The sky is still blue
The clouds come and go
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?
Fuck You, Tammy! take their name from a line in Twin Peaks: The Return, and the joke lands exactly where it should: halfway between fan devotion, deadpan absurdity, and the kind of emotional volatility that makes Lynch’s world feel like a soap opera conducted during a gas leak. Their version of Falling, the second single from the Sycamore Trees EP, takes the Julee Cruise classic out of its blue velvet trance and puts it on its feet, blindfolded, grinning, slightly overmedicated, and ready to dance through a therapy session nobody’s insurance would cover.
Falling is the kind of cover that knows reverence can become taxidermy if nobody kicks the rhythm section awake. FYT! keep the ache of the original, but they lace it with a propulsive backing track, a looping snare, and a saxophone that appears to have escaped from a jazz club inside someone’s nightmare. It carries a little of Luscious Jackson’s Naked Eye in its groove, a little of Bowie’s late-career fever in its brass-battered urgency, and a great big gob of Lynchian wrongness smeared across the mirror.
Michael Leviton’s video understands the assignment, then eats the assignment with a fork and a nice slice of cherry pie. A Woman In Trouble seeks help for romantic obsession and finds herself trapped inside a therapy cult where erotic treatment methods make standard psychoanalysis look like a DMV appointment.
“To direct a Lynchian video, I tried to inhabit a Lynch-like mental state less literal than my usual and let images come to me without really knowing what they mean,” says Leviton. “Before I started directing music videos, I was a writer, so I think in terms of story. In my younger life, I preferred the Lynch movies that made the most sense story-wise like The Elephant Man, Twin Peaks, and Blue Velvet. But since then, I’ve become more excited about the stuff that I love without understanding it, like Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: The Return, Mulholland Drive. So, for this video, I began with images. First, I envisioned a woman on a therapy couch shot from above, dancing while talking to her therapist. I ran with this idea. Therapy is always on my mind because I was raised around a lot of therapy that’s considered rather extreme and cult-like. It wasn’t out of character for me to imagine a “therapy cult” that uses unconventional methods like making patients dance blindfolded. I saw weirder stuff in real life when I was a teenager.”
That looseness pays off: bodies dance blindfolded, desire mutates into diagnosis, and everyone looks far too attractive to be trusted with your emotional recovery.
Frontwoman and bandleader Devery Doleman describes the video as “Lynchian in the purest way – erotic, surreal, with elements of noir, horror and comedy. “It was important to me to cast the entire band, and everyone gives a great performance and is fully committed, slightly unhinged, funny, and very hot.”
Watch the video
What began in 2017 as a Halloween tribute to the music of Twin Peaks has become a full-time séance for the David Lynch Extended Cinematic Universe, with Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and the rest of the red-curtained canon folded into the act like evidence in a very glamorous police file. Devery Doleman, Julie Rozansky, Nate Smith, Bill Ferullo, Blaise Dahl, and Anthony Cekay play these songs with the devotion of fans and the nerve of burglars, sneaking into sacred rooms and rearranging the furniture before Gordon Cole can shout about it.
Listen to Falling below and order the single here.
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