Devendra Banhart: Can't Help But Smiling

First off, what the fuck are these guys thinking? [laughs]. Have they listened to my music, which has the least commercial prospects in the world? My attitude is they're this suffocating behemoth in its last days, but they seem interested.

-Banhart on signing to Warner Bros.

Photo by: Neil Krug

Talk turns to icons we admire, spurred on talk of Mutantes' recent moving Outside Lands performance.

"I've always loved Tony Bennett. He's always just done his thing. He didn't go through a '80s phase where he made weird fuckin' electro-pop. If you just stick to your thing it comes around eventually," observes Banhart, who draws inspiration from individualistic artists like Bennett, Os Mutantes' Sergio Dias, and major touchstone Caetano Veloso. "My definition of selling out is when you change what you do as a reaction to what people expect or don't expect you to do, when you change the art you share with the world based on ANYTHING but the natural reality of the necessity for change. These artists are a reminder that one can live that natural reality and still thrive."

Georgeson, Banhart, Rogove, Remington, Amarante
By Neil Krug

While Banhart is entirely comfortable with constant change, his audience has at times bristled at his endlessly evolutionary ways. Some still long for a return to the nursery rhyme simplicity of his early songs, missing out on the delicious layering that's gone on in recent years on his own albums as well as his quality freak rock side project with Rogove, Megapuss. Jazz, doo wop, tone poems, and way more are given electrical charge and sculpted purpose in his more recent recordings, even as the childlike P.O.V. of "Little Yellow Spider" continues alongside the hard won wisdom he's taken in lately. Still, there's some fans that dream wistfully of his homeless days bouncing between couches and recording ditties on telephone answering machines.

"I'm so happy I'm not still fucking doing that six records in! At the same, I'll be back at doing that again soon. Trust me, I have a Starbucks application always at hand. I can always return to that because I understand how that works," says Banhart, one of those rare artists who rarely give their audience exactly what they expect. "I'm not trying to help along evolution, and I don't think anyone can. I'm not trying to do anything. This is just how this thing works – time, life, music. It's not like we say, 'Well, we're making a new record. It better be different than the last one!'"

Devendra Banhart by Lauren Dukoff

"It's happened to me, too, where I've liked a musician and I put on a new record and it doesn't sound like the last one and I'm turned off. I'm like, 'Oh man, where's that other stuff? I liked that!' And then a year later I'll hear the new record again and I love it and realize I just needed to look at it for what it was in that moment and not judge it by the past," observes Banhart. "It's a good thing to foster, rather than the usual thing where the older you get the more closed off you are to new things and change. That's really frightening."

Another thing that initially put a lil' scare into Banhart was signing with Warner Bros. Records after years of putting out his work on independent labels. However, now that the album is done and entering the world he's more blasé about hitting the big leagues.

"First off, what the fuck are these guys thinking? [laughs]. Have they listened to my music, which has the least commercial prospects in the world? My attitude is they're this suffocating behemoth in its last days, but they seem interested," observes Banhart wryly.

One theory is the mainstream recording industry may be in a state of flux similar to the early 1970s, where a lot of interesting music was bankrolled by major labels simply because they had no real idea what would sell at that moment and wanted to throw as much up against the wall as they could. As aromatic abstract art goes, Banhart rates, and he's developed a healthy following doing what he does, not so much oblivious of or consciously angled against the mainstream, but simply running along an entirely different groove. If the mega-labels once embraced hyper-weirdoes like Captain Beefheart, The Bonzo Dog Band, and Roy Harper, well, maybe they can find love in their hearts for a gentle iconoclast like Banhart. It also doesn't hurt, from a major record label perspective, that Banhart's profile in recent years makes him a cultural figure that's known by some simply for his name and image without any connection to his music.

Devendra Banhart by Lauren Dukoff

"Something that leaves a sour taste in my mouth is people who are well known but you have no idea why. It's so strange how excited we are to be around a person that's famous. Then later, hopefully we step back and ask, 'Why are they known? Did they fuck a donkey on tape once?'" says Banhart, slicing to the heart of our vacuous star-fucker culture that's sadly caught him in its slipstream. "Yes, but I'm not involved in that world. That's why I stopped looking at reviews or articles about me of any kind, because there was this shift that occurred with the last record in the music world, where it went from actually talking about the music to making a bunch of presumptions about me."

At heart, Devendra Banhart is an omnivorous lover of music that crafts new partners (i.e. songs) for us to canoodle with. His approach, attitude, and general countenance are a joyous, slightly troubled one. He seems nervous – and perhaps rightfully so – that beauty and simple truths offered without irony or subtext may not fit with the cynical, ironic age we find ourselves in. He is humble about his own talents and contributions, and gushing with praise for musicians he adores. He is kind and scattered and fabulously charismatic. These things are not presumptions but firsthand observations from the hours I've spent with him, and all these traits, in one way or another, surface on What Will We Be, whose creator is asking himself the same question that he poses to the listener. Only he's cool (and wise) enough to descend into his reverie on the slinky heels of rich ancestors like Roxy Music, who get name checked on the new album with "16 & Valencia Roxy Music."

"I had to put Roxy Music in the title, not only because we essentially ripped off the chorus from 'Love Is The Drug,' but also because it's not really my kind of song. It's a seriously 'pop' song, and I was a little embarrassed about it actually. But it captures the feeling of walking down 16th towards Valencia [in San Francisco], which is the apex of drugs and sex and salacious, seedy, tantalizing urchins. Whatever your kick is you'll find it, at least that's the invitation of this seductive, beguiling underbelly. It's a crossroads," says Banhart. "It's so exciting as I approach it, and I think, 'I'm gonna get high. I'm gonna get laid.' And 'Love Is The Drug' or 'In Every Dream House A Heartache' is playing in my headphones, and of course, like every time I wander into this crossroads, I go home and I'm not high and I certainly haven't gotten laid. I think it's really funny, and that's why that chorus ends with, 'Ain't gonna find a lover/ Ain't gonna find a man.' We so rarely come out the other side having gotten what we expected."

Some footage of us while we were recording!!!!