Tomorrow evening, Devendra Banhart will be playing at the Moore. The singer-songwriter, who has served as a face of the “freak folk” and “New Weird America” genres, is touring in support of his tenth album, Ma, which dropped in September. The album is a cohesive and comforting listen. Made after Banhart realized he may never procreate, the record is meant to impart lessons on the child he might not get around to having, mulling over the concepts of nurture and the maternal. He’s trying to make sense of everything he’s learned in life, I suppose, singing in English, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. It’s really Banhart at his best: loungey, loose, funny, deeply observant, and weird. Reflective, too.
I had a chance to chat with Banhart while he was in Los Angeles preparing for the tour:
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Stranger: Where were you at creatively before beginning your most recent album, Ma?
Devendra Banhart: I suppose the period of time that immediately follows the completion of an album is kind of a time of absorption and observation. This feeling of being a tourist in a place you don’t get to stay but get to visit becomes amplified by this space that now exists because the last album is done.
Oh God. Okay. Wow. It’s done. And what I’ve learned is that I don’t really learn or necessarily have the tangible feeling that my skills have been any way improved or increased or been refined. I definitely don’t feel like, I understand songs better or understand the process of writing better or understand poetry better or understand painting or drawing any better.
So in that space, you’re just in the process of observation until you’ve accumulated enough to start to shape it into something. For me it’s a dreadful thing. Like—oh fuck, how do you write a song? I’ve got no idea when it comes into that time. I certainly have no sense of really understanding how that works…it’s really a process, a practice.
Ultimately you want to say as much as you can with as few words and you want to express as much musically with as much silence as possible. And I guess that’s something you work towards.
What made you want to move forward with this album? What were you thinking about and what were you inspired by?
Once you’ve really filled up a certain amount of books. You go, okay, I think I’ve got enough. I’m going to go into them now and see if there is enough material here. And that material is really based on your, your internal and an external world. And mine happened to be this kind of, you know, observation of a particular relationship between parents and children.
My band, they’re all parents now and it’s just incredible. I’m seeing this new kind of relationship that they have with their children and I get to be this auntie I’ve always wanted to be. But I get to go home and write about that. It’s a very new way of seeing my friends and seeing them behave, a very beautiful compassionate side which was always there, but it’s magnified by having this being in their lives. So that observation becomes part of the record.
All the while I’m really helplessly observing the situation in Venezuela, which is so tied into my own family and it’s so tied into my own mother. It has politicized my mother and actually changed the relationship I have with my mother where now we have this political discussion daily and it’s quite interesting and beautiful to have this new dimension to our relationship. But of course the subject is horrifying and very, very painful for the both of us. So that’s certainly been a part of my life and on my mind and is part of the materials of the album.
But also, the realization that I still, you know, I still feel lonely. I still feel heartbroken, I still feel frightened, I still feel insecure, and I still turn to music and art to feel comforted. I still listen to Vashti Bunyan, Carol King, Joni Mitchell, Anoni, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Caetano Veloso. These are the people that are so formative for me. And it still has that nurturing and comforting effect on me. I thought that was so amazing, you know, it’s been like decades and I still turn to music for that kind of mothering quality.
So Ma was born out of that?
[Ma] was born from this kind of maternal feeling and theme. It’s a genderless maternity, you know, it has to do with more of this nurturing quality that one can find in a variety of elements. And also maybe the feeling that a definition for a type of spiritual growth or evolution is asking yourself the question, can you identify mother? Can you see mother beyond one human being? When you’re born you just see this one person, mother, but can you see mother in other people, can you see mother in other things?
In addition to music, you’re also a visual artist and paint all your own album covers. What was the process and what were you thinking about when painting this cover?
Those two worlds only intersect when the record is done. I focused for a period of time on painting in order to take a break from the writing and music practice, so you can approach it in a fresh way. And then when the painting phase exhausts itself, you go to the writing and music. But when you finish a record, that’s when you really have to look at the music and see how it applies visually or how can you interpret and represent it visually. It seemed like these flowers emerging from the void was the most appropriate image.
I was curious about how you decide what language to sing and write in—is it something that kind of comes to you or is there an emotion that you can better express in Spanish versus English or vice versa?
I think the subject determines the language. And on the last record [Ape in Pink Marble] it was very much this kind of fantasy world. We created this imaginary space and we imagined that the album was the soundtrack to that space. So there’s a bunch of characters and there weren’t any songs in Spanish. It just shaped up that way. It didn’t really fit in that narrative. And this record since so much of the subject is related to maternity, my own mother, and then of course Venezuela that’s been a mother to me, a lot of Spanish just kind of emerged naturally given the subject.
Before I sat down to interview you, my coworker and I listened to the album and we both singled out “Taking a Page” as being one of our favorites on the album and we were thinking about the line: “I was taking a page/ From all the time I spend/With a vanity/That knows no end.” I was curious about what your thoughts on vanity are, you know, in general?
I’m aware of my own vanity, especially as I age, I start to go, “No, I’m not so pretty anymore! What’s happening?” But you know, vanity is this—it’s something that as you get older you have this opportunity to either be freed by disassociation with your body, the visual lesson of aging. Like “Oh, wow, this thing is really changing.” And actually it’s rotting, it’s disintegrating. And the thing isn’t me and I can either identify now with that thing that isn’t me or I can really struggle and hold onto this thing that is changing by the second.
You’re not too concerned with it when you’re younger and you kind of think that you’ll look that way forever. But as you get older you go, “Whoa, okay, like I have to let go of this, I have got to let go of this thing.” And so you know, it can become a tremendous source of freedom or a tremendous source of suffering. My experience is it’s a combination of both…..I am not this thing that is changing. I’m simply changing with it.
Totally, yeah. I appreciated that observation in the lyric—it seemed instructive in a certain way.
Actually, out of all the songs, [“Taking a Page”] is the most where I feel like I’m introducing myself to this imaginary child that is almost the subject of most of this record. On this record there are no characters—it’s really just me. That’s a new thing for me because most of [my other] records there are at least three or four character songs and there are none [on Ma]. And that’s why [“Taking a Page”] feels very autobiographical. And therefore I don’t know really what it’s about.
What do you mean?
If you’re writing something personal, ironically, the great paradox is that it’s about getting out of the way. The great paradox is that you’re trying to get in touch with something that is much deeper than your name and your looks and your clothes and your position in life—those things that you use to say “This is my identity, this is who I am.” You’re in fact trying to get in contact with something much deeper than that and hope that you can do that in an honest way. It sounds pretty pretentious actually, but the point is you’re trying to get out of the way to express some things that are actually personal. That seems kind of paradoxical but it’s quite interesting.
With Ma being your 10th album, you have such a massive catalog of music. I’m curious—what is it like when you sit down to compose what your show or a set list is going to be like? What it’s like to encounter songs that you wrote 10-plus years ago and performing them now alongside new music?
Well when it comes to looking at the whole catalog and trying to put together a new set list, it really helps to be drunk. I’ll have a good amount of whiskey because if not, it’s just this Pandora’s box of embarrassment and failure. It’s good to be drunk to try to have some objectivity, which is impossible.
And for the most part, you know, just like our wardrobes—generally speaking—it’s best to give everything away, best donate everything you’ve got. If you held on to a couple of flannel shirts from back in the day that fit you still and you find them a couple of years later, “Oh this is so nice. I’m so happy I held onto this! I feel nice in this thing.” That’s kind of how it feels with the songs, you look into the ones you haven’t been playing for a period of time.
