Devendra Banhart releases Flying Wig via Mexican Summer. The release marks Banhart’s 11th studio album - his first with Mexican Summer - and the first full length since the universally lauded Ma in 2019. It is also the first time the acclaimed singer/songwriter has collaborated with with musician, producer and Mexican Summer label mate Cate Le Bon. 

Banhart, who has in recent years established himself as a lauded visual artist in tandem with his work in music, has been crafting intricate and captivating albums since 2002. Flying Wig is a landscape of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. What goes up, must come down, eventually. Battle-scarred by life and loss, Banhart found himself despondent, folded inwards; finding it difficult to speak, let alone sing.

Banhart explains, “ My whole life has been filled with sadness. Everything I do in life is to help cope with that sadness.”Turning his back on Los Angeles’ wailing sirens, he packed the bones that would become Flying Wig’s songs into a bag and took to the secluded woodland of a Topanga canyon. The album is the actualization of a precious friendship with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, Mexican Summer stablemate and producer of Flying Wig, Cate Le Bon. The pair’s coming together is one 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. “She’s the only person I wanted to make this record with,” Banhart admits. “We set out to make a record sonically unlike anything I have made before – with a new creative partner at the helm. We definitely wanted a new sound, electronic yet organic and warm…we wanted to draw out and emphasize the emotional aspect of a synthesizer.”