Devendra Banhart - Following in the footsteps of pre-war folk

“Like finding home in an old folk song”

Perhaps it's the aura of legend surrounding him that gives Devendra Banhart his peculiar charm: a name suggested to his parents by an Indian mystic, a life as a busker between Texas, Venezuela, California and New York, music that seems to come from a forgotten time…

Born in 1981 in Texas, Devendra Banhart was still a child when his parents divorced and his mother took him to live in Caracas. An experience that Banhart recalls as one spent in a place where you risked your life just by stepping outside, but which left him with a distinctive taste for the laid-back Spanish-language singing he would go on to showcase in various songs across his records.

It seems Devendra Banhart was already amusing himself writing songs from the tender age of twelve. His father, he recounts, gave him a guitar, and that very same day Devendra was dumped by his then-girlfriend: what better coincidence to kick off a career as a songwriter?

When his mother remarried, Devendra moved with the family to California, where in 1998 he enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, devoting himself mainly to painting and drawing. The results can be seen in the strange, shakily-drawn sketches that illustrate the artwork of his records and which, according to their creator, are a visual component inseparable from his music.

It's said that Devendra's true musical calling arrived while he was singing the gospel standards “How Great Thou Art” and “Love Me Tender” at the wedding of Jerry Elvis and Bob The Crippled Comic, the two gay friends he shared a room with, to whom he would later dedicate his “Soon Is Good”.

From that moment on, Banhart, after knocking around old Europe for a while, started playing in clubs around San Francisco and Los Angeles. And it was in the city of angels itself that, one evening after a show, Siobhán Duffy — girlfriend of former Swans singer Michael Gira — approached him. Struck by the bursting personality of that eccentric young man's songs, she bought a Banhart CD-R for a dollar and immediately brought it to Gira, who was busy running his label, Young God. For Michael, it was love at first listen. “I'd never heard anything like it,” he recalls today, “it was like coming across songs left abandoned in an attic since the 1930s.”

Michael Gira went to see Devendra play at a sushi bar: and here again, fact and legend blur together, because apparently among the patrons that night was former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar, who, irritated by the young Texan's dreamy, acid-tinged folk, decided to put one of his old band's songs on the jukebox… In response, Devendra supposedly stopped playing and calmly went over to spit in Sammy's plate: what happened in the brawl that followed remains unknown, but it's not hard to imagine the young Texan had to make a quick getaway…

What is certain is that, from that day on, Michael Gira decided to take Devendra Banhart under his wing and have him record an album for his label.

Banhart thus moves to New York, first into a squat and then into an actual house, and starts collecting his songs on whatever device he can get his hands on, from a four-track recorder to his friends' answering machines, which he'd call at the oddest hours to hum some melody that had just crossed his mind, begging them not to erase the tape...

The result, leaving aside “The Charles C. Leary”, a raw appetizer released a few months earlier on the French label Hinah, is an album with the long-winded title Oh Me Oh My… The Way The Day Goes By The Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs Of The Christmas Spirit, released in 2002, which presents itself as a collection of dazed, lo-fi acoustic sketches written more for himself than for an actual audience.

“They were like fragments of a psychoanalyst's session”, Devendra recalls today. And so, amid hisses worthy of a dusty vinyl record, off-key whistling and lopsided hand-claps, Oh Me Oh My… unspools fragments of a minimal folk, dense with the eccentric symbolism stirring in its author's mind.

Devendra Banhart's vibrant yet madness-steeped voice immediately brings to mind the likes of Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson, who seem to be reflected in the rippling waters of this music made of ancestral nursery rhymes.

In most cases these are mere sketches of tunes, deliberately left unfinished in their bare original form, since what Banhart says he prefers is short poetry and music that isn't too crowded, so that there's always room between the sounds and the words.

But in a handful of instances the compositions on Oh Me Oh My… reach a more fully-formed shape, and it's then that they shine like flecks of gold in an old prospector's sieve. Such is the case with “The Charles C. Leary”, which Devendra dedicates to his family's memories, through the image of the boat owned by his great-grandfather, of which his father kept an old painting, or the wild, feverish “Nice People”, which alternates with the more conventionally ballad-like atmospheres of “Cosmos And Demos” and the hypnotic lightness of “Michigan State” and “Pumpkin Seeds”.

