I realised he was deeper than I had thought, and his understanding was absolutely philosophical. He didn’t want to make a commercial piece, he wanted to express his feeling, and the feeling of his people.”To get a sense of how classical and jazz bands might fuse, they put the Philharmonic and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra together for a concert in which they would first play Grieg’s Peer Gynt and then Duke Ellington’s suite inspired by it. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, he is an outspoken campaigner on racism and social injustice, and he was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans. A few minutes after the interview he’s on stage, quivering voice relishing the ripe words on spine-tingling acoustic songs before he’s on his feet, shimmying through a set of Stones-y strut and psychedelic flower-pop that’s loose and limber enough to feel something like a musical equivalent of his youthful wanderings.

It’s a great show, steaming with history yet full of its own flavours. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, Banhart is, indeed, cooking where it counts.’Cripple Crow’ is out on Monday; Devendra Banhart plays the Astoria, London WC2 on 16 November. Next up we got bread, napkins, forks, a house commercial, then a car commercial… and then a party!”If Banhart’s live show is anything to go by, he’d throw a good one. So, they asked for a cheese commercial and we thought, let’s get some cheese Had to buy another fridge for all that cheese and beer. Did he need the money? The publicity? Or was he just monkeying about? His answer, at least, has more cheek than cheese about it “Well, I love that cheese,” he says “I grew up eating that cheese.

It changed my life, you know? The song was written by me and Andy Cabic, and we thought, this is ours, let’s use it for commercials It got used for a beer commercial and we got some free beer And we love beer. Recently, Banhart did something that seems, from a distance, out of character: he let one of his songs, “At the Hop” (“Put me on your plate/ ’cause you know I taste great”), be used in an advert for Cathedral City cheddar. There might be a few shreds of Parmesan in there but it’s not like some big block of Brie, melting in the sun.”Which, happily, brings us to dairy products. “I wanted to make that song as vague as possible in terms of talking about the current state of the world,” he says “Protest songs can be cheesy but I think I did all right. It’s about a “schizophrenic hermaphrodite”, and it also has a bigger purpose: “I was with this guy from the band Bunny Brains and he was saying, ‘I heard your record, man, it’s gonna be in, like, Starbucks, whatever.’ And I was like, man, I don’t want it to be in Starbucks! I’m going to write a song that will ‘guarantee’ that it is not in Starbucks.”And ‘Cripple Crow’’s protest song, the Beatles-ish “Heard Somebody Say”, with its easy bridge between 1968 and now? Despite the suggestion of over-naivety in the lyric, “It’s simple, we don’t wanna kill”, Banhart treads carefully. “The album’s penultimate track, “Little Boys”, also contains more layers than it might appear to. As the song shifts from a blues lament to finger-clicking pop at the halfway point, it veers wickedly close to sounding like a paedophile’s pop anthem (“I see so many little boys I wanna marry”) Not so, says Banhart.

“I’m very open to your interpretation, it’s a groovy interpretation,” he says. “But I was listening to mostly south American music while I was making it and reading a book by Dee Brown, ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’. So, for me, the theme of this record is actually present-day South America, pre-Columbus North America. “It might just be one word that’ll let the song kind of walk around a little bit So, to me, that song is not even so much about me. There is some play there but it’s not like I’m pulling it out of my ass. It’s more about having fun with the way the government in America treats people like children.”Similarly, the sense that the album repeatedly riffs on a theme of children (“Chinese Children”, “Long Haired Child”) is welcomed but half-rebutted with a broader idea. So you start finding freedom in music as opposed to wandering.”‘Cripple Crow’ is rich in a kind of open poeticism, translating Banhart’s persona-based playfulness into songwriting that traverses eras and genres while majoring in precocity, purpose and possible meaning.