The musician Mac DeMarco recently bought a disjointed and centenary farm on an island off the coast of British Columbia, at the bottom of the Salish Sea and accessible only by boat. A ferry operates a few times a day from Tsawwassen, near Vancouver; The trip lasts about two hours. At the end of June, Demarco came to get me in the ferry terminal in a vintage Land Cruiser, its halogen headlights covered with yellow smiling faces. The house came with around eighty olive trees, in different states of dynamism or decline. DeMarco had pruned the dead branches, trying to evoke what is called the shape of the “open vase”, eliminating the growth of the fragile center to promote air circulation. During my three days on the island, he played more or less with the trees with the trees, hacking mowers or an electric saw, launching tangles of foliage in a wheelbarrow and throwing its contents in the woods. Sometimes I dropped off my recorder between the members of the trees so that we can speak while he was working. There, DeMarco transformed itself from a naughty indie-rock icon in a boundary of DIY to a gap in red vans in disintegration.
In 2012, Demarco released his goal, “Rock and Roll Night Club”, on Captured Tracks, an independent independent label based in Brooklyn known for its deep bench of Lo-Fi guitar groups. As he released his second full album, “Salad Days”, in 2014, he had been a sort of Slacker broadcast King. Demarco records were easy, loose and cool, with echoes of Neil Young and Brian Wilson, if they had been brought up on wet even, legal weeds and back problems Tile. Fork gave “Salad Days” his best new musical designation. Before the album release, rapper Tyler, the creator tweeted: “Dear Mac Demarco I love you you are great. “The disciples of Demarco were passionate and sometimes disturbed. Guy, but I was just a stupid with a tuque,” he said.
Demarco has become more popular in the past decade. “Chamber of Reflection”, a treat and synthetic track from “Salad Days”, is omnipresent on Tiktok, and has been broadcast almost a billion times. Demarco himself has more than twenty million monthly listeners on Spotify, a remarkable number for a guy who plays heborant and trembling guitar songs on everything that is in the lead. A Tiktok account dedicated to his work has more than eight hundred thousand followers and offers videos of DeMarco jokes which are sometimes scatological and always absurd. (Imagine, let’s say, a start-up, with a pleasantly disturbed aspect, with a hooded sweatshirt, placing a false phone call in which he tries to order half a million dollars of poop and pee.) Fans of Demarco have always been young, but he thinks they could become younger. “There was a time when I understood my audience. Now I have no idea,” he said. “I grew up and they didn’t do it.”
His new house is in an exciting proximity but somewhat perilous with the ocean. From the bridge, which is parallel to the shore, you can locate orcas, humpback whales, white -headed pygargues (a pair nest nearby, at the top of a Douglas Gargantusen fir tree), otters and port seals, whose speckled heads periodically came out of water, looking at the snacks. The property had been sold as it is. The chalet of guests, where I slept, had a beautiful airy room that jumped on the beach, muffled by an ad hoc foundation that looked like something that a little one could make from glue sticks and popsicle. At night, I could hear waves crashing loudly against the Western wall. (“He’s going down!” Dismarco joked one morning. “That’s life! »)
DeMarco and her longtime partner, Kiera McNally, had already set a place in Echo Park, in Los Angeles; It was perhaps too aware of the financial and psychic ferment that accompanies renovations at home. Shortly after my arrival, I wondered if the property had a well – once you lived with a well, the health and viability of all the wells remain inevitably present in its conscience, a source of small endless conversations, like time or sport – and its face lit. “Do you know Wells?” He asked. Sweetness had been in his mind. He had Monke in an old concrete tank and a pump, trying to understand how to irrigate certain raised beds. He had looked for local rules on the collection of rainwater. The whole situation made him a little nervous. “It could have been a big mistake,” said Demarco. But it was impatient to be humiliated. “I thought I knew everything when I had their twenties. I want to stay in a place where I constantly remember that I do not know Jack shit, I will never be shit Jack, and then one day I am dead.
