All You're Waiting For: Nancy Whang's Favourite Albums | Page 5 of 14 | The Quietus

Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

4. Angelo BadalamentiSoundtrack from Twin Peaks

This has a similar story to Pixies and Beastie Boys in that it came out when I was in high school and me and all our friends totally lost our mind over it. We’d watch it every week and then the next day at school we’d confer and talk about what happened. Which is funny because so many of my conversations with my friends now are so similar. Especially now that you can binge-watch all of these TV shows and TV is just so good right now that it dominates all of our conversations. Especially with a show like True Detective which is kind of like a mystery and you talk about all the weird stuff, you theorise and come up with all these conspiracies. So it was like that with Twin Peaks and that was the first time that I ever had that relationship with a TV show. Then after that there wasn’t another TV show that I replaced it with. It was very specific to Twin Peaks. And it was filmed in the region I lived in, the Pacific Northwest, and me and all my friends connected with that and felt a little bit of ownership over that.

The music is really pretty and haunting. I actually bought the songbook so that I could learn how to play them. And I really like Julee Cruise, I thought her voice was really pretty.

[Nancy played ‘Twin Peaks Theme’ as an intro the LCD Soundsystem’s ‘New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down’ at their final show in 2011]

When we first started playing ‘New York I Love You…’, I was still trying to learn how to play it, and I don’t think I’ve ever played it the same twice. Even for the recording there was no music written for it. But then as I got more comfortable playing it I started doing different things with it. There’s this bit in the middle where it slows down, like the bridge, or the part before the big outro, where it slows down and I can hear other songs that could fit in there. The first song I played in that little interlude was ‘Empire State Of Mind’, then I got bored of that and started doing Brian Eno’s ‘By This River’, then we would even sing the whole of that song before going back into ‘New York I Love You…’ but my favourite is when I did ‘Twin Peaks’.

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