Hollie Fullbrook of Tiny Ruins on when David Lynch produced her 2016 single Dream Wave.
We sat under a flickering fluorescent light in the empty staffroom, my colleague Simon and I. It was 2013, and I was working the late shift at Auckland Central Library. On our 15-minute tea break, we were discussing music and the frustrations of trying to make it. Broke and somewhat disillusioned by it all, I was scrabbling about in a creative rut.
“Maybe you should try transcendental meditation ‒ it works for David Lynch,” said Simon. Ahhh, Lynch. I had watched Mulholland Drive when sick and home from school as a teenager, enthralled and alone in my parents’ lounge. Then there was Twin Peaks, the DVDs following one after the other over a weekend with my friend Matthew, when we were 21. And I’d loved the audiobook of him reading Catching the Big Fish, his autobiography about meditation and creative thought. It had arrived as illegally downloaded audio files emailed between friends, like an invitation to a secret club. Yes, perhaps I should give TM a go. We returned to stacking shelves. That night, I walked back to my flat in the darkness, listening to demos.
The next morning, Simon messaged me, incredulous. David Lynch had sent out a tweet overnight, something about how he’d found a band he liked called Tiny Ruins. Our obscure Auckland folk band was suddenly bathed in gold Lynchian light.
Fast forward a year, to September 2014, and I was in a taxi, winding upwards into the Hollywood hills. The little map I clutched in my sweaty hand began zeroing in on Mulholland Drive. I was otherwise tour-emptied, floating and slightly delirious. I had stayed up late the previous night in my motel watching Blue Velvet. Ten days before, with my bandmates Cass and Alex, I was nearing the end of our first, somewhat-disastrous, tour of North America, often playing to a mere handful of people, and once to no one at all. After the show in Boston, a kind person had offered us a place to crash. We had our foam mats and sleeping bags ready for this eventuality. I awoke to the sound of our host cooking pancakes.
Sleepily opening my emails, I saw I’d received one from Ella Yelich O’Connor [aka Lorde]. Curating the Hunger Games soundtrack, she had untold powers in facilitating collaborations. She knew David Lynch was a fan; did I have any unrecorded demos? Whether the song made it onto the soundtrack didn’t particularly seem to matter – she was saying, hey, this is your chance. It was such a generous thing to do.
In the tour van later that day, encouraged by a beautiful bear on the forested edge of the highway, I sent a demo of Dream Wave – a song inspired by Auckland’s west coast beaches. Six nerve-wracking days went by before I received word that I was to fly to LA in two days’ time. I began corresponding with David’s music and sound producer, Dean Hurley.
So, there I was, entering a concrete, modernist bunker, my heart thumping. David emerged from the darkness of the cinema seats. He wore a suit, his hair immaculate. He shook my hand warmly, putting me at ease, and ushered me to the kitchen, where he made us coffee, “This is what I call an Americano,” he said.
We walked back to the cinema seats. Dean – scarcely older than me, with a shock of silver hair similar to David’s – was setting up the studio gear below the big screen. David recounted how he had stumbled across me on YouTube the previous year, singing Carriages for a radio session in Sydney. “Sweet Mary Louise! One day I’m watching you on the screen, and now you’re here,” he exclaimed.
As we talked, there was no pretence. His candour was disarming. I felt I could tell him anything, but it had to be true. I sensed how busy he was, how many plates he was probably juggling in the air. And yet there was a quietness and a curiosity – he wanted to know so much – about the tour, New Zealand, me.
“So what might this recording be used for?” he asked. “Erm, it’s for the Hunger Games soundtrack, potentially,” I said. He smiled ever so slightly. “The only thing I know about hunger games is right around lunchtime.”
We got to work on the song. To the side of the cinema was a small booth. I squeezed in with my guitar, while David sat before me through the glass, quite close. I could hear his voice through my headphones. He wanted to keep our recording as near to the demo as possible. The atmosphere was intense. David looked directly at me and spoke firmly, as if calming a skittish horse. “Imagine, when you do this next take, that your friend – a very close friend – has died.” As I did another take or two, David expanded upon this “vision” more and more. He wanted me to feel deeply sad, and I did. When I hear the song now, I still feel it.
David instructed Dean to add some ambient atmospherics. Then percussion, and a synth bass line. It was in the making of the music, the doing of it, that he became much more animated.
