Devendra Banhart: Everything Is Burning

Before releasing his 11th solo album, Flying Wig, and embarking on an international three-month tour, Devendra Banhart needed to go on a different type of pilgrimage. 

He packed a bag and boarded a flight for New Delhi, India, then turned north from that chaotic megacity and arrived in Bir—a tiny Himalayan village with a sizeable population of Tibetan Buddhist monks. Banhart was seeking purification— spiritual, physical, mental—and face time with his teacher, a prominent monk who he’s studied with for years. And like so many seekers, he was guided by a sense of wonder. 

“In the society we exist in, everything an artist does could be considered irrational,” he says. “But in the monastery, it’s like: Today, someone saw a giant boulder in a river and felt it had the energy of Lord Shiva, so let’s get a crane and move it. That’s almost laughable here in the West. But it is exciting for me. I go to India to bear witness to things like that.” 

To anyone familiar with Banhart’s music, none of this will sound surprising. Rather, the singer’s curiosity—the playfulness of his melodies and lyrics, his freedom to experiment—has long been one of his biggest draws. From his earliest days as a scrappy, weirdo-folk troubadour coming up alongside Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom, to recent years recording funky Tropicália-tinged rock, predictability has never been Devendra Banhart’s thing. But, even he has never landed on a planet quite like Flying Wig. And, in its sound, subjects and feeling, Flying Wig is brand new territory for the singer.

The album was produced and co-created by Welsh singer Cate Le Bon, who helped him replace his warm guitar playing and effervescent melodies with ambient waves of synthesizers, electronic percussion and meditative lyrics. Inside the folds of those sounds, we find a much more subdued, humbled and awe-struck Banhart. 

And the journey that led him there began with a conversation with an actual wig, flying above the ground without any head beneath it. 

***

It’s early fall and Banhart is back in his Los Angeles apartment. He’s amazed that he’s able to articulate any thoughts at all—he just returned from India last night.  Even while deeply jetlagged, Banhart’s mind is a labyrinth of bad-joke tangents, alternate-universe scenarios and philosophical meanderings. He describes sitting in quiet meditation, absorbing lessons from his teacher—receiving “a direct transmission from his Buddhist lineage that’s pure and un-fucked-with.” 

But soon we arrive at the wig—and the genesis of his new album. Amid COVID-19 lockdown, Banhart took a wig—a gift from his sister—and hung it in the middle of his living room with a fishing line. The wig made him feel less alone, less like the world was ending and more like there was another world to explore. 

“I’d imagine that, when I was asleep and the whole world was in lockdown, this wig was out there, mixing in a whole society of wigs,” he remembers, a hand grasping his chin and grinning. “It was going to bars, going shopping—living in a parallel wig world. I talked to it a lot; it really became my companion.” 

Banhart struggled to write songs, questioning the point of making any art in a world that seemed to be wobbling toward a violent conclusion. He sensed a chasm grow between his fingers and his guitar. His last solo album, 2019’s beautiful, vulnerable Ma, felt eons away. Any song sketches he could muster felt disparate and anchorless. 

An old friend and an older poem pulled him back from the void. 

“I reread this poem, and I understood it in a new light,” he says, before reciting, as if for the first time: “This dewdrop world/ Is a dewdrop world/ And yet, and yet.”

The haiku comes from 19th-century Buddhist priest Kobayashi Issa. 

“And yet…” Banhart repeats. “I understood that this pointless, impermanent thing is still so worth experiencing, honoring and standing in awe of. I wanted every song to return to an and yet-ness—standing in awe, admiring the miracle. It was so clear to me that it’d be my lyrical anchor.” 

Banhart seems to be on a quest to find meaning and feel wonder despite—or because of—the impermanence of our lives. He noted his changing relationships. His longtime friend Noah Georgeson had already shifted from producer to collaborator; the two men released an ambient, orchestral album called Refuge in 2021. 

“[Refuge] opened up this shift in a decades-old relationship,” Banhart says. “And when you wanna spice things up, you change—you don’t need to get a divorce. So I began wondering who else could by my producer. And Cate Le Bon was the first and only person I asked. When she said, ‘Yes,’ that chasm began to shrink. I could play once again.” 

Cate Le Bon and Devendra Banhart have been friends since the early 2000s, when both were rising names in alternative folk scenes. Friends often suggested they meet, citing their similar debut album titles (his: Oh Me Oh My…, hers: Me Oh My) and magical, musical worldview.

“The first time Devendra met me, he came into a recording session of mine sporting a hairstyle that looked like Coachella and asked me to perform an emergency chop on it using a fork as a comb. Then he complained about how awful it was and left,” remembers Le Bon, checking in from a studio in Greece. “I was a little perplexed by him. Even now, after years of friendship, I still am. I enjoy that someone you know and love so well can enter or leave a room and mystify you.” 

Banhart calls Le Bon, “an amazing writer, an amazing singer, an amazing producer and the bass player of her generation—of many generations. I wanna say something flippant and stupid, but with Cate it’s gotta be totally sincere.”

The pair set dates on their respective calendars, and invited friend and engineer Samur Khouja to join—and Banhart finally felt like he had some marching orders. He began assembling a vast body of song sketches, sending batches to Le Bon. Throughout, he kept searching for his and yet, writing songs inspired by wonder that were, hopefully, wonderful as well. 

***

Less than a year later, Banhart, Le Bon and Khouja arrived in a cabin in Topanga Canyon, Calif. In the preceding months, the team had whittled down nearly 90 demos into a more manageable 15. 

“I was thinking quantity over quality. I told Cate, ‘I’m so sorry, I promise I’ll pay you to comb through and find the good stuff,’” Banhart says.

