I first heard this song (or first really heard it, that is, you know, as if for the very first time) on a bedtime playlist, or what was intended to be a bedtime playlist. My then-new streaming service helpfully kept adding songs to the mix so it played all night (later I figured out how to prevent that because I can’t sleep this way every night). I woke at 3 or 4 with this song playing, Rebekah Del Rio’s clarion, mellow, quasi-operatic vocal piercing the night and my sleep, with an aural vision of a lonesome universe and no stars in the sky. No stars, no stars. Never mind I live somewhere with cloud cover replicating that most nights. Del Rio’s vocal feels every ounce of that loneliness unto desolation in a universe with no light anymore, all winked out, especially when you wake up and don’t know what’s going on. She wrote this song with David Lynch and John Neff in 2001 and recorded it for her 2011 album Love Hurts Love Heals. It was used in the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017. Much like Del Rio’s appearance in Mulholland Dr. the sense of tragedy is at once affecting and slightly ridiculous. It is almost too deep, like a well that takes too long for the stone to hit something. It feels, in “No Stars,” as if the singer has spent a lifetime enduring pain and feeling love. They don’t cancel each other out but rather deepen the experience of both. The pain is palpable, on the long notes especially, which she can hold for a long time, but her love is equally profound, and you know from the grain that it is constant.
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