What gives depth to the oddities of Oh Me Oh My… is the echo of the old rural ballads of the oldest tradition, which resound with all their unmistakable mythology in the voice of this new son of theirs, now wise as a centenarian, now fragile as a child.

Critics were quick to coin the label pre-war folk to describe the music of this bearded Texan freak and the scene that suddenly lit up around him, reflecting his glow. After all, it's not hard to recognize in Devendra Banhart's songs the demons and ghosts that populate the ballads of the American Anthology of Folk Music.

The purity of outlook with which he seems to approach the tradition of his homeland closely recalls what Bob Dylan describes when talking about his own beginnings in the first volume of his autobiography, “Chronicles”, where he defines folk music as “a parallel universe, based on more archaic values and principles (…) an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of glittering corridors (…) a reality made of a more luminous dimension”, which “exceeded human understanding, and once you were summoned into its presence you could end up sucked in and disappear”.

But, in truth, the Devendra Banhart phenomenon, to be truly understood, cannot simply be reduced to the tradition of Great Depression-era bluesmen and folksingers. There is a multiplicity of elements woven into Devendra's highly distinctive personality, which cannot be overlooked when approaching his music: from hippie folk to the eccentricity of Daniel Johnston, all the way to a taste for certain roaring-twenties dance-band atmospheres, it's a saraband of voices out of time that echoes in the voice of the Texan folksinger.

Riding the wave of the first enthusiastic critical responses, in 2003 Young God released an EP aimed at the UK market titled The Black Babies, named after one of the bands Devendra had formed during his earlier artistic wanderings.

Alongside two of the most representative tracks from his debut album, “The Charles C. Leary” and “Cosmos And Demos”, here presented in different takes, Banhart offers half a dozen new compositions, which remain rigorously faithful to the crooked spirit of Oh Me Oh My….

Once again, then, the record moves from playful divertissements to arpeggios that turn first light and pastoral, then shadowy like those of an apocryphal Robert Johnson, reaching an unexpected sixties sweetness on “Long Song”.

The Black Babies is, in short, a perfect corollary to the previous album, one that only further fuels curiosity about Devendra Banhart as an artist and the surprising potential of his ideas.

“Sing child sing, sing your song”

The promise shown by those early, jagged recordings is duly confirmed in 2004, when Devendra Banhart releases not one but two new albums, Rejoicing In The Hands and Niño Rojo, just a few months apart.

On the first, lo-fi remains a trademark, but for the first time Banhart's compositions sound far more fully realized and rich in personality, managing to hit straight at the heart with their spontaneous madness.

Recorded in Lynn Bridges' old Georgian villa in Westpoint using strictly vintage equipment, Rejoicing In The Hands seems to want to retrace the borders of Greil Marcus's invisible republic, taking its cue from the earliest songs intoned to the moon by ancestors newly arrived in the New World. Just listen to the dreamy "lalalala" of "This Beard Is For Siobhán" to grasp it, and to be transported into a parallel reality in which Syd Barrett finds himself shut away in an old American basement recording the Basement Tapes.

The contours of the young Texan's world are still defined by the fingerpicking with which he caresses his acoustic guitar, though this time it's the tulle veil of strings on "A Sight To Behold" that stirs the ghost of Nick Drake, alongside the piano of "Will Is My Friend", the percussion of "Fall" and the drum crescendo of "This Beard Is For Siobhán".

The songs on Rejoicing In The Hands are brief, lightning-flash illuminations, stretching out to five minutes only in the case of "Insect Eyes". But a mere minute and a half of moving simplicity is enough for a song like "Autumn's Child" to lodge itself in the soul and never leave.

The album's title, which in its full version was meant to be "Rejoicing In The Hands Of The Golden Empress", refers to the embrace of Mother Nature, to that vague kind of "reconciliation with everything" that inspires Devendra's naive, animist vision of the world. And indeed, pursuing this idea of the earth's motherhood, Devendra indulges, in his own particular way, in the traits of his own feminine side, underlined too by his use of a vibrato-prone falsetto that many have compared to the timbre of early Marc Bolan.

