Tag Archives: mac demarco

#1197: Mac DeMarco – She’s Really All I Need

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Rock and Roll Night Club. That’s a bit of a strange one to me. I’m a big Mac DeMarco fan, and I may have said that quite a few times in the previous posts I’ve written before. But I think I’ve only listened to that particular (mini)-album just the one time. It was DeMarco’s very first release, before 2 even came out, but it was the last one I got round to listening to. I remember the recording quality sounding pretty murky, while DeMarco’s vocals sounded much, much lower than usual. A much different vibe from the usual Mac stuff I was used to. But the one song on there that stood out by not being so different is the one I continue to listen to to this day.

‘She’s Really All I Need’ appeared in my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify one day at work back in 2018, and initially I was confused. That slinky Mac guitar tone was all there, and the standard calming vocal delivery was present. It was obviously a Mac DeMarco song, but why hadn’t I heard it before? Was this a new song? Then I saw it was from Rock and Roll Night Club, and that answered the question. But because I liked the tune so much from the jump, think I downloaded it to my laptop when I got home, it gave me the motivation to actually go ahead and listen to the whole album. From the first paragraph, you may have sussed that it’s not one of my favourite DeMarco records. But ‘…All I Need’ is definitely one of my favourite songs of his. And so I write to you in the hope that you might enjoy it too.

The track is one of the many, many love/relationship songs that DeMarco has in his catalogue. May even be safe to assume that it’s another written about his longtime girlfriend. Though if you want to get into more depth, it sees DeMarco write about his anxieties. He’s waking up in the middle of the night with shivers. He’s bummed out by these people waving their degrees in front of his face, reminding him of his own inadequacies. But in the end, none of that really matters because he’s got his lady to calm him down and get him on the right track. All very endearing stuff, with a bunch of relatable, humorous lines and a general laid-backness to the proceedings. Also notable in that there’s an actual bridge in the track that DeMarco solos over, which I don’t think he’s done ever since.

#1152: Mac DeMarco – Salad Days

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Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days turned 10 this year. Back when music release dates were on Mondays (or Tuesdays in the US), it was released on March 31st or April Fools’ Day 2014 depending on where you lived. I was in my first year of uni, checking out Pitchfork on my old laptop. The album got the Best New Music mark. I listened. My following of the dude started right there. I was hooked. So much so that I even dedicated a post to it on here. Check out the writing of the 19-year-old I was. Had so much to learn. Now I’m six years older than DeMarco was when the album originally came out, and I find myself relating more and more to the lyrics as the time passes.

Although my previously linked article of my initial impressions of the album may be underwritten and not so substantial, the points I make on there still hold up. The album is indeed ‘sweet’, the eleven tracks on there are ‘enjoyable’ and I still really like the guitar tone on there to this day. The record is most definitely my favourite of DeMarco’s. The melodies are on point. Each tracks flows by like a breeze. And the whole package begins with its title track, a good old existential crisis indie song in which Mac sings about potentially having passed his peak in life but also telling himself to get over it and try again for another year like all the rest of us have to. Quite a melancholy way to start things off. But it’s real, it’s a universal feeling and the deliver of it makes it easy to digest. A very fine combination.

Seems appropriate that this song will be the last representative of the album in this whole series. Finishing off where my Mac DeMarco discovery began and all that. There are still more songs of his to come though, so stay tuned if you’re really looking forward to them. I would have written about a couple other tracks from Salad Days had the stars aligned. ‘Blue Boy’ was an instant favourite on the first listen. ‘Brother’ took some time, but I eventually got ’round to it. I noted ‘Chamber of Reflection’ as a highlight in that old, old post, but I sort of fell out with it quite quickly actually. Think I just found it to be a drag. That’s just me. But all in all, this album means a lot to me, no doubts there.

#1059: Mac DeMarco – Preoccupied

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Well, here’s the last representative from Mac DeMarco’s Here Comes the Cowboy album that will be featured in this long, long list. It’s been fun. Though I’ve written about ‘Nobody’ and ‘On the Square’ previously, I’d also like to send my regards to ‘All of Our Yesterdays’ and ‘Hey Cowgirl’. The latter of those was somewhat agreed to be one of the more lacking songs on the record initially upon its release almost four years ago, but hey, I like it. Had Cowboy been released in 2013, those two songs would have their own dedications. But this is where we now stand at this moment in time.

