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

LL: That's very George Harrison.

DB: I really dig George.

LL: Who are your main musical influences? What people did you look to or listen to when you were younger?

DB: Probably Caetano Veloso and Simon Diaz. Those are the two people. Caetano Veloso's song "Lost in Paradise" and Simon Diaz's song "Luna de Margarita" are both on your mix. This is a to-be-continued question.

LL: We'll have a follow-up conversation?

DB: Yeah, please. I want you to check them out. We'll put a star next to my two heroes. And let's just also add at this point that Lindsay is an extremely hard worker. She just got off a plane after coming back from Berlin and she's exhausted and yawning and passing out, and it's Valentine's Day and we're at the Mercer Hotel and we're drinking melted chocolate.

LL: He's illegally smoking inside.

DB: Illegally smoking pink cigarettes. And we've got 12 beautiful Chippendale models dressed as Care Bears giving us lap dances, and we have a snow machine and we're snowboarding on giant, pink, phallic-shaped snowboards, and it's just so much fun.

LL: I'm just letting you go with it. [laughs] The music that you sing and the type of people that you like--it seems something of a cult-type thing. What do you want people to get from your music? Or is it just for you?

DB: I don't think it's an exclusive thing at all. We try to be inclusive. The word cult is an exclusive word. I sing about human things that people can relate to--at least I think I do. The people that kind of get the wrong idea and get a little obsessed and show up at the house--

LL: Has that happened?

DB: It's begun to happen. You just learn how to deal with it. I'm sure that you know exactly what I'm talking about. It happens to you ten-thousand-fold.

LL: What was the first album you bought?

DB: EMF's "Unbelievable" was probably the first single I bought. I don't know, a Nirvana record or a Guns N' Roses record. That was pretty much all you could get in Caracas.

LL: What about when you came to the States?

DB: Neil Young's Harvest [1972] was probably the first record I got. Or a record by this band from L.A. called Strictly Ballroom. Those are probably the two things I got into. But I grew up listening to salsa and merengue, dance music, party music. And then I'd go home and my parents would be listening to Caetano Veloso or Nell Young or Nusrat Fateh All Kahn. I always had this feeling that there's this music that you dance to and party to, and then there's music that kind of makes your heart dance and that you party to in a different way. You don't move around and shake, but you can. It makes the inside of your spirit shake and move around and stirs different parts of your being. You have many asses, and it makes your soul's ass move as opposed to your ass-ass move.

LL: I like that description. So you're open to all types of music?

DB: I chicken-dance to anything--anything that's chicken-dance-able.

LL: Are you a political person? Or just in your own way?

DB: In my own way.

LL: In terms of the government?