Dua Lipa closes Seattle show with Ben Gibbard duet

Dua Lipa closed the North American leg of her Radical Optimism tour on Thursday night at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena by inviting Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard onstage for an acoustic duet of I Will Follow You Into the Dark. The surprise collaboration capped a run of concerts in which Lipa has regularly paid tribute to local music figures by performing city-specific covers and, on many nights, bringing the original artists to join her.

Lipa introduced the performance by telling the crowd that she had aimed to highlight an "indie legend" in Seattle and described the song as defining "what love is in such a pure form, of wanting to follow somebody until the very end." Her band cleared the stage as Gibbard took an acoustic guitar and the pair traded verses before harmonizing on the chorus in a stripped-back arrangement.

The Seattle appearance follows a pattern Lipa established earlier on the tour. She said in a recent interview that the idea began after a collaboration with Chris Stapleton at the American Country Music Awards and that she proposed doing a different cover each night. "How fun would it be if every night we do a different song?" she said, adding that...