Devendra Banhart isn’t interested in being your savior. He’d rather be your auntie. “Everyone in my band has kids now,” he says with a warm laugh. “I’m the auntie, you know, showing them ‘That is great’ or teaching them to speak Spanish. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve got a lot of turtlenecks.”
That kind of tender eccentricity pulses through Ma, his contemplative, musically hushed, politically fraught, spiritually adrift new record. And like the title suggests, it’s all about moms—literal, metaphorical, linguistic, and cosmic. “Ma means ‘mother’ in as many languages as I could find,” he explains. “It might be the first word a being might utter—and maybe even the last.”
Also: it’s a Japanese term for negative space. Also: it’s how Banhart explores the helplessness of watching Venezuela, his birthplace, fall apart under dictatorship. Also: it’s a recording philosophy. And probably a dog’s name in Topanga Canyon somewhere.
“There’s this mothering quality that’s not gendered,” he says. “It’s in nature. It’s in art. It’s in people like Vashti Bunyan.” He’s not just name-dropping the UK psych-folk legend. She duets with him on Ma as a sort of musical matriarch, her voice still able to calm a Devendra in crisis. “Every time I feel unloved or frightened or lonely, I turn to her music,” he says. “Still. After 20 years. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s nourishment.”
Carole King and Joni Mitchell also get name-checked as emotional anchors. “That maternal wisdom,” he calls it. “I still turn to it when I feel insecure. Which, to be honest, is like 99% of my life.”
If that sounds melodramatic, spend five minutes discussing Venezuela with him. “It’s a dictatorship,” he says bluntly. “A military dictatorship. People are dying. There’s no food, no medicine, no electricity. My family lives there. I get texts that say, ‘You won’t hear from me for a week. Power’s going out.’ That’s how people are living.”
Over four million have fled the country, many on foot. And while Banhart funnels ticket sales to aid groups like World Central Kitchen and Rainbow Railroad, he knows it’s not enough. “I’m doing the bare minimum,” he admits. “But so can you. That’s the good news.”
He slips into satire briefly—because it’s the only way to stay sane. “It’s not even a good dictatorship,” he deadpans. “It’s a myopic, ego-driven, mismanaged mess. At least with North Korea, there’s a game plan. This is just chaos.”
Ma isn’t a protest album, though. It’s gentler than that. Acoustic. Natural. Recorded near the Pacific Ocean with the windows open and the birds as backup singers. No synths. No walls. Literally.
“We started in a temple in Kyoto,” he says. “There were no walls. Just a ceiling, a floor, and the garden. We recorded in a zendo, but didn’t keep the track—it was poorly recorded. But that feeling, that spaciousness, that became the whole album.”
Spaciousness is key. Banhart talks about “ma” in the Japanese sense—the space between the notes, the silence that makes the song. “Maybe growth is learning to see the mother in more than just your mother. In nature. In people. In the ocean.”
And if that’s too ethereal for you, he’ll gently steer you toward one of the album’s “hypothetical child” lessons instead. “The record is me trying to introduce myself to a child, if I had one,” he says. “Or to my nieces and nephews. Or to myself. Or to the world.”
There’s a lot happening on Ma. There’s politics, philosophy, grief, gratitude, acoustic guitars, turtlenecks. But above all, there’s a quiet invitation. A gentle plea to care. “Things are so awful,” Banhart says. “You either have to be really gentle about it—or really funny.”
He prefers both.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
