Her 2011 song Betty Blue is a tribute to Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia. Just as in Lynch’s films, the sadness Del Rio channels for her songwriting derives from broken dreams, grief and strife in cities associated with the American dream. “And after all that, he used the first take.” And again.” She can no longer remember how many times she did it, but she does recall the massive bruising on her thigh. “So I did it again, and this time it wasn’t as natural. “David said: ‘Now I want you to do that one more time – try to close your legs a little,’” Del Rio recalls. The scene could have been filmed in one take, but, at the fainting moment when the vocal track plays on, she inadvertently exposed her underwear. When shooting the scene at the fictional Club Silencio, Lynch used the recording of the impromptu session they had done at his house, but Del Rio also sang live with the mic turned off to better convey the lungbusting effort of her vocals. “I was absolutely unaware he was recording,” she says. The whole meeting took less than half an hour. She had coffee with Lynch at his home he asked if she wanted to get into his recording booth, where, he boasted, he had a rare Telefunken tube microphone. Lynch shared an agent, and the director was persuaded to meet her. She enlisted singer-songwriter Thania Sanz to provide a translation, and it became Llorando, the version in Mulholland Drive.īefore she worked with Lynch, Del Rio had only ever had a hit in the Netherlands – with the title track of her first album, Nobody’s Angel, which reached No 2 in 1994. Del Rio was devastated, so a friend of hers suggested she sing Crying in Spanish. Then, in 1995, the Latin pop singer Selena was killed by her former fan club president. “I would sing it a cappella because, oftentimes, the band would have a hard time with some of the chord changes,” she says.
In the early 90s, she was a country singer, and Crying was part of her repertoire. Alongside the late Julee Cruise, Del Rio is Lynch’s chief musical muse, but her relationship to Crying long predates her artistic relationship with the director.ĭel Rio is 54 and of Mexican, Italian and Sephardic heritage.
“My voice lends itself to that sadness because I carry a lot of that grief inside,” she says, as she finishes the North American leg of her No Hay Banda tour, a continued celebration of Mulholland Drive’s 20th anniversary.
#Songs in mulholland drive professional
In her own life, Del Rio has faced professional disappointment, homelessness and the pain of losing a child.
Del Rio appears to be singing live, but her voice carries on playing even after she has fallen to the floor in a faint: a metaphor for the deceptiveness of Hollywood and its indifference to suffering. No matter your personal theory about Mulholland Drive – is the plot a Möbius strip with no beginning or end? – the scene at Club Silencio is the crux of the film. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, she plays the sorrowful singer La Llorona de Los Angeles, who appears in a pivotal scene with a heart-rending Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s ballad Crying. This is no surprise, given the way most of us were introduced to her. “I am sort of an emo – I love Morrissey,” admits Rebekah Del Rio.
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