Devendra Banhart: Child of the cosmos

Devendra Banhart is in a groovy place right now, he tells Kevin Harley. So why should he care if he's called a naive hippie?

The elfin Banhart hails from Texas via Venezuela, but he looks at home here, where the stage is a cool, calm barn set among trees, fields and lakes. "I live here, in this castle," he says, gesturing at the château, with an impish twinkle that makes him look more than ever like the pixie king of the hippies. "Got a nice room, with bread and wine. That's where the servants live," he adds, waving at the lodge-cum-dressing-room: "Young, elfin women that shave the callouses on the soles of my feet daily..."

Banhart emerged to acclaim in 2002 with 'Oh Me Oh My', a debut album of mellifluous folk songs that sounded sharp and happy to be alive, rather than merely nostalgic for a 1967 that Banhart (he's now 24) is too young to have known. As for his hippie-chic, timeless quaver of a voice, and lyrics about beards, teeth, the cosmos and animals, he carried the role of a man out of time and place naturally.

If being prolific without failure is any gauge, it's a world he knows how to move in, too. Banhart released two albums in 2004, 'Rejoicing in the Hands' and 'Nino Rojo', neither deviating far from his stomping ground so much as revelling in its fecundity on songs about spiders, pigs, owls, suns, insect eyes and the like. His new album, 'Cripple Crow', manages to be no less recognisably his while taking sure, subtle steps forward. Many of its 22 tracks boast a full band, and it weaves a faintly whimsical yet wily, witty and worldly web out of protest songs, late-1960s-styled psychedelic pop, sultry Spanish-sung folk and catchy doo-wop.

"I'm a little more satisfied with it," says Banhart. "I look at making records like you make a dish. A culinary experience. The way you throw in a tambourine, it's like spices or herbs. The main part of the song is the stock. On the first record I worked with shitty ingredients, and on the next two I was not cooking but, like, a recipe book. On this one, we got to cooking a little."

The effect is of having stumbled on the happiest of hipster-hippie hoedowns, complete with extra, ethereal voices that give 'Cripple Crow' the flavour of something baked in one big love-in. Its sleeve suggests as much. Referencing the cover of 'Sgt Pepper', it features many of the 25 guests on the album, from the nu-folkie Joanna Newsom to Georgeson and Cabic, the bohemian sister act CocoRosie (one of whose number, Bianca Casady, is Banhart's girlfriend), members of the folk-ish outfits Feathers, Espers and Currituck Co, and more besides. Asked why this "wyrd" folk scene has re-emerged to acclaim for the first time since the late Sixties, he is sufficiently self-aware to quip: "Oh, we're a corporate strategy - we were groomed to do this. My beard isn't real. I can't wait to get out of these nasty Seventies rags. I'm more a cargo-shorts-and-Hawaiian-shirt kind of man. And this," he says, pulling on his hair, "is a strap-on ponytail."

'Cripple Crow' taps into history, not least by being recorded in Bearsville, Woodstock, a location occupied by The Band and Dylan in 1968 where they fashioned the legendary 'Basement Tapes'. "I wanted to work with my family in a space that feels like an energy battery," says Banhart. "Something that has been storing energy for a long time. It's not so much about equipment but the architecture of the space. And what for me stores energy the best is wood. I wanted a place that had good vibes, so I went there and wrote the record in winter by the fire and invited my friends to come play on it. We were surrounded by the beautiful wood and snow and deer and wild turkeys and, once in a while, bears. And it was cold so we tried to make a record that was warm, to astrally project some kind of tropical hibiscus island."

Banhart was born in Texas, before moving to Caracas at the age of three and back to California in the mid-Nineties. The early influences he cites range from Milli Vanilli to EMF and Garth Brooks; formative experiences in a more notably Banhart-ish vein include writing songs about dogs having plastic surgery. His first gig was at his room-mates' gay wedding, singing "How Great Thou Art" and "Love Me Tender" as Bob the Crippled Comic and Jerry Elvis made their vows. Around this time, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and lived homeless in Paris; then a move to New York in 2001 introduced him to his afore-mentioned "family", as well as Antony of Antony and the Johnsons (whose 'I Am a Bird Now' album features Banhart's heady incantations on one song), and the former member of the Swans, Michael Gira, who released 'Oh Me Oh My' on his Young God Records label.

