At the start of the century, Devendra Banhart emerged as the ecstatic pied piper of an esoteric folk resurgence, a magnetic singer-songwriter who mingled childlike wonder and guru-level insight over glittering fingerpicked guitar. Unapologetically inquisitive and ardent, Banhart’s early works seemed to provide a sort of instruction manual for life.
But Banhart soon seemed lost himself, or at least distracted in the search for something more. Since 2005’s discursive Cripple Crow, his records have veered wildly into magpie obsessiveness, recombining genres and criss-crossing borders in search of revelations that didn’t come. In the process, he’s made messes of records, though they’ve always included a few stunning moments, songs like “I Remember” or “Never Seen Such Good Things” that insisted the singular spark of those early works remained. The beguiling Ma—his tenth album and best and most cohesive statement in more than a decade—starts to rekindle it.
Approaching 40 and dealing with the death of parents and mentors, Banhart realized in recent years that he may never become a father. Ma, he has said, is his attempt to gather the insight he might pass along to his hypothetical child, lessons he wished he’d learned as an adolescent. The broad prompt gives Banhart a necessary sense of direction but ample leeway to roam, a space to pull together the messy threads of his life. There is jubilation and mourning, existential unease and everyday amusement. He sings in four languages, gliding among English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he shifts smoothly during one three-song stretch from electric country-funk to string-buoyed piano balladry to elegiac finger-picking. This time, the moves make Banhart’s messages feel ecumenical rather than disjointed, hard-won wisdom he’s ready to dole out in any way he can.
Banhart steps fully into these songs with a vitality that recalls his beginnings. The songs are arranged and rendered with nuance by a veteran band, as comfortable with synthesizer squall as they are saxophone fantasies. Puckish and tender, Banhart seems again delighted to be here, too. From the opening notes of the smart little “Is This Nice,” where pizzicato strings and loping bass ingeniously invoke the sway of a baby being rocked, he is a singer with renewed purpose. “Is this real? Do I mean it?” he coos in the second verse, in the tone of a nursery rhyme. “I really wanna be here with you.”
The lessons flow freely from there. Banhart handles death with gravity and grace, with “Memorial” honoring the complicated feelings that remain after a person is gone. The irrepressible “Kantori Ongaku” reads like a user’s guide for reckoning with a world more complex than the one you might have imagined. During “Carolina,” wrestling with a bout of unrequited love, he is funny and self-effacing, crooning in Portuguese over dreamlike strings that he’d stand a better chance if he actually learned the language of his would-be lover. He touches on the peril of global warming and the paradoxes of globalism, and he admits that it’s OK to have mixed emotions about living in this world at all. “The older I get, the less I fear anyone I see/And yet all the more, I fear humanity,” he sings, condensing the album’s vast emotional topography into a striking couplet.
In the last decade-plus, Banhart has seemed so busy searching for a new way to say something old that he’s not managed to say much at all. But Ma is a record rich with takeaways, about how to get by and how to be kind in a social order that tempts us to be indolent and indulgent. It is alternately soft and steely, somber and ebullient, confused and confident—as true to life as “The Body Breaks” and “I Feel Just Like a Child.” “I love you the way I want everyone to know/How very much I love them but never told them so,” he sings during “Will I See You Tonight?,” a wrecking ball of a duet with Vashti Bunyan. It is a complicated confession of failure—a fitting end for an album guided, for the first time in years, by Banhart’s probing vulnerability.
Buy: Rough Trade
