Rebekah Del Rio, the songwriter and powerhouse vocalist who sang “Llorando” during the unforgettable Club Silencio scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, has died. Variety confirmed Del Rio’s death through the Los Angeles coroner’s office, stating that the artist died on Monday, June 23, at her home in Los Angeles. A cause of death has not yet been revealed. Del Rio was 57.
Del Rio’s stirring rendition of “Llorando” is often considered the emotional crest of Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. “Llorando”—a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s operatic ballad “Crying”—appears late in the film, as Naomi Watts and Laura Harring’s characters sit in the cavernous, crimson-draped Club Silencio, weeping while Del Rio belts the lyrics a cappella. As the song continues, Del Rio faints on stage, revealing that her charged performance was merely an impassioned lip sync.
Rebekah Del Rio, who was of Mexican, Italian, and Sephardic heritage, grew up in San Diego and worked as a country singer in the years prior to meeting David Lynch. Roy Orbison’s “Crying” had been part of her repertoire since the early 1990s, and she often performed it without instrumentation. “I would sing it a cappella because, oftentimes, the band would have a hard time with some of the chord changes,” Del Rio told The Guardian in 2022. She decided to record a Spanish-language version of the song after the 1995 murder of Tejano pop queen Selena, which devastated Del Rio and the star’s devoted Hispanic fanbase.
Del Rio was living in Nashville, writing and recording country western music when she got a call from her agent, who wanted to introduce her to David Lynch on her next trip to Los Angeles. During a meeting at Lynch’s home studio, the director asked her to sing “Llorando” on the spot and secretly recorded the impromptu performance. Del Rio reflected on the whirlwind meeting in a 2018 interview, remembering that the whole thing only lasted the length of “one and a half songs, two cigarettes, a cup of coffee,” and that the director praised her singing with a classic Lynchism: “David says to me, ‘Ding dang, Rebekah Del Rio, that was aces.’”
During the filming of Mulholland Drive, Lynch asked Del Rio simply to mouth along to a backing track of “Llorando,” but the singer was too committed to the physical expression of singing to fake it. “I say, ‘I can’t do that, I can’t mouth my own track. No! You won’t get the vibrato, I’m singing along,’” she recalled in 2018. Instead, she sang every take directly to Laura Harring and Naomi Watts, so they could experience it live during the shoot.
Lynch enlisted Del Rio once more in 2017, as a performer at the fictional Bang Bang Bar in Twin Peaks: The Return. She shared the stage with Moby, who played guitar as she sang “No Stars” from her 2011 album, Love Hurts Love Heals. (The song was based on a chicken-scratch poem Lynch handed her during one of their meetings.) “Llorando” appeared on Del Rio’s 2003 LP, All My Life – Toda Mi Vida. In 2022, Del Rio joined the No Hay Banda Tour, a celebration of Mulholland Drive’s 20th anniversary.
Like late singer Julee Cruise, Del Rio’s voice is inextricable from the uncanny world of Lynch’s films. “My voice lends itself to that sadness because I carry a lot of that grief inside,” Del Rio told The Guardian. Del Rio lost her son to cancer in 2009, and began performing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to honor him. “I get lost in the music and the sound and the feeling,” she said of singing Cohen’s beloved ballad. “I feel like I’m in a trance, and we’re all on the same ride together.”
