Mac DeMarco's Maturity Through The Years

Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV, also known by his stage name as Mac DeMarco, is a Canadian-born singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. His discography ranges from surf rock, indie pop, ballads, and "jizz jazz", a genre he invented himself. Throughout the years as an artist, he has acclaimed himself to the top of people's minds when they think of indie music by his charming, goofball, playboy personality alone. But by the passing years, he himself has matured with his music and state of mind. Seeing him transition in live shows, interviews, and music has clearly shown his experiences as a musical icon, taking him to places in life where most people could only ever imagine.

Makeout Videotape, Mac DeMarco's first band, lasted from 2008 to 2011. This consisted of Alex Calder of Strange Dreams, Pierce McGarry of the Mac DeMarco band, Jen Clement, Joe McMurray of ~j~, Jon Lent, Graham Clyne, Ryan Boyce, Peter Sagar of the Mac DeMarco band and Homeshake, and Alec Meen. Heat Wave EP was released on Bandcamp in 2009, marking their first ever publicly released music heard by listeners. The best way to describe this sound would be like washing your mouth with vodka in the morning after a hangover. The blown-out bass, extremely dirty guitar tone, and harsh drums makes it sound like you're driving to the beach with friends in a crappy old van with an even older speaker. There's just no way you can't play air guitar during Mac's shredder solos. My favorite song off of this EP has got to be the cover of "I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York" by Harry Nilsson. While the original song is sweet, has multiple accompanying instruments that compliment it, and Nilsson's calm voice soothes the listener, Makeout Videotape turns the song on its head with their version of it. Making it bare boned with a thrashing bass, a snare with a towel thrown over it, and a cheap guitar, it adds a whole new layer of surf-like aesthetic. This approach is only furthered and cleaned up in the mixing stage in their only full-length album, YING YANG. This 13-song track list is jam-packed with bright, loud songs, such as "FUTURE BOY", and some with pitched down vocals and slower pace, like "BRIAN". My favorite song, "ISLAND GROOVIES" immediately opens with a cymbal crash and goes straight for a groovy, summertime tune, giving you nostalgia for the beach, even if you have lived in Alaska your whole life. All songs on this album were played in Drop D, a guitar tuning that makes the tone sound deeper. In an interview with Ernie Ball, Mac states that, "If you change all of tunings and you have no idea where to grab chords anymore, it's like you're learning from scratch again”. In its entirety, Makeout Videotape's approach with music seems child-like with its high energy and accessible tunes.

In 2012, Rock and Roll Night Club came out as Mac's debut album under his own name. If Makeout Videotape was his maximalist period of energy put into music, then Rock and Roll Night Club was his minimalist period. By slowing down all the songs and pitching down his voice post production, he makes himself sound like Tom Waits as a drunk lounge singer. During the recording sessions, Mac in an interview with Kurt Anderson on Studio 360 said that he was sick during most of it, so he purposefully made the record sound like this to fit the mood he was feeling during the time. I mean seriously, it sounds like Mac was wasted while recording the drum beat and creating guitar solos that make me feel like I'm trying to eat a sloppy joe. These feelings especially resonate on the song "Moving Like Mike". I can totally see this song being played over a scene of a drunk guy trying to get home from the bar on his own. Even with simple chord progressions, he drives some horrible instruments through expensive recording equipment and amplifiers just to get the aesthetic of the late 80's soft rock scene correct. In "She's Really All I Need", he goes back to his surf rock feel, but puts in the Rock and Roll Night Club special of slowing everything down. In this song, he is confronted with the reality of life, with him not being as successful as his friends who went to college and got a real job. "Don't bring me down, man, Wearing that frown, man, now”. He simply doesn't want to succumb to the realism of everyday, he just wants to rock out with optimism and hope for the future that everything will turn out right. While this was the first attempt of being a solo artist, Mac displays himself to have some versatility with how he produces and approaches certain tones of music. This album can be seen almost as if it was a bad night on the town and you wake up with a hangover, but you still love it and do it again the next night.