It's hardly a coincidence, then, that his duet partner turns out to be the legendary English folksinger Vashti Bunyan, "the spirit of wisdom and purity" according to Banhart, and indeed the very reason he makes music at all. In fact, it's almost always female figures that Banhart cites as his inspiration, since, in his view, most music made by men shares a kind of disguised self-centeredness, while music created by women has the capacity to be "honest, revealing, and strong and soulful all at once"...

The other album Devendra Banhart released in 2004, Niño Rojo, presents itself to all intents and purposes as the second chapter of the previous album. Not an appendix, in other words, but a true twin, drawn from the very same recording sessions.

The landscape on offer is therefore one whose borders are already familiar, traced by the maze of crisp arpeggios with which Banhart caresses the strings of his guitar. It's true that, compared to Rejoicing In The Hands, there are more moments in which the arrangements go beyond the simple voice/guitar pairing, but these are finishing touches that don't alter the substance of the design, merely enriching its features with a touch of piano, an accent of drums, a swirl of strings...

Right from the start, though, the atmosphere running through the tracks of Niño Rojo feels lighter and more relaxed than that of the previous album, even more enjoyable, as shown by the playful, carefree air of songs like "We All Know", with its ramshackle horn-driven finale, and the irresistible "At The Hop", which stand as the album's most engaging moments.

According to Devendra Banhart, if Rejoicing In The Hands was meant to represent the mother, Niño Rojo would be the son, "exuberant and foolish"... And never more than this time does Devendra seem to want to face the world through the eyes of that child in the title, looking around with insatiable curiosity, mouth agape before the evidence of what surrounds him, heedless of his own fragility. It should come as no surprise, then, that the album opens with "Wake Up, Little Sparrow", a cover of a song by the legendary nursery-rhyme and children's-song writer Ella Jenkins.

What emerges more clearly than in the previous chapter is Banhart's sense of belonging to a kind of Age-of-Aquarius artistic community: a web of relationships that bears fruit in "At The Hop", written and performed with Andy Cabic of Vetiver, and "Be Kind", dedicated to a "lovely Bianca" who, for anyone unaware of the gossip surrounding his liaison with Devendra, is of course none other than Bianca Casady of CocoRosie.

In short, of the Sixties' legacy, Devendra Banhart seems on this record to have managed to retain only its original innocence, without carrying along that loss of innocence which soon turned the positivity of its initial impulse into utopia.

Compared to the diligent rehashing of the past that seems to be all the rage today, what Devendra Banhart does is not mere imitation, but genuine immersion of self. An attitude perfectly captured in the lines of "It's A Sight To Behold", from Rejoicing In The Hands: “It’s like finding home / in an old folksong / that you’ve never ever heard / still you know every word/ for sure you can sing along”.

Taken together, the two companion albums come across as the fulfillment of what had only been glimpsed in fragments on Oh Me Oh My…, and despite their essentially monochrome underlying palette, they stand as a work of far greater weight than one might expect from a near-newcomer: a record that will be nearly impossible to leave out of any account of American folk music in the new millennium.

“Ride the song that ends right when it starts”

By this point, Devendra Banhart's drunken vibrato and bare-bones acoustic guitar are no longer enough on their own to amaze. So, for his debut away from the familiar shadow of Michael Gira's Young God, the Texan folksinger decides to shake off the cumbersome pre-war folk label that critics had pinned on him, and to give free rein to the eclecticism he had already hinted at on his earlier records. Having signed to XL Recordings, the same label as the White Stripes, Banhart releases a new album in 2005 titled Cripple Crow, which breaks away from the lo-fi sound of his early work and presents itself much more as a gypsy-collective celebration than as the solitary ravings of a lone folksinger — a destination that clearly owes something to the live experience he'd built up in 2004. This time Devendra the Guru has decided to leave the Great Depression years behind and dive headfirst into the magic of the fabulous Sixties: his hallucinated-jester approach, however, doesn't change even on this new record — it simply dresses itself in more garish clothes, with no fear of looking gaudy.

