Last month, David Lynch and Chrystabell shared the first single, ‘Sublime Eternal Love’, from their forthcoming joint album, Cellophane Memories. Now, the duo is back once again, with a second song and music video that takes us deep into their joint psyche, or maybe into another dimension altogether.
Titled ‘The Answers to the Questions’, the track itself is slow, syrupy, and mysterious, layering the Texan singer’s vocals with instrumentals by Lynch and his late friend and longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. The accompanying visuals essentially take place in a moving Lynch painting, where Chrystabell performs alongside a pulsing stormcloud and a masked figure with a detachable face.
The full-length album is set to follow on August 2, released via Sacred Bones. A new press release details the record’s origins on one of the filmmaker’s nighttime walks through a forest, when he witnessed a bright light over the tops of the tall trees. “As he recalls it, the light became the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and revealed a secret to him. It is from these mysterious convergences of light and sound, day and night, starry sky and black forest that Chrystabell and David’s collaboration has continued to blossom.”
Cellophane Memories is just the latest collaboration between the pair, who have previously worked together on the records This Train and Somewhere in the Nowhere, as well as Twin Peaks, in which Chrystabell played FBI agent Tammy Preston. The new music contains “many doors that are left open to wonder, wander and get turned around in,” says Chrystabell herself. “It's like mood music... not that it creates mood, but more that it reflects your own.”
More specifically, Cellophane Memories will take listeners through fairytale forests, mountain peaks, swimming holes, darkened bedrooms, and Lynch’s favourite “crepuscular highways” – “the sorts of sublime landscapes where people often travel alone in search of a wayward lover”, and which “immerse the traveller in the supernatural sensations of other worlds” – to grapple with the question: what is a mystery? We wouldn’t expect anything less.
Watch the new video for ‘The Answers to the Questions’ above.