Blue velvet
But in my heart there’ll always be
Shadows fall so blue
as lonely as a blue, blue star
Forty years after David Lynch’s Blue Velvet entered American theatres and permanently changed the emotional temperature of a certain shade of blue, New York’s Fuck You, Tammy! have returned to the song at the center of David Lynch’s film and stripped it to piano, voice, and a small amount of psychological unease. The group, which calls itself “The Band From Another Place,” has spent nearly a decade interpreting music from Twin Peaks and the wider Lynch universe, yet Blue Velvet/Blue Star feels less like repertory than an invitation to sit uncomfortably close.
Lead singer Devery Doleman and keyboardist Bill Ferullo leave enormous amounts of room around each other. Ferullo’s piano has the polished gravity of an empty hotel ballroom, while Doleman sings with the poise of someone maintaining composure under circumstances that may soon make composure impossible. The simplicity sharpens every hesitation and breath, giving Bobby Vinton’s old standard a private, almost ceremonial quality without burying its sweetness.
“Our version of Blue Velvet/Blue Star is only piano and voice – we kept it intimate and haunting, to have you feel like you were in a room with only a grand piano, voice, and your own longing,” they say.
Director ioiulex follows the song down its own peculiar rabbit hole, placing Doleman and Ferullo inside a black-and-white nightclub that seems caught between cabaret and footage recovered from a forgotten studio vault. The image drifts in and out of focus as exposures flare, figures double across the frame, and the performers gradually lose their apparent command of their own bodies. What begins with the formal elegance of an old MGM audition slowly takes on the logic of a troubling dream, with sound and image slipping out of alignment as hands begin to itch, gestures repeat at odd intervals, and bodies bend backward into poses that turn the song’s romantic reverie into something strange and faintly dangerous.
“The video…is an example of an archetypically Lynchian switch, where an innocent, lyrical interpretation of a standard becomes dangerous and unsettling. For the video we landed Bill and Devery in a nightclub scene within Isabella Rossellini and Angelo Badalamenti’s shoes. We filmed them in a film noir black and white, sometimes in high contrast, sometimes with a scratched lost footage quality, doubling over, in and out of focus, under and over exposed.”
Watch below:
Fuck You, Tammy! began in 2017, when Doleman, bassist and vocalist Julie Rozansky, and drummer Nate Smith assembled musicians for a Halloween performance of Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti material while Twin Peaks: The Return was airing. What began as an occasion became a working band, eventually adding Ferullo, guitarist and vocalist Blaise Dahl, and saxophonist and guitarist Anthony Cekay.
Their description of themselves as something resembling “Grace Zabriskie fronting Roxy Music” remains wonderfully suggestive. Across dream-pop, post-punk, art rock, and Lynchian pop archaeology, these songs survive because beauty and menace can occupy the same room without resolving their differences. With an album of covers and originals planned for 2027, Blue Velvet/ Blue Star finds them standing confidently inside that uneasy room, listening closely as the walls begin to move.
Listen to Blue Velvet/Blue Star below and order the track here.
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