They’d selected a remote location with its own pure and un-fucked-with lineage: Neil Young wrote and recorded his After the Gold Rush demos in the cabin. Further, from the cabin’s window, Banhart could see another cabin—where he’d recorded his 2007 album, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. The cabin closes another circle as well: Young and Banhart shared a manager, Elliot Roberts, until his death in 2019. 

“Twelve years after I recorded Smokey, I’m looking out the window and I could see the cabin where I made that album, remembering Elliot standing in that cabin pointing to this cabin,” Banhart says, still in disbelief.  

From the beginning of their time in Topanga, two things were apparent to the trio. 

The first: Banhart would not be co-producing the album. Within their first five minutes in the studio, says Banhart, he knew that he wanted to hand the reins to Le Bon, allowing himself to release and sink as deep as possible into his subconscious, creative mind. 

As he puts it, laughing, “I wanted to do as little work as possible! In creating music, there’s this intense, weird vulnerability. Half the time, I’m like, ‘La La La La, popcorn colonic in the parking  lot?’ Then I’m asking if it’s any good. I’m always seeing what I can get away with.” 

He trusted Le Bon—as a friend, peer and quickly as a producer—to tell him what he couldn’t. She’d already combed through dozens of demos; in Topanga, she wasn’t shy to tell Banhart when he could do better. 

And the second: This record would not sound anything like Banhart’s previous 10. 

Banhart was intent to enter the cabin ready to experiment, without a notion of where he’d end up.

“If you enter the studio saying: ‘We’re not gonna fuck with these songs one bit,’ a lot of useful space can be missed. I wanted to come into the studio with lots of space, ready to fill in the blanks,” he says. 

“We allowed these songs to be in motion for as long as possible,” Le Bon adds. “Working on them all simultaneously allowed one song’s evolution to inform another song, so they felt like they were all carved from the same rock.” 

The influence of Banhart’s 2021 ambient album Refuge loomed large in mind—those orchestrations had proven far more difficult and rewarding than Banhart imagined. Le Bon’s own musical palette—heavier bass, shades of ‘80s New Wave—coaxed along a new sound. Banhart and Le Bon began recasting the demos as synth ballads, leaving guitars and drums largely to the side. 

Here, in a cabin tucked away among eucalyptus, cypress and pine trees, he loved the idea of creating a sound that distinctly did not mesh with the pastoral landscape. They would not be creating another Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon—and certainly not an After the Gold Rush update. 

“The canyon has such a pastoral vibe, and it worked well as a counterpoint for this very synth-heavy, almost desolate shadow landscape that we wanted to create. That idea gave the record a distinct identity. We used these synths to create something desolate, dystopian—like the shadow realm of the environment we were in, but without any mega-dramatic terror,” Banhart says. “It’s grainy memory of the future. Like the landscape in Terminator, but when the Terminators lose their charger and need a rest.”

Banhart pauses and grins again, mustering another way to illustrate the dichotomy. His eyes widen when he finds one. 

“It’s like going to North Korea, to make a record solely on ukulele,” he says. 

***

While Flying Wig is indeed more electronic than any Banhart record before it, the music feels warm and organic—humans hugging when the Terminators take a nap. It’s the sound of friends embracing each other’s weirdest, and thereby most human, creative impulses. Their music is lasting and yet in an impermanent, dewdrop world. 

Over the course of two cabin-dwelling months, Banhart and Le Bon narrowed their initial 15 songs down to 10.  Most of them—short of one real Gary Numan-esque synth-rock banger, “Twin”—are slowly unfolding, like an electronic lotus flower. 

Banhart’s melodies are all hummable, if not as playful or outright kooky as in records past. His lyrics are equally cerebral and rooted in our physical, impermanent world. Over an industrial churn of “Sight Seer,” he admits, “I’m singing no longer for fun, but as a form of protection. Just like feeling the embrace of no embrace at all—limitless as space, yet infinitely small.” 

When Banhart couldn’t find his own and yet, his producer stepped in to remind him. On the hushed, twinkling “Charger,” he opens with one of the most relatable fears of the modern world: “Well, it looks like I’ve lost my charger.” But he needed Le Bon to take it home. 

“I had this line for the chorus: ‘Everything is burning,’” remembers Banhart. “And I was beating my head, trying to find the corresponding line. Cate just happened to say: ‘But the grass is always green.’ I jumped up and screamed—that was the line! That chorus is us, encapsulated. The first line is so silly and so stupid. This [is] very real[1]world anxiety. But by the chorus, there’s a different feeling in the room.” 

The communal living allowed for free-flowing creativity and collaboration. No one was waiting to go home; they’d built a new home together. 

Khouja breaks it down like this: “It was so nice to learn the nuances of each person’s habits. Cate likes to run in the morning. Devendra likes pickles and I used up a lot of counter space in the kitchen with hot sauces.” 

Le Bon is similarly fond of their Topanga time: “Living and making music together in the canyon was a very beautiful bubble of an existence. I’d wake up and find Devendra in the kitchen writing. We’d have coffee and, most mornings, we’d drive together to see the ocean before we started work. It became a ritual: trying to spot the gray whales migrating before working 12 hours in the studio.” 

Banhart, too, was migrating— completing a pilgrimage back to a place of comfort and support after he’d been stuck speaking to a wig that couldn’t respond. In the cabin/studio, he wore a dress that he had received from Le Bon and his grandmother’s pearls. 

“When I sing in a dress, I’m in my power. I feel beautiful and strong,” says Banhart. “The years leading to this record, I felt like I was floating in space. I needed to feel tethered, and those pearls brought me back to my own lineage.”