Mac DeMarco Made a Nice Album That You'll Be Playing All Summer
It was a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, the first day of March, and Mac DeMarco was under the console in his home studio, hunting for an orange. The space is a converted three-car garage behind the house he shares with his girlfriend, Kiera McNally, at the top of a hill on a one-way street on L.A.'s east side. DeMarco, a chill-vibes-playlist staple, is originally from Canada; he and McNally relocated here about three years ago from Queens. Before buying this house, DeMarco worked mostly in the corners of various bedrooms. He'd never had a dedicated space for working on music, or a swimming pool; now he has both. Here Comes the Cowboy is the first Mac DeMarco record completed under these circumstances, but he's not sure this had much of an impact on the finished product. You can't hear the proximity to palm trees on a record, after all. “When I'm in a room doing it,” he said, “the room could kind of be anywhere.”
Here Comes the Cowboy sounds like it was written and recorded in the time it took a sunbeam to make its way across the studio, but it was actually cut over two weeks in early January, when L.A. experienced above-average rainfall. “It was handy,” DeMarco said. “It was like the weather was like, Just finish it, jackass. So I did.” Other than contributions from his touring keyboardist and some field recordings of twittering backyard birds, DeMarco played everything himself. The new songs unfold at the same unhurried pace as most of the music that's made him a latter-day indie icon, but they're also more confidently constructed and less ramshackle than ever—ornate miniatures without a single wasted gesture. Career-wise, DeMarco may be bigger than ever, but instead of bulking up his sound, he's stripped things down even further. “I want everything to sound tiny,” he said. “That's what I was going for on this record. Very small. Teensy. Tiny little drums, and then maybe there's a guitar, but there's a lot of room in between. Slow, quiet. That's what I like.”
Despite the title, DeMarco said, “it's not a cowboy record at all.” He just likes saying the words “cowboy” and “cowgirl,” the way Robin Williams used to call people “chief.” His favorite cowboy song is Neil Young's “Cowgirl in the Sand”—a very good choice, and a very Canadian one. A key influence this time out was the 1980 song “Graduation,” by Henry Flynt, an American conceptual artist and composer whose experimental “hillbilly tape music” sounds like Steve Reich minimalism arranged for dueling banjos. “It sounds kind of like a train pushing along,” DeMarco said. “It's not about cowboys at all, but that song set a vibe for me, for this record. In a way. I think.”
He continued showing the rest of his space. A rack by the door held a copy of the Marge Simpson issue of Playboy; a Grateful Dead dancing-bear flag was hung by the couch. Other totemic personal items, lined up atop a sound-baffling panel near the lightly cobwebbed ceiling, included a seven-inch of Billy Joel's “Uptown Girl,” a framed letter from a fan with a cute cigarette-smoking dog drawn on it, a photo of a young LL Cool J, and a DVD of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards with another DVD, the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster, hidden behind it, “just to keep the vibe straight-up.”
The possibly rotting orange had failed to turn up, though. DeMarco began to wonder if it had ever been there in the first place. “Maybe I'm trippin', ” he said.
Alex Pappademas is a Los Angeles-based writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2019 issue with the title "Summer Comes Early, Thanks to Mac DeMarco."
Photographs by Aaron Sinclair
