Devendra Banhart
“I’M a little bit out of my mind,” explains Devendra Banhart from his home in Los Angeles. “I got back from Japan yesterday and I’m going to Nepal tomorrow for a month. It’s half a pilgrimage, half shooting a movie. Oh, and a video too!” The singer-songwriter can’t reveal more about his new acting gig, other than that “the subject is something that’s really important” to him, but he’s delighted to discuss his new album, Ma, at length, and take Uncut through the dusty corners of his very fine catalogue; come with us, then, from Paris pavements to Woodstock, and from New York to the place where Richard Brautigan died.
“Everyone has their own projects,” Banhart explains of his close circle of long-term collaborators, “so one of the only ways I get to see my friends is to make a record!”
THE CHARLES C LEARY
HINAH, 2002
The songwriter’s earliest recordings, tracked around the world (and sometimes its toilets)
I started recording in San Francisco, then I went to Paris – one of the songs was recorded in a toilet there because the acoustics are so good! I was travelling with a Tascam that Noah Georgeson had lent me, on the condition that I would have to share the music. I just had this feeling that I had to record because I was writing these songs. You’re pulling from the first 17 years of your life, and you’re learning that songwriting can be a way of working through certain things, and it can be a way of saying to people, “This is what I’m like when no-one’s
