I suggest that 1977's Eraserhead, David Lynch's first movie, was not only his best work, but the most frightening film ever made. I watched it on DVD on a portable TV on my own, in the dark, and I almost died of fright. In a cinema it must be even more powerful.
My interest in The Lynch revived when the Twin Peaks revival series came out in 2017. We gradually noticed that almost every episode would end with a girl, or a band led by a girl, singing dreamily in the Roadhouse dive bar. It was powerful. As is my wont, I started to dig, and found a name: Johnny Jewel.
Johnny is a proponent of what some people call synthwave or synth-pop but is a sort of electrified Americana. The Chromatics appeared in that series and are a good example of this. When the Australian saxophonist Jorja Chalmers, now based in Margate, signed for his Italians Do It Better label, I took note. She is Bryan Ferry's go-to sax and keyboard player.
Johnny's music also includes something called noir disco, and in that arena I consider Pearl Charles to be the shizz. It's not quite disco. It is nothing like Abba. Sometimes she will use a fiddle. It is synthy pop, but with a darkness in the mood and in the lyrics. She is a spirit of the night. As is The Lynch. His contribution to film and TV is famous. What is his contribution to music?
“Art is not a hobby, it’s a necessity,” says Johnny Jewel. “I have an unquenchable thirst for sound and tone.”
Lynch and Johnny Jewel provide some of the solution to my own troubles. Why did I start writing seriously about Americana music in February? Why do I love Lynch? Why do I work so much? Three ego-based questions about me. The truth is that I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but I can start to see some connections.
This week I saw Pearl Charles in Hackney, East London, and managed to chat to her at the merch stand. Why was I there? She's not a roots or "big C" Country artist. Some of her older stuff might be, but this new Desert Queen album has the disco about it. Perhaps a little Sophie Ellis-Bextor but dark. Some if it is really dark, but Pearl lives in the desert at Joshua Tree, in the light. The only dark things about Pearl Charles are her hair and her mind.
London's Moth Club spoke to me. I mean the very fabric of the building. I was stunned. I walked off a quiet street into a working men's club in broad daylight but was transported, once inside, into David Lynch's Roadhouse at night with no windows. I sent a photo of the red stage with its gold backdrop and its vaulted ceiling decorated with gold glitter to Calmer Sounds and she immediately sent back a GIF of the Roadhouse. I was in Twin Peaks and it was a shock. And it linked Pearl's music back to David Lynch. Suddenly pennies / nickels started dropping.
A couple of hours later I was staring intently at Beyoncé fans at Marylebone. Those English cowgirls had just spent two hours watching the first night of the Cowboy Carter residency over in The Spurs stadium. I spend a lot of time at Marylebone Station after work. It is the end to every single one of my nights out in London, for better and worse. It was where I first listened to some unreleased demos by Cyrena Wages on April 29th, mouth agape. It was also where I was when the new Valley James single dropped at midnight on the night of 5th June 2025. Valley James is a phenomenon. Her very name conjures up the American West, as does the photo below.
But that photo does not represent my Valley James and not the one who dropped the single Electric Blue this week. She has gone all Richard Gere in a Pretty Women suit (with bright lipstick) this week. The song and the look today are much more David Lynch. I put the song on in the car on the way home. In a car, in the dark, I felt like I was taking part in a remake of Lost Highway. This is why I like these songs so much: they link me back to David Lynch, which takes me all the way back to when Twin Peaks was new, in 1990. In the UK it aired on BBC2 on October 23rd of that year. Our world changed that night.
Electric Blue by Valley James
I have seen all of Lynch's films now, including 1984's maligned Dune. I have read his books. I have his course on Masterclass. I am an aficionado. He was into AI and music and film and story. He was into Transcendental Meditation and something called Ayurvedic medicine. He spoke to me and millions of others. He developed a theme he called The Art Life. He developed that theme into a book and documentary.
The only thing I thought was unnecessary for Lynch was what killed him. The chain smoking. I admired almost everything else about him. I admired what he sacrificed for his art life, except his marriages. I felt perhaps he should not have married again. He married four different women and had a long-term relationship with Isabella Rossellini. He either did not realise, or did not care, that the true art life is not compatible with marriage in the traditional sense. A true artist belongs to you, the audience, and has to remain free of encumbrances.
A true artist will never have an office job, will never sit at home and play with the kids or do the ironing. They are the ones who forget to tie their shoelaces. They live on a different plane, some might say a different planet. These are the pure artists. The ones you know of. Picasso. Van Gogh. Proust. They were all damaged, as Johnny Jewel is damaged. When he was 17 he was kidnapped and held for 36 hours at gunpoint. Something like that happened to someone I used to work with in front of my eyes (none of us realised at the time) and I cannot imagine the effect on the mind.
Most of us have to inhabit reality and cannot call ourselves true artists. But for those times when we do show up, we engage with our process. Even if only for an hour a day, the rest of the world stops spinning for us. We go dark. Lynch said, and I have found this too, that for every 4 hours you spend sitting on your own in that room, you will do perhaps 1 hour of good work. This is why we despise interruption. We despise other noises off. We despise the internet and the cellphone and that bane of modern existence, the notification. The ping ping is death to art. It breaks the flow. When your flow breaks it takes a long time to get it back and sometimes it will not return that day. This is why we prefer the analogue over the digital, the manual typewriter or pencil over the laptop. Do not interrupt the artist at work.
These are all the reasons I am writing about music today. Because I loved Americana even before it was called Americana. Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles and Tom Petty are my childhood choices, even alongside The Beautiful South, which play a form of British Americana. This is why Rianne Downey loves them. She is the British Dolly Parton of Gen Z and was chosen by Paul Heaton to represent the female side of their sound.
What is best about roots music for me is the dark quality in the mood and in the words. It is night music, not afternoon music. It has that in common with jazz and sometimes Pearl Charles sounds like Emma Smith. Jazz is night music. Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music are of the night. I have always loved horror novels, ghost stories and fear. This combination is almost toxic. It is certainly addictive. You can have beauty singing about death. And if you can make a funny song about death, like Cyrena Wages or Chloe Kimes, then you have something that people with a certain sensibility will never be able to get enough of.
This, friends, is my answer. I have always been drawn to this music, for nearly half a century, but it was only on April 29th that I was given permission to write about it from the inside, as an expert and not just as a fan. My artistic side grew a little, and a domino effect began. I began to treat it more seriously. You might call it the butterfly effect. You might also say something else. You might just call it serendipity.
