Late one morning, not long ago, Devendra Banhart is on the line from his home in California. The subject for discussion is his new music, which means talking about art and insects and death. But first the preliminaries: 

‘Where are you?’ he asks. 

‘Glasgow, Scotland. Where are you?’

‘I’m in Los Angeles, wherever that is.’

The Zoom meeting, at his request, is audio only. My laptop screen is dark. It’s like interviewing Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ painting, if Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ spoke with goofball sincerity.

Case in point, here he is on the firefly, a creature that gives its name, and the idea of fleeting beauty, to one of his excellent new songs: ‘I can’t believe that it exists. If I wasn’t a musician, I would be an entomologist. I’m so into insects. I’ve just always wanted to be in their world, checking them out. I’ll sit in the garden and stare at an ant and just be blown the fuck away.’

Banhart, now 42, came to public attention in the early noughties as part of the so-called ‘freak folk’ scene that included the likes of Joanna Newsom. His forthcoming album, Flying Wig, hardly sounds like the same person. There is no trace of naïf psychedelia. It’s a gentle drift of melancholy synth-washed neon that brings to mind Avalon-era Roxy Music, late-period Talk Talk, and Leonard Cohen around the time of Death Of A Ladies Man. It also sounds quite a lot like Cate Le Bon, the Welsh artist who is its producer.

‘If you’re gonna make a record, it’s daunting, but it helps to ask somebody who’s a better singer and songwriter and musician than yourself,’ Banhart says. ‘Cate is just beyond.’

What did Le Bon bring? Artisanal feel for the nuts-and-bolts of writing combined with a poetic shorthand that helped Banhart to shape his songs. At one point, while he was struggling with an overcrowded arrangement, she advised: ‘try to find the stone that sings amongst it all.’ He still marvels at those words: ‘that’s using poetry like a spell, like a tool.’

Le Bon also gave Banhart a specific gift: her blue Issey Miyake dress. He wore this hand-me-down during the recording sessions. Why? It goes back to his childhood. ‘I started singing in a dress. When I was nine.’ At home in Caracas, Venezuela, he would put on his mother’s dresses and sing. ‘It’s a safe space for me. It gives me strength.’ He is in awe of the world, but sometimes struggles to be happy in it, and what can seem like gestures of performative oddness are strategies to help him find comfort and pleasure.

This relates, he said, to a line from one of the new songs, ‘Sight Seer’: ‘I’m singing no longer for fun/but as a form of protection.’ Can he elaborate? ‘It’s an expression of gratitude to art; when we turn to it for solace or to protect ourselves from a world that is increasingly cruel and insane.’ 

Flying Wig is inspired, in part, by ‘This Dewdrop World’, a 19th-century haiku by Kobayashi Issa. The Japanese poet wrote it in response to the death of his daughter from smallpox, and it spoke to Banhart in his own time of loss. ‘My friend Hal Wilner died of covid. And my friend Connie died and Diego died and Jamie died. It’s a lot of friends. That became a chasm in my heart.’

The dewdrop, like the firefly, is an image of transience. But the poem’s refrain (‘and yet, and yet . . . ’) speaks to the way that we carry on despite our knowledge that all things must pass. For Banhart who, during lockdown, found himself artistically paralysed, unable to sing or even to reach out a hand and lift his guitar, this tension between nihilism and creativity was his reality.

Eventually, though, the songs came and he found himself able to ‘transmute grief into something that makes the world more beautiful’. His singing, throughout the album, has a generous tenderness; it feels as though he is trying to comfort, even heal, both himself and the listener. 

‘Yes, the whole record,’ he says, ‘as doom-laden as it may be, there’s this light always. That’s the and-yetness of everything.’

Flying Wig is released by Mexican Summer on Friday 22 September.