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By Dennis Cook
This is the soup
That I believe in.
This is the smoke
I'm always breathin'.
This is the way
I share my breakfast.
This is the way
I serve my sentence.
Devendra Banhart by Matt Fink |
Devendra Banhart is making eggs.
The hirsute breakout of an emerging scene that's been dubbed "freak folk" is having a late breakfast. "You won't
come between me and my eggs," says Banhart, laughter and good vibes bubbling below his bright voice. They're
just regular old chicken eggs on his plate. There are those who imagine Banhart lives in a tree house where he dines
on snozberries and moonbeams washed down with condensation from lotus petals. A strange, magic-man legend
has developed around him, but even just a few minutes with him dispels any ideas about cosmic messiahship.
What you find is an especially switched-on, ferociously perceptive cat who draws you in with come-ons like "What's
shaking, man?" For the next hour, he talked animatedly between bites about every subject offered up. Banhart
feeds off your spark and sends it back to you a little brighter and stronger. Like the many musical legends he's
compared to, Banhart is an undeniably special presence, but he's also delightfully, deliriously human. It is his
pronounced humanity - fierce and tender in equal co-mingled measures - that one picks up on in his music. It
connects us with our own humanity, and that, my friends, may be the real reason all the kids are slipping under his
spell.
Making and Breaking Mythology
Devendra Banhart by Chris Buck |
"It would be very different if I felt comfortable with those terms like 'freak folk,' 'avant-folk,' 'New Weird America,' all
that shit," remarks Banhart. "If I felt comfortable with those terms, it would be different. It would perhaps be
something I felt responsible for or nervous about or the weight of. But I'm so turned off by – and want to have SO
little to do with - these stupid and tacky and horrible terms that they mean nothing to me."
Since his 2002 debut, Oh Me, Oh My, there've been many attempts to categorize Banhart's sound, which
carries echoes of, amongst others, Bert Jansch, Bonzo Dog Band, Holy Modal Rounders, and The Beatles. His music is infused with
the free-wheeling, electric spirit of Tropicalismo, the politically charged late 60s/early 70s Brazilian art movement. Like all original
noises, Banhart's music is hard to categorize and harder still to market. It speaks for itself, often in the gently
warped tones that appeal to freaky people everywhere. He's been lumped in with contemporaries (and friends) Six Organs of Admittance, Feathers, Vetiver, and Joanna
Newsom. There's little to tie these artists together beyond a shared appreciation for psych-tinged folk-rock of
a certain era (Pentangle, John Fahey, Fairport Convention, Traffic) and the endless round-robin of guest appearances
on each other's albums. Each shows a unique and restless imagination that no one phrase can easily condense.
Devendra
Banhart by Autumn de Wilde |
"Six Organs of Admittance is Six Organs of Admittance. He plays very singular and unique and specific-to-him
music that you can tell apart from anything," offers Banhart. "Joanna Newsom is pretty un-fucking-classifiable. In
time, Joanna and Ben Chasney will just be considered who they are and not some freak folk or whatever musician."
"My hero, my favorite musician, is <
b>Caetano Veloso. That's my number one," enthuses Devendra. "What gets me through a tour is
listening to Caetano (slight pause) or Jorge Ben, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, and all that. That's what gets me through
my life. Tropicalismo becomes this big part of my life and this big inspiration, so I started thinking about
Naturalismo. That's what we do – naturalism. I started talking to Andy (Cabic) from Vetiver about this.
'What do you think about this? Naturalism is a good one, right?' If we give them some alternatives then maybe
people will start taking this seriously. It's not going to happen with these humiliating, embarrassing, cheesy, tacky
phrases like 'freak folk.' Then he says, 'We don't want to be anti-artifice. We don't want to be against anything or
elitist in any way.' I agreed."
"Then I started thinking about something I've said in every interview, which is that everything is a derivative of
nature. Everything. Even the most plastic, most synthetic things are derived from nature. The source of them is
found in nature at some point. Naturalismo becomes a completely all-inclusive thing. If there's one thing we can
take from Tropicalismo, it's this anthropophagic attitude towards the world."
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