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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Interviews by Dave Simpson

‘Most of the time I was only wearing tiny shorts’: how Devendra Banhart made I Feel Just Like a Child

‘Help me find my toes’ … Devendra Banhart in 2006.
‘Help me find my toes’ … Devendra Banhart in 2006. Photograph: Jason Kempin/FilmMagic

Devendra Banhart, singer, songwriter, guitarist

I wrote I Feel Just Like a Child when I was 18, but it wasn’t until I was 23 or 24 and making the Cripple Crow album that it made sense to record it properly. As a teenager I’d thought of myself as an old blues guy and demoed it on an unplugged electric guitar as a slow blues. When we recorded it for Cripple Crow I’d found my musical family, people like [producer-musicians] Andy Cabic from Vetiver, Noah Georgeson and Thom Monahan. Along with the likes of Joanna Newsom and Adam Green from Moldy Peaches, we were doing a sort of anti-folk that was labelled “freak-folk”.

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