Road Scholar

Everywhere he goes, Devendra Banhart sees trails.

by A.D. Amorosi

SUMMONING THUNDER: Devendra Banhart (red shirt) has a voice that lilts like Caetano Veloso's, quavers like Billie Holiday's and hiccups like Marc Bolan's.

Devendra Banhart's a wanderer. Childhood in Venezuela. College in San Fran. He hobo-ed throughout the States with a four-track tape recorder and somehow landed on the Brooklyn apartment floor of Michael Gira, the guy who would release his first album, 2002's Oh Me Oh My.... Banhart just bought a house near Malibu after having lived in Venice and several beachfront spots since 2005.

Oh Me Oh My... was a solo set of softly sung aural postcards, short, raw and spiky. Though dotted with strings, Rejoicing in the Hands and Niño Rojo were equally thought-bubbly. Then he started fleshing out his psychedelic sound, first with 2005's Cripple Crow, and now with Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.

Banhart's voice still lilts like Caetano Veloso's, quavers like Billie Holiday's, hiccups like Marc Bolan's. But on Smokey, Banhart leaps through a hazy maze of samba, son and dub. He's got big epics ("Seahorse"), Spanish rock-outs ("Carmensita") and a Jamaican Jewish wedding song ("Shabop Shalom") that'll make you plotz it's so funny. Lyrically Banhart jumps around, too — from past to future tense and from Jamaican patois to Portuguese slang.

Trying to pin the man down for a normal interview is a bit like trying to send him a postcard. By the time your message arrives, he's already somewhere else. Banhart was on the phone in Detroit when I got a hold of him. What follows are bits from our happily rambling conversation, the points we stayed on the longest. Everything else just wandered.

1. "I'm 15 minutes away from the New Orleans from where I recorded lots of Oh Me Oh My...," figures Banhart, contemplating his own musical evolution. Neither of us pays attention to the fact that Detroit is a whole lot farther from NoLa than that. "All that's changed is me — the location within and without me." No matter where he lived, Banhart insists, he would've made Smokey now. It just wouldn't have had the flavors, details and textural nuances that make it Californian. "If I lived in New Orleans, I could say I smelled fucking gator nuggets as opposed to the stealth macrobiotic cake being baked nearby or the Pacific Ocean breeze."

2. "Freely" is the straightest, most uncomplicated of Smokey's slow songs. It came from the height of hopefulness and from the low of hopelessness, according to Banhart — "the very moment those things intertwined. I saw something ahead and I saw something behind that was keeping me back." Then he laughs. "I had to have a New Age hit in there, naw'msayin'?"

3. Earlier in the day, the Sex Pistols announce they'll reunite for the 30th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks. Banhart's only 26, but he had some skate-punk days in his youth. Now he's making this gorgeous psych music, but he says punk is a life, not a fashion. "Energy opposed to a fucking hairstyle." In 2002, Banhart was homeless. "That record came from my own fucked-up world and my own fucked-up headspace. Smokey hasn't lost that. But now we'll get fucked up, start playing and press the record button to get that energy." That's how Smokey's spikiest tune "Tonada Yanomaminista" came about. "I hope the record isn't that boring that it's lost all that energy of mine."

4. Also, in accordance with his mentioning his pals, his best friend/opening act Matteah Baim, is very punk. "She's my Patti and my Nico rolled into one. And she's made the best record in the last 10 years, The Death of the Sun." He calls her one of the most powerful artists he's ever witnessed. And for him the words "punk" and "power" are interchangeable.

5. Oh Me Oh My... was a solitary thing compared to Smokey's communal energy and camaraderie. But even in 2002, Banhart was collaborating. "It wasn't just me. I was collaborating with cars, the wind, the moment," he says. You can even hear a shooting on Oh Me. "There's an actual murder on 'Cosmos and Demos.' I was in Paris on Bastille Day. I remember watching this guy cock a gun and go in shooting." Despite Smokey's sessions often turning partylike, it was a more controlled environment than Oh Me. "It didn't exclude the trees, leaves, dogs and raccoons."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Devendra Banhart plays Sat., Sept. 29, 8 p.m., $25, with Matteah Baim-Death's Groove, Fillmore at the TLA, 334 South St., www.livenation.com.