Flying Wig by Devendra Banhart
Flying Wig is an album of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio where Banhart was “constantly listening to The Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, modernist, city pop-adjacent and Eno-esque.
Banhart's eleventh record, it's the actualisation of a “precious friendship” with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Mexican Summer stable-mate Cate Le Bon — a coming together prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002 Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos — but never previously translated into the recording studio.
“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, and grief into praise,” - the product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit… if I’m going to cry, I wanna do it in my best dress.”
Tracklist
| 1. | Feeling | 6:19 |
| 2. | Fireflies | 4:52 |
| 3. | Nun | 3:29 |
| 4. | Sight Seer | 5:03 |
| 5. | Sirens | 4:29 |
| 6. | Charger | 4:19 |
| 7. | Flying Wig | 5:32 |
| 8. | Twin | 6:00 |
| 9. | May | 4:40 |
| 10. | The Party | 3:21 |
| 11. | The Rose (Bonus Track) | 6:41 |
Credits
License
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Singer/songwriter, poet, artist and actor who was born in Houston, TX, and moved with his mother to her native Caracas, Venezuela. The family relocated to Los Angeles during his teenage years; it was there that he learned to speak English, skateboard, and play music. Banhart first began to perform in public while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. Flying Wig - out September 22.