"Audrey's Dance" is an instrumental song by American composer Angelo Badalamenti for the television series Twin Peaks, appearing as the third track on the soundtrack album Soundtrack from Twin Peaks (1990). Like the rest of the soundtrack, it was produced by both Badalamenti and show creator David Lynch. "Audrey's Dance" first appeared in the show's pilot, aired on April 8, 1990. Named after the character Audrey Horne, the song was memorably featured in "Episode 2" when Audrey dances along to the jukebox in the Double R Diner.
"Audrey's Dance" has a cool jazz style with a distinctive "walking" bassline, rhythmic finger snaps, and drums played with brushes. The song shares stylistic elements and melodic motifs with other songs on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, and several variations and alternate arrangements of the song were used throughout the show's run. Despite its title, the song frequently accompanied characters other than Audrey, particularly Bobby Briggs. "Audrey's Dance" was reprised in a key scene from "Part 16" of the 2017 limited revival of Twin Peaks.
Composition
"Audrey's Dance" is a jazz song in the cool jazz style. The song has also been compared to lounge music. Royal S. Brown wrote that the song has "a kind of nacht swing style that simultaneously captures the good old days the town would like to live in and the queasy angst of the modern period it is stuck with," and called it "a perfect musical translation of a major facet of Lynch's vision."
Along with other jazz music in Twin Peaks, such as the song "Freshly Squeezed", "Audrey's Dance" is composed around a distinctive "walking" bassline, with a note on each beat. The bass descends and then ascends on a chromatic scale on an octave starting with C, accompanied by improvisation on other instruments rooted in the C blues scale.
Badalamenti wrote the song with multiple harmonic suspensions; in his words, "For this song, I got involved in the use of suspensions ... [which are] dissonant notes that work in chords that rub against the melody ... and create a nice tension, and sometimes you take that dissonance, resolve it, and go to another melody." For example, the song makes repeated use of a dissonant chord that the Australian writer and musician Clare Nina Norelli called "the Audrey chord": G–C–F♯.
The chord, used in the intro on a synthesized vibraphone, contains a tritone, a sinister-sounding musical interval historically associated with the devil. Further dissonance in the song comes from the big band-style brass instruments and clarinet, which build into a "near-deafening cacophony". According to Norelli, the cumulative effect of the song's unresolved harmonic elements is a "dreamscape" that is "not only dreamy but downright spooky, and it feels as if someone has been placed under some sort of nightmarish trance." "Audrey's Dance" borrows motifs from "Laura Palmer's Theme"—first sporadic melodies such as the "Dark Introduction" and the "Doom" motif, then an extended climactic use of the "Climb" motif, which is interrupted before returning to the "Doom" motif at the conclusion.
The percussion is marked by finger snapping and drumming with distinctive brushwork on a snare drum by Grady Tate. Kinny Landrum, who performed synthesizer for the Twin Peaks soundtrack, was inspired to add the snaps by the song "Cool" from the musical West Side Story. Landrum recognized Richard Beymer—who plays Benjamin Horne in Twin Peaks—from his role as Tony in the 1961 film version of West Side Story. Although Lynch and Badalamenti were initially reluctant to include the finger snaps, the choice proved to be fortuitous, and the show managed to include various moments of actors snapping their fingers in time to the music.
Related compositions and variations
The main version of "Audrey's Dance" appears on Soundtrack from Twin Peaks, released on September 11, 1990 by Warner Bros. A number of variations on the song appeared in Twin Peaks, including versions with different instrumental arrangements and speeds. There are also distinct songs based on "Audrey's Dance" like "Sneaky Audrey", a short musical cue that typically accompanied Audrey Horne's investigation. Many of these variations were released on the 2011 compilation The Twin Peaks Archive. An early demo version of the track, titled "Slow Cool Jazz", features a solo performance by Badalamenti on Rhodes piano.