David Lynch Is Go

Outside of the fact that it exists at all, there's nothing too surprising about David Lynch's first solo electronic single, "Good Day Today." He's been at it forever, musically speaking. Lynch is strongly associated with the infernal exotica of his frequent and close collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, while his very first movie Eraserhead featured a painstakingly constructed and widely admired soundtrack by Lynch and Alan Splet that took Fats Waller and ground it into a stomach-churning backdrop of musique concrète. And of course, Eraserhead also had the lady behind the radiator singing "In Heaven, Everything is Fine."

In retrospect, it feels like Lynch's concentrated artistic DNA is revealed in that scene, with its queasy mix of the grotesque and something you might describe as hysterically saccharine. That peculiar binary appears again and again throughout his career. It's there in The Elephant Man's celestial vision of John Merrick's mother, in the goofily mechanical Robin that signals the re-emergence of "normalcy" in Blue Velvet, in Julee Cruise's sickly perfect voice in "Falling," or in the arrival of Glinda the Good Witch in Wild at Heart.

As per so much in the Lynch universe, "Good Day Today" offers an extremely banal sentiment in the shape of Lynch's heavily processed voice pleading to "send me an angel, save me," over a simple but buoyant electronic pulse. Modulating upwards, robo-Lynch goes on to declare, "I wanna have a good day today!" But there's something scratching under the surface; a suspicion supported by blasts of machine gun fire, or the explosive burst of metallic scraping at the very top of the track.

But it could also mean absolutely nothing. Maybe David Lynch is really just expressing a simple desire. Over at The Guardian, where the song is being hosted, it didn't take long for somebody to ask, "Would we care if it wasn’t David Lynch?" Another argues, "That's the point."

Personally, one listen was enough to get me thinking about how "Good Day Today" compliments the Lynch canon. And I think it contains a sly in-joke. The Guardian mentions a similarity to Crystal Castles, but surely the song's most obvious antecedent is Moby's Twin Peaks-sampling 1991 techno hit, "Go." Others might have missed that, but I wonder if we can say the same for Lynch?