Devendra Banhart

Devendra Banhart is a Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter whose music helped define the freak folk and New Weird America movements of the 2000s. Born in 1981 and raised between Venezuela, the US and Paris, his early albums combined intimate, lo-fi acoustic guitar with an unmistakably fragile, warbling voice, drawing comparisons to outsider folk figures while carving out a sound entirely his own.

His songwriting blends English, Spanish and Portuguese, reflecting his multicultural upbringing, and ranges from whimsical, surreal lyrics to tender, straightforward love songs. Over the course of his career his sound expanded well beyond stripped-down folk into psychedelia, tropicalia, doo-wop and pop textures, most notably on the widely praised album What Will We Be, which earned him a Grammy Award nomination.

Banhart became closely associated with a loose community of like-minded singer-songwriters in the mid-2000s freak folk scene, and his restless genre-blending and visual art background have made him a recurring reference point for artists working at the intersection of folk tradition and psychedelic experimentation. He continues to record and tour, maintaining a devoted following built on the strange, tender intimacy of his songwriting.