Chrystabell

Whether performing on screen or in song, Chrystabell projects an ethereal magnetism that leaves ample room for her stylistic breadth. Though many recognize her as FBI Agent Tammy Preston from the third season of Twin Peaks, her musical partnership with the series’ director David Lynch stretches back to the hazy, twang-inflected 2011 release This Train. That collaboration sits alongside earlier work with the swing-revival outfit 8½ Souvenirs, the unsettling atmosphere of 2017’s We Dissolve, the dreamy post-punk of 2019’s Feels Like Love, and the luminous disco and synth-pop textures of 2022’s Midnight Star, each project illuminating another facet of her resonant voice. Their most recent joint effort, the 2024 album Cellophane Memories, finds both artists reaching a shared summit of surreal sensuality.

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Chrystabell entered a household already steeped in music: her mother, a working vocalist, and her father operated a local recording studio together. Early exposure to an array of styles nurtured an expansive palate that later informed her own output. Admiration for Jeff Buckley, Françoise Hardy, Fiona Apple, and Nina Simone prompted her to join the Texas swing-jazz group 8½ Souvenirs, with whom she issued Happy Feet in 1998 and Twisted Desire in 1999. She also spent time as featured vocalist for the M.A.S.S. Ensemble, a troupe that converts performance spaces into interactive instruments shared between players and listeners.

A mutual friend arranged her introduction to David Lynch in 1999. The immediate creative chemistry led them to begin writing together that same day in the studio. Chrystabell issued her debut solo statement, Bitter Pills & Delicacies, independently in 2010. The following year she moved to QQ5 and La Rose Noire Records for This Train, co-written and produced by Lynch, whose languid, heavily reverberant blues and jazz-rock leanings merged with her measured vocals and vivid lyricism. Reviewers widely praised the record, likening her singing to Goldfrapp’s formative work while noting the album’s meticulous sonic layering and narrative detail.

In 2015 she joined Lykke Li, Moby, the Flaming Lips, Zola Jesus, and Duran Duran onstage in Los Angeles for a David Lynch Foundation benefit concert honoring the director’s career. The duo reconvened for the 2016 EP Somewhere in the Nowhere, which retained the earlier sonic palette yet introduced sharper electronic rhythms and a darker tone. The next year brought her third full-length, We Dissolve, recorded with Adrian Utley of Portishead, Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))), and producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels, Sparklehorse). That release veered sharply from her Lynch collaborations, folding in soul, jazz, alt-rock, trip-hop, and dub. While pursuing these varied projects she also made her first major screen appearance as FBI Agent Tammy Preston in the 2017 season of Twin Peaks.

She continued her departure from dream-pop with the Kate Bush- and Eurythmics-tinged reveries of 2019’s Feels Like Love. After the 2021 reissue of Bitter Pills & Delicacies she joined Nouvelle Vague co-founder Marc Collin for Strange As Angels, a collection reinterpreting songs by the Cure, then explored science-fiction disco on 2022’s Midnight Star. Chrystabell returned to Lynch’s Asymmetrical Studio for Cellophane Memories, released in July 2024; Lynch produced while she engineered, their year-long process yielding torch songs whose experimental edits impart a hallucinatory quality.