In the early noughties, back in the nascent rapture of his musical career, nobody sounded or even looked like Devendra Banhart, a querulous-voiced chieftain of the so-called New Weird America genre, alongside Joanna Newsom and band Vetiver.

Nearly two decades later, the Venezuelan-American musician remains singular, but his itinerant spirit of late has led him to less mystical environs and more assured terra firma.

Starting with Mala (2013) and moving on to Ape In Pink Marble (2016), he has sojourned into lo-fi eclecticism, channelling Brazilian tropicalia, Laurel Canyon-esque folk-rock and Eastern instrumentation such as the Japanese koto.

A friend of his, for instance, described Ape In Pink Marble aptly as "psychedelicate".

Subtlety and sangfroid suit him, no longer a man-child at 38. He said in a recent interview: "Everyone in my band is now a parent. I'm the auntie I've always wanted to be."

His 10th album, Ma, is thus a feat of quiet radicalism - a reflection on motherhood, a way of getting in touch with his feminine side and a heartfelt tribute to his other motherland, Venezuela, where he spent his childhood.

"Is this real? Do I mean it?" he asks in the opening track Is This Nice?, initiating a motherly address towards "my beautiful boy" over gently plucked strings and seesawing violins. "Some days, you're going to feel/There'll never again be flowers," he sings, but exhorts that "you cannot give up".

At the same time, this is a record made in pressing times - a divided United States, a roiling Venezuela and a planet beleaguered by climate change. This sets the tenor of the songs - an insistent optimism in the face of adversity, a bulwark against abject misery.

The tracks are shaded, too, by ageing and death - he has processed the recent passing of relatives, parents and mentors, including poet Bill Berkson and his hippie father, Robert Gary Banhart.

In Memorial, a dirge flecked by stately piano, trumpet and horns and the acoustic strumming by Banhart as he whispers: "Can you hear me?/Did you mean it?/Did you plan it out?/Or was it an accident?"

This chasm between the known and the unknowable underpins his existential quest. While borders, mental or physical, are being erected in real life, his worldliness means he is committed to finding home and belonging across lands and singing in four languages, including Spanish and Portuguese.

In the funky, twangy Kantori Ongaku (Japanese for country music) - a nod to Haruomi Hosono, one-third of the iconic Japanese genre-defying pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra - Banhart sings partly in Japanese and confesses in English: "Well, the older I get/The less I fear anyone I see."

The same sentiment is manifest in the trippy singalong Taking A Page, in which he quotes Carole King, finds irony in "my Free Tibet shirt that's made in China" and swears "love is little like/Crowd-surfing in an empty club".

He is making connections and welcoming you into this arcadia. Welsh musician Cate Le Bon joins him in the art-pop curio Now All Gone.

English folk legend Vashti Bunyan waltzes along in the dreamy, synth-and-piano-fuelled ballad, Will I See You Tonight?, in which he yearns: "Now I'm longing for the word/The one I've never known/A vast solstice of flowers/ That are all rightfully yours."