Clipping. / Devendra Banhart
IF I SOUND LIKE I KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, you’re not really talking to me because I don’t know anything — so just to clarify, the caveat here is that I have no idea and I do not know what I’m talking about.” Psych-folk weirdo Devendra Banhart is trying to explain his new record, Ape in Pink Marble. This ninth full-length is unabashedly “Devendra” in feel — a multifarious mix of styles, with dashes of romance and humour that those familiar with Banhart have grown to expect, but decidedly more scaled back, tidier and calmer than his earlier work.
Ape in Pink Marble (alternate titles included Fish Taco in Chrome and Wig on Larva) addresses the cohesion of female and male energy, Western vs. Eastern mythology and witnessing the beginnings of love, loneliness, pretention, privilege and the patriarchy.
One curious aspect of Banhart’s work has been his enthusiasm for blurring gender lines. He sings from a woman’s point of view on both “The Other Woman” and “Bad Girl,” from 2007’s Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. Ape in Pink Marble’s “Linda” opens with the line, “I’m a lonely woman, alone in the world.”
Not only has this been part of his artistic arsenal for years, it was the key to unlocking his creativity in the first place. As a nine-year-old, Banhart put on one of his mother’s dresses and grabbed a comb for a microphone. “That’s how I even gave myself permission to sing,” he explains. “I didn’t know how to sing like all those guys, but suddenly, in a dress, I felt empowered, I felt stronger, I felt like I could sing. Because of that experience — because I feel in touch with that side — it makes no difference to me if I’m saying woman or man, or he or she. Why do I play around with gender? Because gender is mine to play around with. Society is just catching up.”
Banhart flips the script for “Fancy Man,” initially meant to be a song about an “empowered superwoman” (originally “she’s a fancy man”). As it evolved, it became a song about “the privileged white male or the collective consumer, a representation for the lowest common denominator — capitalism and greed and ignorance — but in the end they realize that it’s ridiculous and all for nothing. They have a little bit of an awakening at the end of that song,” says Banhart.
He laments that the “empowered superwoman” version never quite materialized. “It would have been a much more powerful song, but in the end, it turns out that I’m much better writing about a guy who’s an asshole than a girl who’s super amazing. I’m not a good enough writer, that’s why I didn’t go with ‘she’ — she deserves better than me writing about her. I couldn’t structure the song the way that I had actually envisioned it, which was disappointing and a testament to my lack of abilities in really getting it just right.”