Later, David showed me miniature paintings he had hidden inside dozens of motel matchbooks. They were being categorised and numbered for an exhibition. Then he showed me his eerie lamp sculptures – sparse figurative sentinels. As we talked over lunch, David revealed that a close friend and member of their team had died the previous week.
I returned the next day to listen to the song on the huge sound system. Before I left, David said he wanted to show me a short film he loved. I sat beside him while he called to Dean to turn up the volume until we were enveloped in sound. On screen, in chiaroscuro black and white, was a single, shaky hand-held take creeping towards Neil Young performing Love and War. It’s five minutes and 40 seconds I’ve often returned to in my mind.
Upon hearing of Lynch’s death, I messaged Simon, “Remember that crazy morning? After our chat?” “Of course,” he replied, “Burnt into my brain.”
Finn Andrews of The Veils on when the band guest-starred in the 2017 revival of Lynch’s landmark television show Twin Peaks.
My time in the orbit of the great David Lynch was brief, but it left an indelible impression on me. The first of these two instances was the time The Veils were invited up to David’s house in LA to record a song for our new record, Total Depravity. He lived up in the Hollywood Hills and I had to drive along Mulholland Drive to get there, which of course felt pretty surreal. When I arrived, I realised that the house he lived in was the same house where they filmed Lost Highway, and I suppose it was here that the border between dreams and reality first started to fray.
Dean Hurley recorded us in David’s cinema room and put Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on the projector while we were tracking the song. I remember being left alone at one point and seeing an enormous filing cabinet in the corner of one of the rooms that David was using to organise his various paintings and sketches. The spine of one of the cabinet drawers read simply “SNOWMEN ON FIRE”. I love that there were so many of them they required their own dedicated drawer. The song we recorded in that house is called In the Nightfall, and it is utterly infused with that experience in my mind.
The second instance occurred a year or so later when we got a call saying David would like us to appear in the new series of Twin Peaks. It was a great phone call to receive, obviously, and I immediately called our bass player Soph to tell her the news. When we were 14, she and I had gone to Videon on Auckland’s Dominion Rd together and rented out the first two Twin Peaks series on VHS. It was one of the foundational activities we did as friends at high school, which made the fact we were about to walk through the television and actually be in it even more surreal.
When it came time to film the episode, she and I were driving around Pasadena trying to find the location and we got hideously lost. It was then we realised that almost everywhere in Los Angeles looks like a potential David Lynch film location if you squint hard enough, and it wasn’t until we saw a disused school hall with its windows covered in black tarp billowing out like great bat wings that we knew we were in the right place.
That day filming Twin Peaks was such a sincere joy and remains one of the most precious memories of being in this band. Getting to be directed by David was a delight, and there was such a fun atmosphere on the set. I remember David shouting action and Nine Inch Nails watching us from the balcony above head-banging along to our song and thinking, “You know what, life feels pretty damn great right now.”
David saw something in our band, and that is tremendously invigorating to this day. I feel deeply honoured to have been given the opportunity to walk through the screen into the glorious, surreal, and utterly incomparable world of David Lynch.
Peak attractions
Tiny Ruins and The Veils may have enjoyed the patronage of David Lynch, but his films and music left their mark on a generation or two of New Zealand musicians he never met.
Auckland band The Able Tasmans, which released four albums on the Flying Nun label from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, occasionally covered In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song), from Lynch’s confounding 1977 debut feature Eraserhead, in their live performances, with bassist Jane Dodd taking on lead vocals.
On one of their early recordings, electronic music pioneers Strawpeople sampled the opening notes of the Twin Peaks theme, Lynch’s groundbreaking 1990-91 TV series.
But the boldest declaration of admiration for all things “Lynchian” has come in recent years from Princess Chelsea, whose cinematic songs of lost-innocence sweetness and dreamy weirdness have plenty in common with Lynch’s sensibilities.
On her 2023 Taite Music Prize-winning album Everything Is Going to Be Alright she covered In Heaven. It was in the set last August when she and her band performed Twin Peaks-themed shows in Auckland and New Plymouth. So, too, were covers of Floating into the Night and Falling, originally by Julee Cruise, the ethereal singer best-known for her collaborations with Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti during the Twin Peaks era.
Princess Chelsea performed dressed as the show’s FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper to audiences in Twin Peaks fancy dress. In Auckland, that included a human-sized slice of cherry pie and a living, plastic-wrapped incarnation of the show’s murdered cheerleader, Laura Palmer.
