Devendra Banhart has released an Amazon Original cover of The Grateful Dead’s “Franklin’s Tower,” available to stream and purchase only on Amazon Music and can be heard below Banhart’s cover is released in honor of the 45th anniversary of The Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah. The song was produced and mixed by Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Marlon Williams) and recorded with his current touring band consisting of Nicole Lawrence (guitar), Jeremy Harris (synths), Gregory Rogove (drums and percussion). It was recorded remotely in various studios and home studios around Los Angeles and Stinson Beach, CA.
Devendra Banhart on his Amazon Original cover of “Franklin’s Tower”:
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…
