Chrystabell and an Eternal Love

Sublime Eternal Love is the newest single from long-time collaborators David Lynch and Chrystabell. The song is the final track on their forthcoming album Cellophane Memories—released on August 2, 2024 by Sacred Bones Records. Following their previous collaborations This Train (2011) and Somewhere in the Nowhere (2016), this album fuses Lynch’s improvized lyrics, recently rediscovered archival recordings by Angelo Badalamenti—the composer for Lynch’s films including Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and the theme song for Twin Peaks— and Chrystabell’s haunting vocals.

Film still: Sublime Eternal Love, 2024

The album was inspired by a vision Lynch had during a nighttime walk through a high forest, where from over the treetops he witnessed a bright light. Like a synesthetic transmutation, the light transformed into Chrystabell’s lilting voice and offered him a secret. The album is an ode to mystery, welcoming feelings of intuition and transcendence that cannot be contained in words. Like Lynch’s cinematographic style, the music video is an atmospheric void; from a pitch black background, three reflections of her porcelain cheekbones and bitten lips are illuminated and concealed by a flickering spotlight—a sublime, ominous echo emerging from a phantasmic chorus of Chrystabells. 

Film still: Sublime Eternal Love, 2024

In a piece of writing enumerating Lynch’s impact on her life and art, Chrystabell once explained that in the decades of working alongside him—and observing his unique compositional technique—she recognized that, “When my emotions are intense, he helps me use them to reach deeper, to seize the gold that shimmers and sparkles but is just beyond my grasp…David has confidence, not only in himself and his own talent, but also in me. And the fact that he has confidence in me inspires me, in turn, to be confident. It’s a spiral effect, and it lands us in a gold mine.”

Big Fish is a recurring series on David Lynch’s personal voyages into creative expression and transcendental meditation—centering collaborative, consciousness-based projects spanning art, film, music, and writing.