Is Mac DeMarco the last indie rock star?

Musician Mac DeMarco recently purchased a stunning 100-year-old farmhouse in the depths of the Salish Sea on an island off the coast of British Columbia, which can only be reached by boat. A ferry runs several times a day from Tsawwassen near Vancouver. This trip took about two hours. In late June, Demarco took me to the old-fashioned land cruiser from the Ferry Terminal, whose halogen headlights were covered with yellow smiley faces. The house has about eighty olive trees, in various states of vitality or decline. Demarco has been pruning dead branches, trying to figure out what is called the “open vase” shape, allowing the fragile center to grow and expand to promote air circulation. During my three days on the island, he was more or less in trouble, chopped off with a clutch or chainsaw, threw the tangle of leaves into the wheelbarrow, and poured its contents into the woods. Sometimes I would put a recorder between the limbs of the tree so that we could talk while he was working. There, DeMarco transforms from a boring indie rock icon to dismantling the gaps of red vans, DIY Frontiers.

In 2012, DeMarco released his DébutEP “Rod and Roll Night Club” on Captured Tracks, an independent Brooklyn record label known for its deep bench for its huge Lo-fi guitar band. When he released his second full-length album, Salad Days, in 2014, he was anointed with a kind of slutty lazy king. Demarco’s record is simple, loose and cool, and the echoes of Neil Young and Brian Wilson are on wet memes, legal weeds and back issues, Thrasher. fork Give the best new music name for “Salad Day”. Prior to the release of the album, the creator released rapper TylerDear Mac DeMarco I love you, you are awesome. “Demarco’s followers are passionate and occasionally eliminated. But I’m just a fool with a tu silly on it,” he said.

DeMarco has become more popular over the past decade. The shaky synth-driven track “Reflection Room” in the ubiquitous “Salad Days” on Tiktok has been played nearly a billion times. Demarco himself has over 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify, which is a great number, and it’s a guy who plays the weird guitar song he plays in his head. A Tiktok account dedicated to his work has over 8,000 followers and features Demarco’s videos that tell jokes that are sometimes both stereotypical and always ridiculous. (For example, the picture, is a delightful and boring Demarco, hoodie, who made a fake call and tried to order $500,000 for poop and pee.) Demarco’s fans have been young, but he thinks they might be younger. “There’s a little bit I know my audience. Now I don’t have a fucking idea,” he said. “I’m grown up, they don’t.”

His new house sat in an exciting place, but somewhat dangerously close to the ocean. From the deck parallel to the shoreline, you can find orcas, humpback whales, bald eagles (a pair nesting nearby, on the top of the Gargantuan Douglas fir), otters and harbor seals, whose speckled heads pop out of the water regularly and sprinkle snacks nearby. The property has been sold as is. The guest cottage I slept with a handsome, airy bedroom sticking out on the beach, supported by a temporary basis, similar to something that a juicy toddler might make with glue and popsicle sticks. At night, I heard the waves striking loudly against the western wall. (“This is down!” DeMarco joked one morning.c’est la vie! ”)

Demarco and his longtime partner Kiera McNally have secured a place in Echo Park in Los Angeles. He may have overrecognized the financial and psychological fermentation that comes with home decoration. Shortly after arriving, I idly asked if the property had a well – once you live in a well, the health and viability of all wells is still inevitably present in one’s consciousness in some way, a source of endless little conversation, such as weather or movement, while his face illuminates. “Do you know Wells?” he asked. Tamsui kept thinking. He kept wandering around with an old concrete tank and a pump, trying to figure out how to irrigate some raised beds. He has been studying local rules about rainwater collection. The whole situation made him a little nervous. “It could be a big mistake,” DeMarco said. But he longs for modesty. “I thought I knew everything when I was in my twenties. I wanted to stay in a place that kept reminding me that I didn’t know Jack shit, I would never know Jack shit, and then one day I’m dead.”

