Adam Green is sharing the final single off of the upcoming album, Moping in Style: A Tribute to Adam Green, Devendra Banhart’s cover of “Pay The Toll”. The song also comes with an animated lyric video featuring Green’s drawings, directed and animated by Tom Bayne. Check it out below. Originally released as an expansive, string-laden ballad on Adam’s 2006 record Jacket Full of Danger, Banhart translates the song into is a somber and hushed folk track, emphasizing the sadness found beneath Green’s deep-voiced crooning on the original.
Discussing his long-standing relationship with Banhart, Green said,”Devendra is my peer in this universe – we were born 2 days apart in 1981 and so our relationship to the signposts of reality is synched up. He has been a huge inspiration to me since I first met him when we were 21 years old. He was the first total artist I met, meaning it felt like he was in tune with all aesthetic principles and was in command of himself as a composer and a visual artist in equal parts. It has always felt to me like Devendra was someone who was prophesied to come along once in a generation – I’m so glad and lucky our worlds collided.”
Banhart also offered his own recollection of his friendship with Green, “Adam is funny, he really cracks me up… but what’s funnier still is that as oblique and hyper symbolic as his work can get, I have, from the moment I first heard him over 20 years ago, thought “ahh, this makes sense.” … we are true twins and that deep affinity I have for him is one of the things that keeps me goin, it ain’t nepotism when you love the person and the work, it’s just the freakin best. I love Adam.”
Banhart released his latest album Flying Wig earlier this year.
Photo Credit: Stephen Hoffmeister
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