Dua Lipa — Modulations

These fragments trace the shifting keys of Dua Lipa’s voice — from the polished pulse of pop anthems to the stripped clarity of live collaborations. Modulations listens not for genre but for movement: how a performer bends tone, posture, and emotion to inhabit new registers of self.

On Thursday, 16 October 2025, in Seattle, Dua Lipa invited to the stage Ben Gibbard, the voice of Death Cab for Cutie, to close her North American tour with a tender detour — a duet on I Will Follow You Into the Dark. Before the first chord, she told the audience: “I love this song for so many reasons, but really because I feel like it just really defines what love is in such a pure form, of wanting to follow someone to the very end.”

It was an ending that folded back into origin: pop’s bright surfaces giving way to a quiet, almost devotional stillness. By choosing to share the stage with an “indie legend,” she traced a bridge between worlds — proving that modulation is not escape, but expansion; the voice seeking new colors in its own echo.

“I Will Follow You Into the Dark” — Re-enacting Intimacy Through Voice

Ben Gibbard’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (2005) is an elegy sung in the language of devotion:

“Love of mine, someday you will die
But I’ll be close behind.”

Written after the death of Pope John Paul II, it sought to oppose institutional notions of salvation with an ethics of companionship. The 2025 duet between Gibbard and Dua Lipa reanimates that intimacy as dialogue rather than monologue.

Lipa’s luminous timbre inflects the song’s plain confession with a new register of endurance: not the adolescent vow of eternal love, but a mature awareness that affection is itself a form of remembering. Gibbard, by contrast, remains tethered to the song’s fragile origin — his voice still dry, almost documentary. The interplay between them transforms the piece into a study in shared memory: how repetition does not exhaust meaning but restores it under new conditions of presence.

In this sense, the performance becomes a small counter-archive of feeling — an act where popular music, stripped of spectacle, rehearses mortality as intimacy, and memory as a continuous duet between voices that refuse to fade.¹

¹ Dua Lipa and Ben Gibbard, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark (Live in Seattle, Night 2),” filmed September 2025, YouTube video, 3:59, posted by Dualipa Archive, October 2025, https://youtu.be/Lwf7mVKXbLo.