Later this month, 35-year-old Demarco will release “Guitar,” his tenth record and his first since 2023’s “One Wayne G,” a nine-hour compilation of most instrumental demonstrations. Last November, Demarco made a “guitar” at his home in Los Angeles in about two weeks. Prior to that, he recorded a completely different album, “Hear The Music,” which he played for McNally only. “It’s the only time anyone will hear it,” he said. “With the second one, I played her a little while recording it, but I didn’t tell anyone to work with me for four months. I just don’t want to start the doomsday clock: ‘Okay, now, where are the photos?’ Having it as something I can enjoy for a while was a really good experience.”

“Guitar” is an unusually independent record. Demarco played each instrument; produced, designed and mixed songs; shot album covers and music videos using a tripod; and released under his own label. He is sometimes modest about his ribs – “I can do the little things I do now, which puts me in my position now, but I can almost do it,” he said – but “guitar” is amazing and has deep qualities, unlike on his record. It contains some of his most intimate and complex songwriting. “That’s progress,” Demaco said. (He sticks more to his musical performance: “The sound of the guitar is like I’ve been back for ten years.”) Comparisons can be found – I hear Nick Drake’s “Five Leaf Remaining” intimacy, David Crosby’s roughly swaying, “If I only remember my name, it’s hard to extend for any particular tradition for any particular tradition. He said of the album: “I’m not sure about that at all.” ”

Demarco talks about composition as a mandatory work, as if he was fulfilling his prophecy. “I think if I don’t, I’ll be punished by the universe,” he said. “When I write songs, I feel satisfied, and maybe that’s also some sort of addiction – ‘You did another one, man!’ – but I think it’s just something I’m doing.” He continued, “I can have other hobbies. I can renovate the house or maneuver the motorcycle engine. But when I do these things, I feel introverted.” The concept – a difficult call to profession – is at the heart of “punishment,” a new song with a rocking guitar line:

Backwards, but no plan to retreat
You can have all of me, a pound of my meat
Because mom, someone told me that the punishment will come
Those of us who don’t do what we do.

The night I arrived, Demarco was briefly focused by the rocking chair. After dinner he retrieved the saw from the shed, cut the new support beams, and held some courts on the utility and characteristics of the Robertson screw, which was the conical square at its center, and in 1909 he was patented by a Canadian tool salesman. Demarco finally stabilized the chair, although he proposed his own example of his native ants the next day. “Sometimes, all of this feels like a distraction,” he said. “I just send it a little bit….”

DeMarco was born in 1990 in British Columbia and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. His name Vernor Winfield Macbriarire Smith IV has a noble trash, although his mother, Agnes DeMarco, changed it to MacBriarire Samuel Lanyon DeMarco after his father left (Mac five) failed to pay child support. “In my father’s family, I have money, but I just don’t know those people,” he said. He believes that raising a single mom might give him some trouble. He called his fellow countrymen “utilities.” “In Canada, especially here, even businessmen, ‘I Can He said, but framin “somethin is not that difficult”. “He said: “Almost like ‘what, can’t you do it yourself?” ‘I appreciate it. ”

Demarco no longer smokes or drinks. It is hard to exaggerate his previous dedication to these bad habits. It was not uncommon for him to clear a whole bottle of Jameson during a plate for a while. In 2012, he wrote an “Ode to the Governor” about his favorite cigarette brands. (“Oh, don’t let me see you cry/’ because oh dear, I’ll smoke you ’until I’m dyin’. He’s also photographed under the seemingly loose rain. (“So you make cigarettes popular with kids?” podcast Adam Friedland once asked him.) At that time, Demarco’s unabashed liberalism was a little charming—although sometimes even depraved. (If you have a high tolerance for Tomfoolery, body horror and the most glaring corners on the internet, you can find a video of a nude Demarco on Startage online, drunk and solidifying his relationship with the drums.) “I definitely have a very serious drinking problem,” he said. “It’s terrible. I’m so glad I’m leaving it myself. Would I do something peaceful here if I’m not sober? Probably not. Am I even alive? I don’t know. I saw pictures of myself in 2018 or 2019 and I look very close.”