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4. Roy Orbison: “In Dreams”
The most unforgettable musical scene in “Blue Velvet,” though, starts with a song request from the monstrous Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper): “The candy-colored clown they call the sandman.” With his face illuminated from below by a mechanic’s work light doubling as a microphone, Dean Stockwell’s character Ben lip-syncs this Roy Orbison classic as Lynch draws out the hidden menace in lyrics that read as romance: “In dreams, you’re mine.” (Orbison’s music also figures into 2001’s “Mulholland Drive,” with Rebekah del Rio performing a Spanish-language cover of “Crying” in a climactic scene.)
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5. “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)”
In “Eraserhead,” the Lady in the Radiator appears to Henry, the film’s shock-haired protagonist, and performs this tune on a tiny stage inside, you guessed it, his radiator. The songwriter Peter Ivers co-wrote “In Heaven” with Lynch and released his own version later, and the track has drawn as much of a cult following as the movie: I heard the cover version by Pixies long before I had actually seen “Eraserhead.”
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6. Chris Isaak: “Wicked Game”
Chris Isaak’s update of Orbison’s high lonesome croon and Elvis Presley’s low growl fit perfectly in Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), a violent romance featuring Laura Dern and an Elvis-obsessed, snakeskin-jacket-wearing Nicolas Cage as lovers on the run.
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7. Jimmy Scott: “Sycamore Trees”
Lynch tapped Jimmy Scott, a jazz singer with a high, ghostly voice, for a key scene in the final episode of “Twin Peaks” in 1991. Agent Cooper enters the otherworldly Red Room and watches Scott sing “Sycamore Trees,” a mournful ballad written by Lynch and Badalamenti.
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8. Rammstein: “Rammstein”
One of Lynch’s seemingly more incongruous musical enthusiasms was for industrial hard rock verging on metal, used most prominently in his 1997 film “Lost Highway.” Alongside tracks by Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, this pummeling song by the infamous German band Rammstein contributed to the movie’s sinister undercurrent.
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9. Beck: “Black Tambourine”
Beck’s album “Guero” (2005) includes this groovy shuffle that plays underneath Dern’s Hollywood breakdown in “Inland Empire,” Lynch’s experimental (even for him) 2006 feature.
