For more than 20 years, singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart has been bringing his distinctive croon to bear on a brilliant catalogue that has hopped from outsider folk to synthpop. As he prepares to release his next album, Flying Wig, on 22 September, he’ll answer your questions spanning his career to date, which you can post in the comments below.
Born in Texas, Banhart was raised in his mother’s homeland of Venezuela before moving back to the US in his teens. A spell at art school led to experiments with music, and he began the kind of free-spirited songwriting and performance that came to define him, busking around various cities and recording musical sketches on the fly. His breakthrough second album, Oh Me Oh My, came out in 2002, and Banhart became a key name in the diffuse “freak folk” movement of the era.
His ambitions and musical arrangements swelled as he jumped from the little label Young God to mega-indie XL Recordings and eventually a major label (his stardom helped along by a high-profile romance with Natalie Portman), picking up collaborators such as Anohni, Beck and the actor Gael García Bernal along the way.
A four-year break from album releases after 2009’s What Will We Be seemed to do him good: 2013 comeback Mala is perhaps his finest record to date, though its brilliant followups Ape in Pink Marble and Ma further establish this later period of his songwriting as his strongest.
He continues it with Flying Wig, an album made in a Topanga cabin once owned by Neil Young and produced by Welsh alt-pop star Cate Le Bon, who helped to evolve his sound, now encompassing warm, drowsy synths and tinny drum machines. It was inspired in part by a poem by 18th-century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa:
This dewdrop world –
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet,
And yet …
“I’ve never read a more concise and clear illustration of hope,” Banhart has explained. “The ‘and yet, and yet’ is our ability to face despair with hope, to keep on failing and loving. It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, grief into praise.”
Whether you want to know about this new album born out of sadness and hope, or indeed about any of the rest of his variously impish and melancholy catalogue, post your questions below before 6pm BST on Tuesday 25 July.
