November 20, 2002

I USUALLY COUNT on Halloween to keep the real ghouls at bay, but this year's festivities were about as depressing as the other 364 days. Hordes of drunk, unhappy revelers trudging through the Castro, four stabbings, broken-glass mosaics on all the sidewalks. A few nights earlier a processional of lights traveled down my street, and a girl on stilts dropped a carnation at my feet. The music from a nearby flatbed truck sounded like Dead Can Dance, and the whole scene felt like a ghost but turned up later in the A&E pages of the Bay Area Reporter, reminding me of the Superdrag song "Nothing Good Is Real." The flower frightened my dog, and we went home and thought about our costumes.

I was sure I wanted to devote this space to Justin Timberlake – bursting the seams of 'N Sync for a solo flight. But Justified, a hyper-produced onslaught of slow-love jams, falsetto bravado, and whispered threats like "I want to rock your body," is so much creepier than Halloween that I keep having to press pause and scream. My coworkers are in no mood for hysterical fits, so it sits on my desk, and my flesh crawls, and my hair stands on end. Justin is a love-daddy now, determined to sex us all up, and I'm wondering where that leaves his fan base of screaming preteen girls.

There are different kinds of creepy. There's the kind where a young white boy tries to pretend he's Barry White and everyone buys his record. Also in this category might be the kind from The Shining, where someone you've come to know and love starts behaving so badly you don't know exactly how to mention it. But not all things creepy lead to liner-note acknowledgments that use the ill-advised words "we came up with something timeless" or hotel corridors full of blood. There's the kind that happens when you take strong drugs or stop sleeping and realize it's not just the hills that are alive but the trees and the wind coming in under the door and probably even the cracks in the sidewalk you're walking down in a quiet frenzy. Dead friends stand in the doorway and talk to you. Everything talks to you. Too much of this kind of creepy makes it hard to inhabit the world, but enough of it makes for good songwriting.

Devendra Banhart, 20 years old, extravagant of hair, skinny as a rail, looked like he knew something about the cracks in the sidewalk when I saw him play in the back room of Club Waziema last year. He sat hunched over his guitar and drifted through a set of short, skittery songs in a voice that hung around in falsetto a lot, with sudden drops in altitude I could feel in my stomach. When I closed my eyes, I heard a crazy lady sing the blues.

A year later, Banhart's come out with an album whose full title, Oh Me Oh My ... the Way the Day Goes by the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit (Young God), is a skittery, crazy-lady conversation all its own. For the record, I think he could stand up to Justin as a boy idol if he had to. Banhart's vocals are no less affected than Justin's and twice as unnerving. The nation's teenagers might not go for him, but undersocialized young adults on anti-anxiety medication may be waiting for trading cards with his picture on them. And, as luck would have it, there are photos of Banhart frolicking in his underwear on the Young God Web site, where he offers clues to his character in a tale of his short life's rambles – from Texas to Caracas, Venezuela, to a canyon in southern California to San Francisco to L.A. to Paris to San Francisco to L.A. to a tenuous squat in an old salsa club in New York – and clues to his influences in an elegiac list of blues and folk singers including Mississippi John Hurt, Vashti Bunyan, and Fred Neil.

In a drawing by Banhart on the back of the liner notes, the text "KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT" flies over what looks like a turreted castle with legs. The hand-scribed lyrics may have been written by a young man in a garret using the light streaming in through a keyhole. Certain songs sound like someone following you down a country road in the dark, a dead person with a guitar and a fragmented poetic sensibility. Two tracks of Banhart's vocals line up unevenly and vibrate together, occasionally contradicting each other, clumsy like the things you say as you fall asleep. One of the saddest songs, "The Charles C. Leary," is a litany of people lost and found and lost again. "Lend Me Your Teeth" sets off a scream like a teakettle whistling and never taken off the flame. Your spine could bend under the pressure. But I don't press pause and scream. Some kinds of creepy are better than others.

On "Michigan State," Banhart croons seductively to a place he's never seen, and it's the prettiest thing I've heard all week. Laughing at his own jokes and talking in nursery-rhyme circles around sweetness and evil and sea salt and snails, he uses the kind of logic only poetry can offer up and get away with. You could sing a child to sleep with it or keep yourself awake all night wondering what it means.