David Lynch has described an aborted plan to collaborate with Kanye West, confessing that they had to call off the project when Lynch failed to “come up with any [good] ideas”.
“I feel I let [Kanye] down a little bit,” Lynch revealed to the Daily Beast. The doomed initiative likely took place last year, after Lynch told the LA Times he “loved” West’s song Blood on the Leaves. Lynch also praised Yeezus’s overall “minimalism”, in a chat with Rolling Stone: “A minimal thing, it doesn’t hurt the mind,” he said, “and the mind can soar.”
“Blood on the Leaves is one of my favourite songs,” Lynch explained this week. “I was going to do the music video for [it] ... Kanye came up to the house one day. [He’s] a good guy, and a great musician. I loved the song, and that’s what brought us together, but I couldn’t come up with ideas that thrilled either one of us.”
Lynch underlined that he was the problem, not West, returning again and again to the problem of a concept. “I never got the ideas,” he said. “I didn’t come up with any ideas that I thought he would like.” The 68-year-old rarely works on music videos: apart from clips for his own songs, Lynch has only directed five music videos in the past 30 years.
Despite the absence of a mutual creative spark, Lynch still admires West’s work. “He’s just riding the wave and not taking no for an answer,” he said. West never found anyone else to direct Blood on the Leaves; Yeezus’s two music videos, for Black Skinhead and Bound 2, were both directed by the English photographer Nick Knight.