The opening of "Now That I Know", with its light, dreamy Nick Drake-like step, creates the illusion that Banhart is still out there alone with just his guitar and a throb of cello. But it only takes a few songs to run into the Kinks-like guitar-and-drums jab of "Long Haired Child", which with its acid-streaked bursts seems to view the Sixties through the colored lenses of Coral. And it's precisely in this lopsided rock 'n' roll that the new face of the Cripple Crow era reveals itself, a bacchanal in which the off-key nursery rhymes of "Feel Just Like A Child" and "Chinese Children" sound as if handed over to an Elvis recovering from a peyote binge. But the Sixties aren't the only source Cripple Crow draws on. There's also room for numbers worthy of a saloon house band, like the ragtime of "Some People Ride The Wave", and for heart-stealing Fifties jukebox ballads, like the one that springs up at the tail end of "Long Haired Child" or the Roy Orbison-style slow number "Little Boys", which midway through turns into a skit worthy of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Despite all this, though, the record truly convinces only when Devendra Banhart lets the simplicity of his country-folk soul speak once again. It's then easy to find, in the interplay of piano, drums and backing vocals on "Heard Somebody Say", an impalpable lightness that seems to belong to Belle & Sebastian's "green period". And in the enchanting sweetness of "Queen Bee" and "Korean Dogwood", or in the plush textures of "Cripple Crow", you can almost picture Donovan sharing a joint with Neil Young.

The richer arrangements of Cripple Crow don't mean, however, that Banhart has given up that unmistakable sense of oblique unfinishedness that remains one of the constants of his music. But compared to the balance achieved on Niño Rojo, this time the loose threads are plentiful across the album's full twenty-two songs. Cripple Crow deserves credit for the courage of a desire for change that still manages not to betray its author's identity. But it's equally impossible to ignore that the new path Banhart has taken still carries one too many uncertainties, even as it allows Cripple Crow to stand as the most immediately engaging record the Texan has released so far.

The vinyl edition of the album also includes a handful of bonus tracks, among which the standouts are the party-starting country of "Chicken", the flamenco of "La Pastorcita Perdida" and the Jamaican flavors of the nearly ten-minute "White Reggae Troll / Africa", also released as a single, again on vinyl.

In 2005, Banhart also puts out, on vinyl only, a split with Jana Hunter, a young Texan folksinger like himself, featuring the less carefree, more pensive covers of "At The Hop" and "We All Know", alongside the pianistic lament of "In Golden Empress Hands" and the lengthy happening of "Little Monkey / Step In The Name Of Love". Another split, this time with Xiu Xiu, sees Banhart turn "Support Our Troops OH!" into a warped Fifties serenade, later included in 2007 on the compilation dedicated to Jamie Stewart's band, "Remixed & Covered".

Banhart also oversees, in 2006, the creation of the compilation "The Golden Apples Of The Sun" for Arthur Magazine, featuring among others Vetiver (joined on this occasion by Hope Sandoval), Joanna Newsom, Iron & Wine, the ever-present CocoRosie and Antony. And as if that weren't enough, confirming Devendra's growing popularity, none other than the reigning queen of American teen movies, Lindsay Lohan, is brought in to interview him for Interview magazine…

"Trying to live freely"

Accompanied as usual by an odd band of fellow travelers worthy of an Ozpetek film, Banhart takes refuge, to record the follow-up to Cripple Crow, in Topanga Canyon, among the mountains of Santa Monica, where Neil Young's "After The Gold Rush" was born in the early Seventies.

Devendra Banhart's fifth album, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, released in the fall of 2007, carries forward the bearded Texan folksinger's process of shedding his own eccentricity, following in the footsteps of Cripple Crow with a slowed-down, opiate pace: but what was meant to come across as a hypnotic atmosphere ends up, more prosaically, just sounding soporific.

"Real hippies don't like me," Devendra demurs, almost as if trying to justify his own cliché. "They can tell right away when someone's a real hippie. I don't even know what that is." The fact remains that, in the album's making-of, he's shown playing with friends on a boat rocked by the waves, and spending his time at his Californian buen retiro making drawings, crafting trinkets and dancing half-naked in a vibe straight out of a summer-of-love commune.

On Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, Banhart's psychedelic streak surfaces even more plainly than in the past, starting with "Seahorse", which, after a becalmed, whispered prologue, stretches out into a languid hallucination where you can almost make out the mustachioed grin of David Crosby. Amid organ breaths, bucolic flutes and visions of seahorses, Devendra chases loosely Doors-like echoes, which lead him to a finale built on textbook electrification.

