Devendra Banhart: think all the bohemian spirit. Experimental joie de vivre, and wild individualism has been bled out of music. Think again. Lindsay Lohan gets inside the eccentric, ecstatic, and irrepressible mind of one of music's true romantics

Interview, April, 2006 by Lindsay Lohan

LINDSAY LOHAN: Okay, let's begin.

DEVENDRA BANHART: So my big, exciting thing for this interview is I made a mix for you, a really long one. And this is my part of the interview: You have to get back to me about what songs you liked.

LL: Is it a mix of stuff you've done?

DB: No, just a mix of my favorite music. It's songs that I love and songs that I think that you should cover and that I'm going to cover, etc. And I want you to get back to me--at least five songs that you somewhat liked or dug or whatever.

LL: Oh, I like Led Zeppelin. Is this your hand writing?

DB: Yes.

LL: You have such nice writing. It looks like the writing on your record.

DB: I also brought you a book of drawings that came with the records I made.

LL: Did you do them too? They're very Yoko Ono.

DB: Oh, I love her.

LL: Let's see, what do we want to start with? I came up with some fun pop-up questions.

DB: I like the whole "What are you thinking right now?" thing.

LL: I like that too.

DB: That's fun. Okay, what are you thinking right now? Just whatever pops into your head.

LL: I just walked into the Mercer Hotel ...

DB: An image. It doesn't matter. It could just be a thing.

LL: I see you smoking a cigarette? What are you thinking?

DB: Red backpack.

LL: Why red backpack?

DB: I don't know. It was just the first thing that popped into my head.

LL: Really? Did you see someone walk in with a backpack?

DB: I didn't,

LL: [laughs] So tell me about your life. You are from Texas, right?

DB: I was born in Texas, but I immediately moved to Caracas, Venezuela, and I lived there until I was 13 years old.

LL: Why did you move to Venezuela?

DB: Because my mother's whole family is from there. My parents split up and my mother went back.

LL: I dated someone from Venezuela and he left there at 13, too. I don't know what part of Venezuela he was from.

DB: Do we look alike?

LL: No, not really at all.

DB: I can really tan. I should have a tan.

LL: People have asked me to describe what you look like when I've mentioned your music and played your songs, and I say, "He's a better-looking version of, like, the Charles Manson-esque type."

DB: Well, I'll tell you what. I don't agree so much with Charles Manson--he's a perfect example of the hippie movement gone bad. But I really do dig his music. There's a sleazy side to it. There's a dark side to it. There's a human side to it. He made some amazing music. "Home Is Where You're Happy" is one of the best songs ever, and it was a Charles Manson song. The Manson films are actually really beautiful, too.

LL: I drove by Sharon Tate's house once. It was very strange and weird. So what made you want to sing?

DB: Plastic surgery, actually.

LL: Plastic surgery?

DB: Yeah. There's this kind of underground fetish that goes on in middle-class families in Caracas, which has one of the highest rate of plastic surgery in the whole world. Rich people don't bother with it and poor people can't afford it--what happens is that people get slight surgery on the pets of the household so they look like the senior member of the family. We had three schnauzers--Lucy, Tina, and Cuca. The surgeon came over and made them look just slightly like my grandmother, who was the oldest member of the family. And then they took a picture. So I witnessed that and wrote this song about plastic surgery called "We're All Going to Die." I did it a capella. Then my family asked me to never sing again. I didn't write another song until I was, like, 17.

LL: Why did they ask you to never sing an other song?

DB: They were horrified. I was about 9 and singing this song. They were really freaked out. But that's when I started writing songs.

LL: And you've been singing ever since?

DB: Yeah, pretty much.

LL: So there are three of you who work together in your band? Or is it just you?

DB: Well, it's a band. It has switched around from time to time and the name changes. The first time it was called the Queens of Sheba. The second time it was called White Buffalo, Deer Woman Appears. And then it was called Hairy Fairy, after the Cockettes. Right now we don't have a name.

LL: When I saw you play, I think it was you, one of your friends, and a girl who performed.

DB: That's right. They're all in the band. It's Noah Georgeson who co-produced and co-engineered Cripple Crow [XL Recordings], and Eliza Douglas, who was also in the band called the Bunny Brains. You've made two records, right?

LL: Yeah.

DB: Then why aren't you hooking me up with your albums?

LL: I didn't really have much to do with my first record [Speak, 2004]; the second one [A Little More Personal (Raw), Casablanca] I had more to do with. But I've been juggling everything at once. They didn't all happen on my time as much as I wanted. I'm also still finding out what I like, so it's kind of hard to incorporate things I want to listen to into my music rather than just writing a lot of hooks. I just kind of go with it.

DB: That's a good mantra.

LL: Do you celebrate Christmas?