‘Preoccupied’ is the fifth track on Here Comes the Cowboy, carrying on the minimalist approach DeMarco had chosen to take when making this specific album. The instrumental’s calming, relaxed, ideal for one of those slow days – that feeling aided by the sound of birds chirping that arrives right from the song’s start and right to the end when the guitar notes have rang out to silence. Like a large majority of tracks by DeMarco, it consists of only two verses and a chorus that’s repeated twice, usually alternating with one another in the structure. That occurs many, many times on the album alone. The simplicity was something that turned a lot of listeners off this album when it was released in 2019. There are tracks on there that I don’t care for a lot myself. But ‘Preoccupied’ is one where its subtle delivery only highlights the content. Gotta appreciate those tasty licks that come in during the choruses.

The song concerns what it states in the title. Everyone’s preoccupied and whether or not they mean to be, they can’t help but show it. You could probably either take this as some sort of commentary of people being on their phones all the time, locked in on whatever’s going on on social media and forgetting the art of actual human interaction, or maybe there’s some mental health issues talk in there too. The lyrics are quite open ended, which is always nice, so there’s a lot of room for interpretation. You know, if this album had come out in 2020, during that whole pandemic/lockdown thing that was going on, I feel like it would have been appreciated a lot more. There’s a lot of stuff on this album that seems really appropriate for what was going on during that time. Clearly DeMarco was in the know about something and we were all too naive to understand.

#1018: Mac DeMarco – Passing Out Pieces

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Well, damn. Tomorrow, it’ll be nine years to the day that Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days was released. Nine years in two more days if you’re reading from the US. And it’ll be pretty much nine years since I’ve been listening to Mac as an artist, waiting in anticipation for each release that followed. Look at this little post I did when I got the idea to write about how much I was enjoying the record. 19 years of age and wasn’t bothered about proofreading what I was writing. Not much has changed on that front. But the album really was on constant rotation at the time, and it’s probably my favourite of DeMarco’s to this day.

If you did click on that link that goes to that post from 9 years ago, you’ll see the short origin story of how I came across the album. It doesn’t bear repeating. But the gist is its Best New Music review on Pitchfork and hearing minute-and-a-half samples on iTunes. If you also look at the date of that post, I wrote it and got it out there on 24th May, the day after the strange music video (above) for DeMarco’s ‘Passing Out Pieces’ was finally released, five months after it had already been out as a single. By May, the song was a firm favourite of mine. Didn’t think the video matched its tone at all, though.

It opens up the album’s second half with these phat but glossy synthesizers, one playing the melodic hook on the left side and another providing the chords on the right, a thick bass mirroring the left-hand-side synthesizer melody and a steady-going drum pattern. The track concerns DeMarco’s feelings of being this musician man who’s never been hesitant to devote time to his followers whether or not it comes at the price of making a fool of himself in the process. He understands that its the price you have to pay in the business that is music, but admits that the stuff he’s done that he couldn’t never tell his mother has a bit of burden on him. He’s seen some scary stuff. But he closes the song out with a growly “Yeah” as if to say, “You gotta love it, though.” The song’s a jam. Always a good time whenever this pops up on shuffle. Yeah, it’s getting to a decade. But it’s sounds super-fresh, still.

#981: Mac DeMarco – One Another

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Hey, it’s another song by Mac DeMarco. Never realised how many of his tracks began with the letter ‘O’. Also never took into account how close they were alphabetically. These things just work out that way. But it’s another good one, at least in my books, though I have to admit it passed me by on that initial listen. Really, it wasn’t until the music video (above) for ‘One Another’ was released that replayed it a few times and found that it was indeed a fine piece of music. This Old Dog had already been out for exactly a month at that point. But you know how they say better late than never and all that. The video played its part too, containing clips of DeMarco and his band goofing around and barely making any attempt to mime correctly to the track.

Like many others on the record, ‘One Another’ maintains a predominantly acoustic soundscape, containing easygoing guitar chord progressions that are pleasant to the ears with these feathery keyboard presses in between. Carrying on his usual go-to lyrical subject matter of relationships, DeMarco takes on the perspective of someone providing advice to another who has just gone through a breakup. This narrator hopes to cheer this poor soul up, telling them they it’s worth to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all, and that by going through this sad situation they’ll know what and what not to do the next time they’ve found someone. Although it may hurt now, there will be a time when they understand it wasn’t all pointless and better days are to come.

Yeah, it’s another relaxing one courtesy of Mac DeMarco. Fans of his were quick to jokingly make quips on the track was similarly titled to another of his called ‘Another One’. These tracks are not the same. Though I would say that that song is even more smoother than this. Can’t go wrong listening to both though. This’ll be the last DeMarco song I write about in this section, I swear.