Like a chameleonic Zelig, Banhart juggles a grab-bag of genres, switching without batting an eye from the sequined, sparkling funk of "Lover" to the postcard tropicalismo of "Samba Vexillographica", with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes on charango, before catapulting himself from the dim-lit reggae of "The Other Woman" to the gospel of "Saved", complete with organ and stock-issue shouting backing singers. But his display of eclecticism sounds all too mannered, proving more predictable the harder it tries to be disarming.

And when Devendra starts dancing to a salsa beat amid the Latin hip-swaying of "Carmensita", you might almost think he's angling for some improbable title as the indie-folk Manu Chao. The line between irony and farce grows thinner and thinner.

The end of his relationship with Bianca Casady of CocoRosie casts a melancholy haze over floating ballads like "Seaside", "Freely" and "Remember", perhaps the best track of the bunch. "I'm gonna die of loneliness," Banhart laments on the closing "My Dearest Friend", accompanied by his muse Vashti Bunyan. Seeking consolation, all he can do is fall back once again on his usual philosophy of universal love, accepting the cycle of karma with fatalistic resignation.

Despite its length, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon seems to always be missing that decisive spark. Banhart devotes himself to building more classic and linear songs than ever, smoothing out the excesses of his unmistakable vocal timbre: but the result never rises above a stretched pass mark.

After the album's release, Banhart's name makes headlines not so much for his musical merits as for his brief relationship with actress Natalie Portman, who also starred in the Bollywood-style video for "Carmensita". Likewise, the off-the-cuff collaboration under the name Megapuss (!) between Banhart and Greg Rogove of Priestbird (with a contribution from Fabrizio Moretti of the Strokes) draws attention more for the pair's photos in Adam's-garb attire than for the content of the record: "Surfing", released at the end of 2008, amounts to little more than a predictable, dated orgy of freak flavors, animated by a spirit of trivial messing around. His appearance in the teen movie "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" then definitively cements him as an indie icon.

"Goin' back"

And in the end Devendra Banhart decided to try and get his head straight. Clean-shaven and with a major-label contract in his pocket, in the autumn of 2009 the Texan sets aside his flashiest disguises to don, on What Will We Be, the classic clothes of an old-school singer-songwriter. Nothing to do with the crooked genius of the Rejoicing In The Hands and Niño Rojo days, to be clear: but this new chapter in Banhart's discography feels sharper than its immediate predecessor, making itself accessible even to newcomers without betraying his personality. The only shame is that, in the meantime, the most interesting part of that personality seems to have gotten lost along the way…

"My gadabout days are over", Banhart proclaims with his usual blend of irony and sincerity. And that his wandering nature has indeed allowed itself a pause can be sensed from a number of precise signs. First, the choice to relegate the more unhinged digressions to side projects, like Megapuss. Second, the return to the same tight-knit lineup as on Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, from Noah Georgeson's guitar to Luckey Remington's bass, without indulging in too many illustrious guest appearances, and entrusting production to an expert in Sixties pop sounds like Paul Butler of the Bees. Third, signing to Warner, which Banhart hastens to justify in his own way, before the inevitable indie-snob backlash hits: "I'm going against the system by joining the system! And besides, I wanted to be labelmates with Paris Hilton…"

More than anything, though, it's the songs on What Will We Be that reveal a newfound sense of peace: somewhere between Donovan and Cat Stevens, lulling arpeggios and gentle melodies blossom, steering Banhart toward the traditionalist songwriting of tracks like "Goin' Back" and "Meet Me At Lookout Point". The Motown hues of "Baby", which gives its title to the short EP released as an appetizer for the album, show that even in its lighter moments there's a greater balance than in the past. "I often feel like the tectonic plates are moving too fast to make sense," Banhart observes, "but with this record I felt closer than ever to really being in control of things." There's no shortage of songs that shift skin abruptly, yet they seem to shift almost naturally: the slightly saccharine sweetness of "Angelika" turns into his usual tropicalist excursion, the jazzy looseness of "Chin Chin & Muck Muck" unfolds into a playful chant, and the hazy atmosphere of "Maria Lionza" gives way to a coda full of sunny openings.

