This old dog
Edmonton songwriter with two dates at Danforth Music Hall grows up on fourth album shows Mac DeMarco’s new tricks
Recently, Mac DeMarco made waves in the desert by standing in front of a Coachella crowd and urging the masses to illegally download his just-leaked new album, This Old Dog.
“Download it! PirateBay, torrents.to, Soulseek, Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa,” he shouted cheerfully between pulls from a cigarette and beer. “Just get it!”
This all seemed perfectly in character for the rascally DeMarco but, days later, his voice a little weary, the laconic-rock songwriter actually sounded a little contrite.
“To me, the leak was not a big deal, but to my record label and the people I work with I think it’s a little bit more of a big deal,” he murmured from New York. “I probably shouldn’t have been so cheeky onstage.
“But you have a couple drinks in you and the sun is beating down, and you can say some crazy things.”
Acircumspect moment from DeMarco? Well, yes, it seems that he’s maturing, and there’s no more compelling evidence than the tuneful This Old Dog.
With his fourth album, the Edmonton-reared songwriter marries his off-kilter hit-making with a new lyrical candour, dropping the just-kidding distance for his most affecting set yet.
It doesn’t require much subtextual scrutiny to figure out the record’s theme. Opening with the strummy hymn “My Old Man” (featuring the chorus “Uhoh, looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me”) and ending with the gorgeous keyboard lament “Watching Him Fade Away,” the record largely seems a reckoning of DeMarco’s troubled relationship with his absentee father.
“That’s fair, but regardless of how heavy it is, it’s partially about that, but it’s also about me trying to figure things out,” he said.
“I had a lot of time off this time after touring. I moved. It was a lot more mulling my life. Trying to figure it all out.
“All the albums are more or less introspective, but the difference is a lot of these songs, I wasn’t thinking I was going to put them on a record. It was like therapy for myself. That removed the barrier of trying to write vaguer lyrics.”
It so happens that DeMarco is growing more personal just as his music is growing more universal.
His last record, 2015’s “mini-LP” Another One, hit No.11on the Canadian chart and reached the Top 25 in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.
Both his shows at the Danforth Music Hall on Friday and Saturday sold out well in advance.
DeMarco’s gone from sharing a “weird windowless room” with a bunch of musicians in Brooklyn in his salad days, to living with his girlfriend in a “weird zone” of Rockaway Beach, to now occupying a house together in Los Angeles.
“The quality of life is high,” he concedes.
When he performs, he sometimes looks out at crowds who look just like him, a “bunch of kids in overalls and Vans and hats,” he acknowledged with a laugh.
After years of being portrayed as the gap-toothed personification of the “shrug” emoji, DeMarco’s not necessarily making a bid to be taken seriously here. But he does say his penchant for mischief is overblown.
“I’m essentially a walking, talking meme at this point. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s the state of the Internet,” he said. “People think I’ve done insane s--- onstage. I’ve never exposed my genitalia; a couple instances, my butt. There was something going around that I pooped onstage. I don’t know how I could do that. It’s a pretty arduous process, especially in front of a couple thousand people.”
OK, then. But DeMarco’s not truly done playing around.
Recently, he joked in an interview that he and his girlfriend were having their first child.
He figured it was obvious he was kidding, but the incident nevertheless inspired a phone call from his mother.
“I think she knew it was malarkey, but she still did call me,” he laughed.
“I was getting a lot of messages from people I don’t hear from that much like: ‘Oh my God, congratulations.’ I was like, what the hell are you talking about?
“It’s a funny thing to get those calls. Maybe I’ll be a parent someday, but definitely not in the near future.”