Devendra Banhart: An Artist’s Hand

Banhart’s latest album, Mala, recorded with longtime collaborator Noah Georgeson, is an album stripped bare in many ways. It was recorded in what Banhart has referred to as his “tiny, tiny home”, with most instruments played by Banhart and Georgeson after being collected from pawnshops and old studios. While these things are tactile, it’s Banhart’s approach to the songs that seems the most exposed. From the very first track there’s a rawness to his vocal timbre that is ultimately captivating.

“Well, if it does seem like I’m using my voice differently…” Banhart begins, trailing off to think for a moment. “I mean, voices change and it does have to do with microphones, distance to the microphone and that sort of thing, but really, for me, I had decided to stop trying to sing. I feel like at one point in making records I really wanted to make it clear that I knew how to sing – whatever that meant – and that I was good.”

How does one stop trying to sing when they’re, well, a singer? “I’m not a singer really,” Banhart says. “I want to tell a story, so my main concern becomes: ‘What sort of music do I need to put to these words?’ I sing it, I enjoy it, but I don’t have this idea that I’m a professional singer or anything. I abandoned that on this record and I’m singing without putting tremendous effort into it, and by just focusing on the architecture of the song and getting the lyrics across in a nice way. It became about the character of the song – often these songs are about the character – and so I put myself in a particular mindset of who I imagined singing the song. Very often the ‘me’ in my songs are not actually me; they’re not autobiographical. I’ve been to the setting but the drama has been created.”

While it’s clear the space within Banhart as an individual changed considerably before and during the recording of Mala, he feels the physical space where he recorded actually had less of an impact on the overall sound of the record.

“Every space I’ve recorded in has been so very different from the others,” he says. “The last one [in rural northern California, where he recorded 2009’s What Will We Be], wasn’t any bigger than this one, but the personnel was a lot smaller and maybe that did help to create an environment where I was a lot more relaxed and less concerned. But that implies that when I’m around a bunch of other people I start to care about how I sing, and that’s not entirely the case. I do know how to play music and I do know how to sing, but it’s been almost a by-product of loving music and wanting to compose music that I’ve developed these skills.”

While Banhart can be humble about his musicianship, his output has been fairly prolific. Mala is his eighth studio album, while his visual art has been displayed everywhere from San Francisco to Brussels. He’s forever creating, which is often a thankless pursuit, and I ask whether time away from music provides him with inspiration to write again.

“I’ve been making visual work since I’ve been making music and I balance both constantly,” he says. “Right now I’m working on a book and so that’s taking up a heap of time. In a weird way, one of my favourite things about composing music is exploring other music and listening to music. I like finding things that inspire me in certain genres throughout the world and throughout time, and then thinking about how I could do something in that style in some other time.

“My composition time is taken up by the conception stage of a song – what would I like a song to sound like? What would I like it to be about? Then there’s a small percentage that’s cathartic, when I think about what I’m going to express; that I’m going to get a particular thing out that I don’t know how to talk about. I think part of why we make art is to express that part of ourselves that exists when we’re alone – well, a slim portion of why.”

I wonder if there’s a medium in which Banhart feels the most confident, or a space where he feels the least amount of self-doubt. “The least amount of self-doubt? I have zero confidence in all of them. It’s just varying degrees of self-doubt, and then a fucking shitload of self-doubt and then an abyss of self-doubt. Then it just goes out into oceans – plural – of self-doubt out into the cosmos. These are celestial bodies of self-doubt that orbit around me.”

So what enables Banhart to cross that terrifying threshold of doubt and allow us to enjoy what he creates, while most people just hide away in privacy? “Oh, well, that’s easy,” he says. “I don’t let failure get in the way of failing.”

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