Fresh off his recent participation in Beck's "Record Club" for the collective reinterpretation of "Songs Of Leonard Cohen", Banhart, as on his last few records, sets the dials of his personal time machine to somewhere between the late Sixties and early Seventies. But it's in the reflection on the arc of love contained in the two parts of "Song For B" that Banhart truly finds his inspiration again, giving himself over to the lightning-bolt thrill of falling in love over a pulsing piano (“Now I take everything as a good sign / Because I’m in love / I take everything as a sign from God”), before drifting off mid-air on the strings of his own guitar.

Compared to the album's overall tone, the openly over-the-top episodes sound more like jarring juxtapositions than ever: that's the case with the almost Franz Ferdinand-like ambitions of "16th & Valencia, Roxy Music", which, as its title suggests, sets out to follow in the footsteps of Bryan Ferry and co. through plastic riffs and sticky choruses, or with the sudden electric detours of "Rats". Stumbling between the inevitable Spanish-language number (the romantic "Brindo") and the reggae joke placed at the close ("Foolin'"), What Will We Be shows its best side when it follows the most straightforward path. All told, it's nothing more than confirmation of what everyone already suspected: in order to still stir up interest, Devendra Banhart is better off setting aside the excesses of his persona and settling for simply being a songwriter. Of course, for someone who had made eccentricity his trademark, there's no worse sentence than mediocrity.

"Won't you come home"

Imagine a trendy interior-design magazine wants to do a feature on your home. Imagine that, instead of some random photographer, a sort of ethereal Slavic supermodel shows up at your door. Imagine that, instead of standing there dumbstruck staring at her, you immediately ask her to marry you. Well, if she not only doesn't tell you to get lost within ten seconds but actually becomes your official girlfriend from that moment on, you can only be Devendra Banhart.

At the start of his career, Banhart was little more than a penniless, bearded drifter, singing oddball-sounding songs with his acoustic guitar. Ten years on, you could easily run into him at some New York art gallery, dressed as a fashionable hipster, arm in arm with Serbian photographer Ana Kras (yes, the very one he proposed marriage to at first sight).

It's not simply a matter of gossip: because for Devendra the bohemian, life and art have always been one and the same, in the manner of Oscar Wilde. So it's no surprise that the title of his eighth album, Mala (2013), is nothing other than the loving nickname (in Serbian, naturally) suggested to him by his new flame. Nor is it surprising that the new record's style leans toward a refined, minimal-toned pop, more contemporary and less backward-looking than ever.

Mother-of-pearl keyboards, muted harmonies, a shimmering backdrop. Even the voice prefers whispering to flourish. Mala is a homemade record: recorded entirely within the walls of Banhart's house in Los Angeles, before he decided to move back to the Big Apple. "An after-party for a party nobody was invited to," he calls it, smiling. Alongside his trusty guitarist Noah Georgeson, Banhart starts over with a set of borrowed instruments and an old Tascam recorder found in a pawn shop. And the warmth of the sound tempers the freak-folk echoes into a vaguely Beck-like DIY approach.

From the sinuous opening of the single "Für Hildegard Von Bingen" onward, the desire to break free from the mannered songwriting of the previous What Will We Be seems clear: more than a return to his roots, Mala presents itself as a new and more solid incarnation, after the long creative pause from 2009 to 2013. Without much nostalgia either for the pre-war folk of his early days, or for the neo-hippie drift of records like Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.

Despite everything, Mala isn't a record about the joys of coupledom. Quite the opposite. So much so that Banhart himself is quick to clarify: "The almost nihilistic, hopeless reflections on relationships on this record have nothing to do with Ana." Irony is then the key to the duet staged by the two newly engaged lovers on "Your Fine Petting Duck", which morphs from doo-wop parody into something teleported onto an Eighties dancefloor.

There's no shortage of continuity with the past, from the Spanish vocals of “Mi Negrita” to the acoustic arpeggios of the instrumental “The Ballad Of Keenan Milton” (dedicated to one of Banhart's personal skateboarding heroes). But the real personality of “Mala” has to be sought elsewhere: in the melodic hooks of tracks like “Won't You Come Over” and “Hatchet Wound,” or in the menacing aura of “A Gain” and “Taurobolium.”

Sure, dedicating a song to medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, imagining her leaving convent life to become a vee-jay, is exactly the kind of oddity you'd expect from someone like Banhart. Which goes to show that, all things considered, there's always a lurking risk for the Texan songwriter: getting stuck behind his own surreal mask, letting the levity of divertissement win out over the substance of the songs.

