In July, Devendra Banhart released Vast Ovoid, an EP of outtakes from his 2019 album Ma. He recently announced OLA: Devendra Banhart plays songs in the order they were written, a series of live concerts streaming every Wednesday. And now he’s back with an Amazon Original cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Franklin’s Tower” in honor of the 45th anniversary of the Dead’s album Blues For Allah. Listen to that and read Banhart’s statement about the cover below.

More than ever
I find myself
Fighting dread
With the dead…

We chose “Franklin’s Tower” for its opening line, one of my favorite opening lines of all time:
“In another time’s forgotten space
Your eyes looked through your mother’s face”

This is the gift of the Dead,

The paradox of personal universality…

Wisdom found at the end of a maze,

The bliss of unconditional love and acceptance…

There’s a Dead for everyone…

Through the pandemic, I go on daily immersions into Blues for Allah, marveling at Phillip Garris’s eerie and alluring cover art,
Help/Slip/Frank guiding me through the weird underworld that the day has become, & I feel at once remarkably insignificant and the most precious thing in the universe, A wave, held in the ocean of my mother’s eyes… a child dancing, rolling away the dew…
Knowing Help is indeed on the way…