Between Heaven and Earth: Alicia Witt on David Lynch, Grief, and the Album That Had to Come Out Now

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There’s a moment early in my conversation with Alicia Witt where she stops being an actress talking about a side project and just… becomes a person talking about someone she loved. That shift happens fast, and it doesn’t really let up for the rest of the hour.

Alicia was seven years old when David Lynch cast her in Dune. He brought her back for Twin Peaks, and again decades later for Twin Peaks: The Return. Over those years, a working relationship became something closer to family — she describes Lynch less as a mentor and more as a beloved uncle, a “revered family member” she felt proud to be summoned back to work with, again and again.

After Lynch’s passing last year, Alicia found herself with a new album taking shape — not a tribute record, she’s careful to say, but something that grew directly out of everything he taught her about how to live and love. The title, Between Heaven and Earth, came from producer Joe Henry, pulled from one of the songs on the record. Alicia told me it captures exactly where she feels Lynch exists now — present, but a little more distant than he was a year ago. It’s also the space she reaches in meditation, in dreaming, in the moments when the mind wanders outside the confines of the body. That’s where she says the purest connections happen.

One song in particular, “The Director,” came almost fully formed — words she believes were given to her, not written by her, in meditation after Lynch died. Turns of phrase, she said, that don’t even sound like the way she normally speaks.

We talked about how the album was made, too, which is its own kind of statement. Alicia and the band recorded live over four days in New York, mostly in single takes, with minimal overdubs. She wanted the imperfections left in — the moments where you can hear the band finding a part in real time, where she’s slightly off-mic because she’s moving with the music. In an era where anything can be smoothed over and cleaned up, she and Joe Henry went looking for a mixer who understood that the goal wasn’t perfection. It was aliveness.

There’s a lot more in the full conversation — how she uses acting roles to process what she can’t say out loud, why an entire childhood spent obsessed with Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald left her with a strange blind spot for 80s music, and her Dream Walk answer, which has nothing to do with Lynch and everything to do with Lucille Ball.

This is one of those episodes that stays with you after it ends. Give it a listen.

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Takin’ A Walk is produced by Buzz Knight Media Productions, in partnership with iHeartMedia. Selected episodes are archived in the permanent collection of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.