Did this itinerant background prepare him for touring, you wonder. "You would think so, but it doesn't," he says. "What I used to do with my mom and then alone was walk as long as we could until we had to stop. Just see something in the distance and walk toward it. Literally. And now I can't walk off because I have to play a show, so there is that weird feeling of losing your freedom, yet at the same time doing something that's free. It isn't as natural as I would think if someone told me, hey, you're gonna be touring all the time. So you start finding freedom in music as opposed to wandering."

'Cripple Crow' is rich in a kind of open poeticism, translating Banhart's persona-based playfulness into songwriting that traverses eras and genres while majoring in precocity, purpose and possible meaning. Tracks such as "I Feel Just Like a Child" seem to have fun with perceptions of him as faux-naive, for example, but he sees the album as more outward-looking than that. "Songs aren't finished when they're done, because they live on, right?", he says. "It might just be one word that'll let the song kind of walk around a little bit. So, to me, that song is not even so much about me. There is some play there but it's not like I'm pulling it out of my ass. It's more about having fun with the way the government in America treats people like children."

Similarly, the sense that the album repeatedly riffs on a theme of children ("Chinese Children", "Long Haired Child") is welcomed but half-rebutted with a broader idea. "I'm very open to your interpretation, it's a groovy interpretation," he says. "But I was listening to mostly south American music while I was making it and reading a book by Dee Brown, 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee'. So, for me, the theme of this record is actually present-day South America, pre-Columbus North America. "

The album's penultimate track, "Little Boys", also contains more layers than it might appear to. As the song shifts from a blues lament to finger-clicking pop at the halfway point, it veers wickedly close to sounding like a paedophile's pop anthem ("I see so many little boys I wanna marry"). Not so, says Banhart. It's about a "schizophrenic hermaphrodite", and it also has a bigger purpose: "I was with this guy from the band Bunny Brains and he was saying, 'I heard your record, man, it's gonna be in, like, Starbucks, whatever.' And I was like, man, I don't want it to be in Starbucks! I'm going to write a song that will 'guarantee' that it is not in Starbucks."

And 'Cripple Crow''s protest song, the Beatles-ish "Heard Somebody Say", with its easy bridge between 1968 and now? Despite the suggestion of over-naivety in the lyric, "It's simple, we don't wanna kill", Banhart treads carefully. "I wanted to make that song as vague as possible in terms of talking about the current state of the world," he says. "Protest songs can be cheesy but I think I did all right. There might be a few shreds of Parmesan in there but it's not like some big block of Brie, melting in the sun."

Which, happily, brings us to dairy products. Recently, Banhart did something that seems, from a distance, out of character: he let one of his songs, "At the Hop" ("Put me on your plate/ 'cause you know I taste great"), be used in an advert for Cathedral City cheddar. Did he need the money? The publicity? Or was he just monkeying about? His answer, at least, has more cheek than cheese about it. "Well, I love that cheese," he says. "I grew up eating that cheese. It changed my life, you know? The song was written by me and Andy Cabic, and we thought, this is ours, let's use it for commercials. It got used for a beer commercial and we got some free beer. And we love beer. So, they asked for a cheese commercial and we thought, let's get some cheese. Had to buy another fridge for all that cheese and beer. Next up we got bread, napkins, forks, a house commercial, then a car commercial... and then a party!"

If Banhart's live show is anything to go by, he'd throw a good one. A few minutes after the interview he's on stage, quivering voice relishing the ripe words on spine-tingling acoustic songs before he's on his feet, shimmying through a set of Stones-y strut and psychedelic flower-pop that's loose and limber enough to feel something like a musical equivalent of his youthful wanderings. It's a great show, steaming with history yet full of its own flavours. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, Banhart is, indeed, cooking where it counts.

'Cripple Crow' is out on Monday; Devendra Banhart plays the Astoria, London WC2 on 16 November