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

"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. We were living in Woodstock in upstate New York in our own mini 60s world, a utopian bubble where it felt like music from any period was up for grabs. We spent a lot of time in record stores and the music library, grabbing soundscapes,"

"We had a hippy ethos about pacifism, sisterhood and egalitarianism, but also I was very aware that this wasn't the 1960s it was the leather jacket, Strokes period of music so there was a parody element to it all. However, I Feel Just Like a Child was genuine. It was about how I could get away with being myself naive and idealistic without shame."

The song was written at age 18 and recorded properly at 23 or 24 for the Cripple Crow album. The recording involved a musical community including Andy Cabic, Noah Georgeson and Thom Monahan, alongside contemporaries such as Joanna Newsom and Adam Green, coalescing into a freak-folk, anti-folk scene in Woodstock. The group drew on diverse influences from record stores and music libraries, sampling soundscapes, electronic music and older acts. Recording took place at Bearsville studio. The song expresses youthful naivete and idealism without shame, includes a Marc Bolan homage, and mixes childhood imagery with lines critiquing adult failures such as war.

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