Devendra Banhart

Devendra Banhart (Born 30th May 1981 in Houston, Texas, but brought up in Venezuela) is an avant-folk singer-songwriter whose first few records were released on the young god records label from New York City. His most recent CD was released by XL Recordings. He is one of the most popular artists to come out of the "new weird america" movement, which includes performers such as Faun Fables, Viking Moses, Jack Rose, Jana Hunter, Arborea, The MV & EE Medicine Show, Currituck Co., Six Organs of Admittance, and The Royal We. He also often joins the band known as Vetiver.

His music tends to consist of fairly simple guitar melodies with minimal other instrumentation, and his lyrics are often surreal and naturalistic. His involvement in the Los Angeles artist community is reflected in "Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon", released in September 2007.

Banhart was discovered by Michael Gira of Swans, who released his Oh Me Oh My... album on his own Young God Records label in 2002. In 2005, he (along with Andy Cabic and Revolver USA) created the Gnomonsong record label.

Banhart also was one of the younger musicians responsible for "rediscovering" the music of folksinger Vashti Bunyan. Bunyan is a guest vocalist on his CD Rejoicing in the Hands of the Golden Empress.

Flying Wig is an album of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio where Banhart was “constantly listening to The Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, modernist, city pop-adjacent and Eno-esque.

Banhart's eleventh record, it's the actualisation of a “precious friendship” with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Mexican Summer stable-mate Cate Le Bon — a coming together prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002 Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos — but never previously translated into the recording studio.

“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, and grief into praise,” - the product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit… if I’m going to cry, I wanna do it in my best dress.”