from the right direction?’ And maybe we'll have this thing that happens as a result but you never know. You don't even hope because there's already so much there. You're just, like, delightful, a delightful excitement when things happen.”
I asked Chrystabell about the origins of Cellophane Memories, which led to a fascinating dissection of her creative relationship with Lynch.
Chrystabell: “The origins are, in a way, 25 years of of creative collaboration with David and all of the different elements that we have. It's like all the treasure digging we've done over that time that allowed us to have this nice, let's call it a standard operating procedure, that could melt into, not even a consciousness / awareness, but is there so that there's that ability to really be productive and at the same time be very ethereal in the process, and almost conversational, which I think was imperative for how this album turned out as it did. There wasn't structure or let's call it pre determinants, or any words like that. It was like all of that had already been built into our foundation of organised creation, for all of it structured, all this for decades now.