Devendra Banhart is Bringing it All Back Home

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Devendra Banhart is slightly confused. The musical artist just returned home from a month in Nepal, a trip where he divided his time meditating for hours a day as part of a spiritual quest, and starring in a friend’s film in a role where he was asked to shout dramatic lines like, “What is this place?” But while the jet lag has passed, he’s still grappling with the culture shock of returning to a big city after life in a rural area plagued with rolling blackouts and wireless that worked only if “the deities of WiFi are with you.” As he continues to emotionally unpack what he learned during his time away, he reflects on how his first experience in front of the camera was helped by skills honed as a musician.

“Before playing, you try to get into that space where the thoughts are just coming and going and you’re not making them tea,” Banhart tells CR. “You’re just trying to be present. In that moment, I forget Devendra. I’m just a person who’s got these songs and I’ve got to play this show. You reduce it to being here in this moment. Let’s play. The only connection with acting is that I have to get rid of Devendra for sure. I’m just this other person. Be these lines, be these words. Try to really mean it.”

It isn’t the first time a trip has informed Banhart’s creative process. On his 2016 album, Ape in Pink Marble, the musician and his band recorded in California, using Japanese instruments and broken synths to create a soundtrack to an imagined dilapidated neighborhood just outside of Tokyo. Thanks to what he calls a slightly drunk conversation with a friend, the recording for his tenth album, Ma, began with the unique opportunity to record in a temple in Kyoto. While ultimately the recording session was scrapped, the experience pointed them toward the direction they needed to go—back home.

“It was very clear that we want to make a record that was a tribute to the mothering qualities in music and art,” Banhart says. “Everyone in my band is now a parent. I’m the auntie I’ve always wanted to be. I get to hang out with these little kids and I get to watch that relationship between their parents and them. It’s a really interesting, beautiful thing to observe… But there’s this sadness—what about me? I live all alone here. But the other side looking at it is I’m fortunate that I do have space to write about it. And if I don’t have children, this record is everything is I’d want to say to them. If I do, this is still the gift I’d want to give them.”

The band decamped to Big Sur in Northern California, rented a house, and began the process by recording the Pacific Ocean for 24 hours to create a background tone that runs through the entire album. As Banhart explains, he considers the ocean, along with his home country Venezuela, and singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan (who appears on album track “Will I See You Tonight?”) as important symbols of maternity. He’s flourished, largely because of the care they’ve provided.

“Maybe one of the definitions of growth is to be able to identify mother in more than one individual,” he muses. “If you can see mother in multiple people it’s going to be easier to get along with them. If you can see mother in other things, it’s easier to respect and appreciate those things. You start off with mother in one person and as you get older you see mother in a lot of other things.”

Ma, is a study of warmth, as Banhart’s whispered alto is surrounded by gently strummed guitars, horns, woodwinds, and strings. It’s folk served with an asterisk, with pop and psychedelia gently hovering around the edges of each song. As promised, maternal love is dissected and honored in equal parts. But mothers (and mother figures) aren’t the only relationships to receive attention. On the playful “My Boyfriend’s in the Band” Banhart tips the hat to those connected to creatives. And on “Memorial” he paints the stark image of someone so inept at reading the room they propose to their partner at a funeral.

“I was so confused,” he says of the awkward true story. “This is insane, this is the most inappropriate thing I’ve ever heard. I went and talked to his widow and one of his closest friends and told them how this person asked if they could propose. When I mentioned this person wanted to propose they all looked at each other and said he would love that. So, I played ‘Middle Names,’ a song I wrote before he died. I couldn’t get through it, I was crying. And then this person gets on stage and proposes. It was super bizarre.”

Like most of the 38-year-old’s stories, the story takes a strange turn, which he acknowledges with a rueful laugh. But as a practicing Buddhist, Banhart knows there’s always more questions than answers, and that it’s okay that his life hasn’t followed a conventional path. Sometimes, leaning into the opportunities you’re presented can yield unexpectedly fruitful results—no matter where in the world that might be.

“I definitely believe in paying attention,” he says. “Do I pay attention? No! Do I need to be reminded to pay attention? Constantly. But I do think that if we can really focus, you start to see things popping up. Little indicators. Little arrows that point the direction. But it requires a bit of discipline. When you’re making a record, just like writing poetry, you’re really going after looking for it. Just looking for it. There’s a thousand dead ends. But then a little passage way appears.”

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