Many years ago, Devendra Banhart slept nightly on a mattress in a dumpster in New York City. It was during a bedbug scare, when his neighbors had thrown their beds away, and Banhart was a homeless teenage busker, finding busboy jobs to finish customers’ uneaten food. “No shocker I didn’t have a girlfriend!” says Banhart, a singer-songwriter who has put out nine albums, from the cartoon-voiced, herky-jerky “Oh Me Oh My …” to the soft and contemplative “Ape In Pink Marble,” over the past 15 years.
“I’m lucky it happened when I was relatively young. It’s tough to do that the older you get,” continues Banhart, 35, by phone from an Orlando tour stop. “I had a hunger, and I was going to jump off this diving board called art. There’s no turning back, so you just go, and that’s how you get through things like living in a squat with no electricity.”
Today, Banhart is making a fine living as a folk musician capable of great playfulness (like 2009’s “Baby” and last year’s “Jon Lends a Hand,” which unashamedly steals its chords from Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers) and powerful sorrow (like 2007’s Spanish-language “Rosa” and last year’s dirgelike “Mourner’s Dance”). He labors to find the perfect sound — on “Ape,” he rented a traditional Japanese koto, which is almost impossible for inexperienced musicians, even guitarists, to tune quickly. And he jams together styles that don’t quite seem to fit, juxtaposing low-key folk and rock ‘n’ roll with Brazilian samba and bossa nova music and augmenting everything with the koto.
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“It’s not an easy instrument to play, and it’s humbling, and we thought, ‘We’ll just rent a koto,’ and the person renting it to us (said,) ‘Well, I could play on it.’ ‘No, no, we got it,'” says Banhart, who lives in Los Angeles. “We hadn’t prepared for the amount of time it took to tune and transcribe — everything had been written on the guitar, so to transcribe it and tune it for three people who didn’t know how to play the koto at all was humbling.”
The album’s unifying feeling is a hard-to-place sadness, perhaps owing to Banhart’s personal tragedies in the past few years — his biological father and four friends died while he and his band were writing and recording songs. But Banhart isn’t sure about that theory. “Those things were never really explicitly addressed while making the record,” he says. “I get the sense that the next record might be more about the process of that.”
Banhart’s music career began when he was 9, when one of his mother’s dresses liberated him to portray an androgynous rock star around the house, singing into combs and brushes. His parents were divorced; his mother and stepfather had moved from Houston, his birthplace, to Caracas, Venezuela, where he grew up. They supported his music and art, but they weren’t always sure what to make of it.
“It’s kind of bemused, slight concern, but at the same time, they’re coming from a hippie place that was part of the ethos of their adolescence,” Banhart says. “They were happy, but I don’t think they really thought there was a career, or saw how that could even be possible, given the first record (‘Oh Me Oh My … ‘) is me recording on this half-broken machine with this guitar.”
Also a visual artist — he would illustrate the covers of his albums and put out a 2015 book of drawings titled “I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street” — Banhart earned a scholarship to San Francisco Art Institute as a young man. From there, he became a sort of vagabond artist and singer, living on the streets in Paris, LA and New York. When the influential indie label Young God put out Banhart’s debut in 2002, it began a wave of critical acclaim that supports his career to this day.
“I ran off and did my own thing and came back,” he says. “It was the time before all music magazines were obsolete, so I could have a review in Spin or a little photo and bring it to (my parents).”
By phone from a backstage area near a loud, whirring refrigerator, Banhart apologizes repeatedly for a bad connection and talks about demo songs he wrote for an upcoming album — something his label, Nonesuch, suggested could be “a Spanish record.” Then he started rehearsing and touring and began to think about a different direction. But he’s less excited to talk about that than a more immediate goal — after the interview, he’s planning to make a pilgrimage to the site of last year’s Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando.
“We’re just going to show up, the way you would show up at any monument, any now-sacred place, any historical site,” he says. “Our intent is to remind people that event occurred and brought a lot of people, ultimately, together in a we-won’t-forget kind of way. It’s still such a shock. That’s why we wanted to play Orlando.
“The offer was Miami, we said, ‘Let’s play Orlando so we can at least have that moment.’ I wish it had never happened, but we are celebrating the love of a community coming together.”
Steve Knopper is a freelance writer.
Twitter @chitribent
When: 8 p.m. Monday
Where: Thalia Hall; 1807 S. Allport St.
Tickets: $28; 312-526-3851 or www.thaliahallchicago.com
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