Later this month, Demarco, who is thirty-five years old, will release “Guitar”, his tenth album and his first since “One Wayne G” of 2023, a compilation of nine hours of mainly instrumental demos. DeMarco made the “guitar” at the house in Los Angeles last November, in about two weeks. Just before that, he recorded an entirely different album, “Hear the Music”, which he only played for McNally. “This is the only time anyone who hears it, I think,” he said. “With the second, I played it a little while I recorded it, but I did not tell anyone with whom I worked for four good months. I just didn’t want to start the Doomsday clock:” Well, where are the photos now? “It was a very good experience to have it as something that I could appreciate for a while.”
“Guitar” is an exceptionally autonomous disc. DeMarco played all the instruments; product, designed and mixed the songs; Turned the album cover and musical clips using a tripod; and publishes it on his own label. He is sometimes modest in his chops – “I can specifically do the little thing I did that put me where I am now, but I can almost do the little thing,” he said – but the “guitar” is magnificent and deeply idiosyncratic, unlike something in his discography. It contains some of its most intimate and sophisticated compositions. “This is the progress,” said Demarco. (He was more reserved for his musical performance: “The guitar is like I went up to ten years, perhaps.”) “I do not feel at all uncertain,” he said about the album.
DeMarco spoke of the work of writing songs as compulsory, as if it were a prophecy. “I think that if I do not do it, I will be punished by the universe,” he said. “When I do the songs, I feel satisfaction, and maybe it’s also a kind of dependence- you have done it again, my friend! ‘- But I think it’s just that I do what I am supposed to do.” He continued: “I can have other hobbies. I can badly renovate the houses or screw the motorcycle engines. But when I do these things, I feel guilty. ” This notion – an inevitable professional vocation – is at the heart of “Punishing”, a new song featuring an influenced guitar line:
On the night of my arrival, Demarco has become briefly concerned about a wobbly bridge chair. After dinner, he recovered a saw in the hangar, cut a new support beam and held some courtyard on the utility and the character of the Robertson screw, which presents a tapered square in its center and was patented by a Canadian tool seller in 1909. DeMarco finally stabilized the chair, although the next day, he presented it as an example of his innate anger. “Sometimes it looks like a distraction of something,” he said. “I’m just a bit … hoi.”
DeMarco was born in 1990 in British Columbia and was raised in Edmonton, Alberta. His birth name, Vernor Winfield Macbriare Smith IV, has an aristocratic jangle, although his mother, Agnes Demarco, changed it in Macbriare Samuel Lanyon Demarco after the departure of his father, when Mac was five years old and did not pay for child alimony. “On the side of my family father, there was money, but I just didn’t know these people,” he said. He thinks that he was raised by a single mother could have given him some effusion. He described his Albertan colleagues as “public services”. “In Canada, especially here, even craftsmen are, as,” I could Do it for you, but being part of something is not that difficult, “he said.” Is it almost like “what, can’t you do it yourself?” I appreciate this.
Demarco no longer smokes or no longer drinks. It is difficult to overestimate your dedication prior to these vices. There was a period of time in which it was not uncommon for him to empty an entire bottle of Jameson during a set. In 2012, he wrote a Woozy and Lovesick ballad, “Ode to Vicroy”, about his favorite smoke brand. (“And oh, don’t let me see you cry / because oh, darling, I will smoke you until I am Dyin”, he sang, his voice in particular rugged.) Photographer Danny Cohen once shot a portrait of Demarco have subjected to a bathing bath overflowing with cigarettes; He was also photographed under what seemed to be a sweet rain of bites. (“So did you make the Cig popular to children?” The Podcastor Adam Friedland asked him once.) At the time, the shamelessness of Demarco was somewhat charming – he is almost supernaturally charismatic – although he sometimes felt depraved. (If your tolerance for Tomfoolery, the body horror and the most knotted corners of the Internet are high, you can find an online video of a nude start-up, drunk, fulfilling its relationship with a whirlwind.) “I have definitely had a fairly serious alcohol problem,” he said. “It was bad. I’m happy to be far from that. Would I be here doing the peaceful thing if I hadn’t become sober? Probably not. Would I be even alive? I don’t know. I see photos of myself in 2018 or 2019 and I look almost dead.”
