David Lynch called Philadelphia one of ‘the sickest, most corrupt, fear-ridden’ cities. That’s what makes it Lynchian.

When filmmaker David Lynch moved to Philadelphia in 1965, to attend the erstwhile Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, he was instantly moved by the city. Though not exactly charmed.

The city’s crime, corruption, and urban blight impressed themselves on the young artist’s mind and lent to his uncanny vision combining the sinister and the absurd. The Twin Peaks creator, however, only spent a short time living in the city.

By 1970, he had decamped to Los Angeles, to study at the American Film Institute, and work on his first feature, the cult classic Eraserhead.

But Lynch’s relatively abridged tenure as a Philadelphian has had an outsized impact. Consider him the Terrell Owens of Philly weirdo transplant artists.

In the year since his passing, retrospectives of his films have dominated programming at Philadelphia rep cinemas and art houses, Callowhill (where Lynch used to live and work) got a makeover as “Eraserhood,” and the neighborhood’s Love City Brewing’s hazy “Eraserhood IPA” grew in popularity.

Now, a new podcast is digging deeper into Lynch’s influence on Philadelphia, exploring the extent to which the city impressed itself upon his life and work — from PAFA to Hollywood, to the soapy subterfuges of the Twin Peaks universe.

Launching Jan. 15 (the first anniversary of the filmmaker’s passing), Song of Lynchadelphia explores, in the words of host Julien Suaudeau, “the encounter of the 1950s American innocence with a place where the dream had already, and very concretely, turned into a nightmare.”

For Suaudeau, a writer and scholar who teaches film at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia served as a creative catalyst for Lynch. Many great cities inspire, whether in their beauty, their scale, or deep history. Philadelphia, which Lynch called “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists” enamored the filmmaker with its crime and filth in the mid-1960s.

“He was traumatized by Philly,” Suaudeau said, over drinks at Love City Brewing. “And he turned that trauma into art; something both beautiful and strange.”

A Parisian native who moved to the region to teach, Suaudeau felt drawn to Philadelphia, and to Lynch, early in life. As an adolescent living in France, he responded to the anxious, hysterical, at-times deeply disturbing depiction of teenage life offered by Twin Peaks.

At the same time, he fell in love with the ‘70s Philly Soul sound, and admired (then) 76er Charles Barkley. (Suaudeau played power forward in high school and, like Barkley, was also considered undersized.)

“I didn’t know about Lynch’s foundational years in Philly,” he said, “but that convergence feels so meaningful to me today.”

Song of Lynchadelphia grows out of Song of Philadelphia, a podcast produced by the local public history project Hidden City, which curates the “Eraserhood Tours” in Calowhill.

The new series explores the city’s secret stories but through a distinctly warped Lynchian lens.

The first episode looks into Lynch’s rather despairing comments on the Philadelphia of his artistic adolescence; a place of “insanity” possessed by a “beautiful mood.” Through interviews with local fans, historians, and Lynch’s collaborators (including production designer Jack Fisk, one of Lynch’s longtime collaborators, and a PAFA classmate), archival clips, and distinctly Lynchian soundscapes, Suaudeau guides the listener through Lynch’s relationship with the city.

“We’re always interested in origins, especially among creative people,” said author and Hidden City co-founder Nathaniel Popkin, who serves as Song of Lynchadelphia’s supervising producer. “There is a darkness that is particularly important [in Philadelphia]. It was a place imagined to have brought light in the 18th century. And it got dark, real fast.”

A historian interviewed in the series’ first episode cites deindustrialization, white flight, racism, rioting, and rising crime as sources of that creeping darkness.

This curdling of the so-called American Dream, so key to Lynch’s filmography, also defines Philadelphia in the period of the director’s artistic awakening. Popkin notes Lynch was living in Philly around the same time as Ira Einhorn, the rabble-rousing environmental activist who was arrested after his former girlfriend’s remains were found decomposing in a suitcase in his closet.

Einhorn would claim he was set up by the CIA, because he knew too much about their top secret paranormal mind-control experiments; a defense that could be ripped from a Twin Peaks episode.

This very “Philly” feeling of weirdness and unease, Suaudeau said, permeates Lynch’s work, well beyond the early shorts he made here.

A character in Twin Peaks calling a cadaver a “smiling bag” dates back to a late-night tour a young Lynch took of a Philadelphia morgue. Visions of soot-covered buildings reveal themselves, decades later, in a particularly nightmarish encounter in Mulholland Drive. Laura Dern’s hard-drinking, no-nonsense character Dianne in The Return lives in Philly and, as Suaudeau puts it, “is the kind of person you would meet in a Philadelphia bar.”

In Twin Peaks, specifically, Suaudeau believes that Lynch reveals the city as a kind of dreamscape. In the series and accompanying 1992 feature film, Lynch casts himself as a good-natured (and doornail-deaf) FBI director, operating out of the bureau’s Philadelphia offices.

“Philadelphia is the head space of the director,” Suaudeau said. “It’s the room to dream.”

The idea of Philadelphia as a great American city, once shining like a beacon-on-the-hill, that had gone to seed by the time of Lynch’s arrival, is itself Lynchian. A metropolis perched on the porous boundary between dream and nightmare.

“He’s interested in crawling beneath the veneer, beneath the surface,” Suaudeau said. “It’s a mood, it’s an atmosphere, it’s an aura in his work.”

“Song of Lynchadelphia” launches on Jan. 15. A tie-in event with a screening of “Eraserhead” followed by a talk-back with Julien Suaudeau is planned for Feb. 21, Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Avenue, Bryn Mawr. brynmawrfilm.org