I’ll Hear You in Twenty-Five Years: Sonic Identifications in Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

At the opening of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, the man we now know as The Fireman famously tells Agent Cooper to “listen to the sounds.” But to what sounds is he supposed to be listening? Unlike its two-season predecessor, which contained a plethora of music throughout each episode, Twin Peaks: The Return is sparse as music goes. Other than each part’s closing scene in The Roadhouse that features diegetic music performed by (mostly) well-known artists, Angelo Badalamenti’s non-diegetic music cues are much less pervasive than in the first two seasons. However, they are much more present, serving to highlight the emotional underpinning which they are underscoring. As such, they have a greater sense of musical development than Badalamenti’s cues for the first two seasons. I argue that Badalamenti’s cues, which are much longer in The Return, are placed at emotionally wrought moments that intend to emphasize the pure emotion, which is also crucial to the plot and its development. This chapter will do two things: to compare the re-use of cues from the first two seasons of Twin Peaks in The Return and to describe how both the music from the first two seasons and that unique to The Return, highlights emotional underpinning in their respective episodes, consistent with the use and expansion of music in and after the new “Golden Age.” Through this comparison, and an examination of previously published and unpublished interviews with Angelo Badalamenti and Dean Hurley, we can understand the trajectory of music composition and use/re-use of music as a storytelling and narrative device that particularly emphasizes emotion, a hallmark of television music in this new “Golden Age.”