Three years later came Ape In The Pink Marble (2016), which shows no shortage of continuity with its predecessor.

Opened by the tender retro snapshot of “Middle Names” (dedicated to his friend Asa Ferry of Kind Heart & Coronets, who recently passed away), the album thrives on 70s psych-folk flavors (“Good Time Charlie”), sudden swerves into soul-funk (“Fig In Leather”), noir ballads like “Mourner's Dance,” and contrite reflections like “Linda,” while on “Jon Lends A Hand,” amid faint trills and delicate harmonies, Banhart's voice obsessively whispers the line “as beautiful as you.”

An album that consolidates the new direction taken by the Houston-born songwriter, deepening his melancholic, intimate side.

The follow-up, Ma (2019), doesn't stray far from the Texan-Venezuelan musician's recent output, except for a cohesion rooted in the author's reflections on being a parent. True to his surreal poetic world, the album tackles the challenges of this role from a mother's point of view. Devendra has said he can't picture himself as a father, but rather as a mother, and it's quite singular that he entrusted this task to an album sung in no fewer than four languages: Portuguese, Japanese, English and Spanish.

Traces of the melancholy of Ape In Pink Marble remain, both in the electronic inflections that punctuate the gentle optimism peeking through the Donovan/Haruomi Hosono-style folk-pop of “Kantori Ongaku” or the successful folk/r'n'b of “My Boyfriend's In The Band,” and in the languid ballads where, between a nod to Leonard Cohen (“Memorial”) and a Harry Nilsson-like mood (“Is This Nice?”), the songs flow like spring water.

Innocence and genuineness run through the whole project, delivering emotion even in its less incisive and original moments (“Ami,” “October 12,” “The Lost Coast”), but what's missing is the spark that could truly ignite the passion. Luckily, traces of it can be found in the gently joyful saudade of “Carolina,” in the raw, minimal tone of “Now All Gone,” in the romantic Michael Franks-style pop-jazz of “Love Song,” and in the brilliant exotic extravagance of “Abre Las Manos.”

The most eclectic of his recent albums is a potential starting point for a creative rebirth that feeds on the multicultural nature of a record which, through the language of folk, embraces pop, Japanese and Venezuelan music with an ecumenical spirit that these days feels downright invigorating.

Ten years pass since the maquillage applied on Mala, and it's clear that Devendra Banhart has no interest in staying anchored to what he's already tried and tested. His new work Flying Wig (2023) is the most enigmatic and claustrophobic album of his now two-decade-long career, a project with an undefined emotional status. Paradoxes, unresolved dualisms and imaginative stories open to multiple readings merge and blur together, generating a quiet chaos as well as pleasant dissonances.

The producer's role, entrusted to Cate Le Bon, opens the door to yet another stylistic shift: synths and faint echoes of the Eno-Bowie partnership try to shake up the elegant torpor of his recent albums, and the result is refreshing.

The ethereal poetics of the ambient-pop of “Sight Serr” and the mystical romanticism of “Charger” have an expressive depth that stems from the artistic rapport between Devendra and Cate Le Bon, a mix of the sacred and profane where, here and there, a bit of that residual past passion blossoms (the title track), even if transfigured by dreamlike electronic trimmings. Refined and understated, the album isn't short on highlights – the sleek electro-funk of “Sirens,” the lively folk-pop turn of “May,” and the curious Pink Floyd/David Bowie-flavored funk of “Twin” – even if the whole reveals a few slight imperfections.

In many ways, Devendra Banhart has taken a path similar to the one successfully explored by H. Hawkline and Jeremy Tuplin; in that light, the delightful groove of “Fireflies” effortlessly earns a place among the most charmingly crowd-pleasing tracks of the year so far, while the eccentric chaos of obsessive melodies and lopsided rhythms on “Nun” has the merit of breaking up the album's seeming uniformity. The consistently remarkable quality of the lyrics and the author's undeniable courage in tackling new sounds are reason enough to file “Flying Wig” away as a project that, in its own way, succeeds and deserves attention. Amid uncertainties and gambles, Devendra Banhart has put together an album that breaks from routine and opens up intriguing new prospects for the future.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google