“The whole idea of The Spirit Lamp was the flicker of recognition, or the flicker of that soft candlelight, of something beckoning you to a deeper awareness,” says Chrystabell, the mononymous vocalist who cherished a decades-long creative relationship with filmmaker David Lynch.
“And, hopefully, towards the idea of peace and love for humanity and love for yourself and” – her voice drops suddenly from its ethereal loftiness to a more pedestrian, self-deprecating tone. “All of that sounds so ridiculous and grand. And it is!”
The San Antonio native laughs into the phone and pauses. I can almost hear her leaning back to toss her long auburn hair from one chiseled cheekbone to another in her La Vernia duplex, a picture of alien grace in the esoteric normalcy of Lynch’s world. “I loved how David was never afraid to make these sweeping [intentions],” she says. “He literally wanted peace on Earth – it’s not just this cliche thing that you say – with every cell of his body. He wanted the world to know peace.”
The mystically attuned 47-year-old describes The Spirit Lamp as a musical devotional, a ceremony drawn from immense grief and a desire to honor her late mentor, who died last January at age 78. Onstage, Chrystabell revisits the dreamlike compositions she and Lynch created while veiled in 16mm film projections from experimental filmmaker David Gatten.
“I didn’t know when we were writing it that it would also be the music that would help get me through losing him, but that’s been the gift,” she says tearfully.
Chrystabell met Lynch when she was just 19, already a haunting beauty with an unearthly sensibility ripe for muse-making. She’d acted briefly in a kung fu movie and for several years she’d been singing with Austin cabaret collective 8 ½ Souvenirs, but meeting the Blue Velvet director opened new doors for her career. Lynch, she tells me, had just returned from a million-dollar meditation course with Maharishi, the creator of Transcendental Meditation™, which the filmmaker practiced deeply and taught to Chrystabell.
“The lyrics for ‘This Train’ came to him immediately after taking this course, and he said that coming home from that course, he was in love with everyone,” the singer recalls of the titular song from their first collaborative project, released in 2011. At the time, she wasn’t necessarily sure what to make of the surrealist, emotionally charged lyrics she’d vocally interpreted, nor the dazzling world of famous connections that accompanied Lynch.
“The first person to hear that song was Elizabeth Taylor,” she says, still astonished. “He really wanted to bring her the gift of meditation, and he thought that hearing this song might reach her heart.”
The relationship Chrystabell formed with Lynch, 30 years her senior, profoundly altered the course of the young Texan’s life, teaching her intuitive confidence and entangling her musical artistry with Lynch’s own. The pair would go on to release two more albums: 2016’s Something in the Nowhere, out shortly before Chrystabell appeared as FBI agent Tammy Preston Twin Peaks: The Return, and 2024’s Cellophane Memories.
Performing The Spirit Lamp, the chanteuse breathes life into iconic songs of the Twin Peaks universe – like “The World Spins,” originally performed by Lynch’s early muse Julee Cruise in a pivotal episode of Season 2. From the perspective of an established artist more than two decades into her career, she also revisits her own work with the director.
“I get to now have the experience of singing this song as the woman that I am now, with people who are drawn to have the experience to be there with me in that moment,” she says. “I’m this living intention for one aspect of what David really wanted to be in this life, which was a reflection for a deepening of awareness.”
Chrystabell presents The Spirit Lamp on Jan. 20 at Radio/East.
This article appears in January 16 • 2026.