Have you ever gotten so trashed at a party that you wake up the next day with videos of you running butt-naked across the lawn, pictures of you slumped on the couch with a penis drawn on your forehead, and texts from your ex telling you to stop messaging them? Yeah, that's exactly what 2. But, that's not what the album itself depicts as, and I will go into that later. This album feels like a recollection of the past and how to deal with the poor decisions made, but with a fun, pop spin on it and a lot of reverb. When I say a lot of reverb, I mean that I can hear a chord still string out 5 seconds after it was played. This is also the time when Mac states he started smoking Viceroys, a cigarette brand from Europe. He says he smokes them because they look cool, not because they taste nice. "Freaking Out The Neighborhood" is the best example to the scenery I described earlier. The song itself has an indie, jangle pop feel which is very easy to digest, but that's not what makes the song. You see, once Rock and Roll Night Club was set off into the world, he performed at a couple of shows for the hell of it. During one of the performances, he said that the crowd was totally dead, completely bored with the performance. So, he did what any reasonable rocker would do, he shoved drumsticks up his butt. Someone managed to take a picture of it at the moment and he saved the show with cheering from the crowd out of both disgust and amazement. But this only led to things worse than a bored audience or broken equipment, his mom found out about the picture. So, he wrote "Freaking Out The Neighborhood", apologizing for his behavior back then to his mom. He even opens up the song with the lines, "Sorry, mama, there are times I get carried away”. After 2 was released, Mac went out on a world tour with a few guys he saw around his building complex that could play somewhat decent. This is where he went even crazier, except without shoving any more drumsticks into unknown territory. Getting drunk on stage, allowing fans to get on the mic to say whatever they want, playing a screamo versions of "Blackbird" by The Beatles, and jumping all around; this is the highest energy live show that any indie artist at the time had put out. By cranking up the volume and having a few drinks in the system constantly, the Mac DeMarco band went from Tokyo to London. They may have dressed like a bunch of bums stuck in the early 90's, but they were loaded nonetheless by constantly on the bus or plane to their next venue. But at the end of a show, Mac would always slow things down and sometimes bring out his sweet Kiki, his girlfriend, to sing a song straight from the bottom of his heart. "Still Together" was always performed with the Mac DeMarco band playing the instruments, while Mac himself just sang with passion. His yodeling while singing the chorus touches many hearts of the audience as they calm down from the past songs. This album is more correlated with his live shows after 2 was released, showing off his hysterical personality to the world for the first time.

After the world tour of 2012 and 2013, Mac decided that he needed a little break from the tour life. He got an apartment in Brooklyn and started creating music for his new album. He decided that he wanted to use the piano more, combining vibrato and chorus pedals and smooth bass lines for his new project, Salad Days. "Salad days" is a term that refers to being young and inexperienced, like how young people find life to be easy and believes there's one road through all of life. He created this album as a reflection on his old self and how he has matured as a singer/songwriter up to that point. Wearing vintage windbreakers, scuffed up Converse, smoking a pack of Viceroys a day, and brandishing old dad hats, he set the aesthetic for his new album. On the title track "Salad Days", he jumps right into singing to his mom about how he's getting older and realizing new things about life that he didn't think about when he was younger. Combining deep lyrics like, "Rolling through life, to roll over and die" then going straight to a whole four measures of chanting "La la la la la la...". By telling us that he has grown with more profound lyrics, he combats this by adding in the childish yodeling of his previous days to show that he's still got some fun in himself. This concept is pushed furthermore is pushed in the song "Passing Out Pieces". He is starting to experiment with synthesizers at the time, adding buoyancy to the beat and creating a new atmosphere for him to work with. In "Passing Out Pieces", he talks about how he's growing up and how things are going for him. Mac's more "woke" perception about life is shown by the line, "Can't claim to care, never been reluctant to share”. He doesn't really care about the things people say about him or his music, he just wants to live life and have some fun. Mac is passing out pieces of himself to his fans, friends, and family because he believes that he has become larger than before. This developed philosophy continues to go forward in his later pieces.

After the critical review of Salad Days and another tour, Mac sat down again in his ashtray littered apartment to write Another One. It took him a week to write the music and another week to record it. Taking the synthesizers he experimented with in Salad Days, he creates an album consisting of softer vocals, piano, and a mood set from the beginning. This atmosphere that is created by the overall theme of love present throughout the album. Mac states in the same interview by Studio 360 mentioned previously that it was a collection of love songs, some about him and some not about him. During this time, vaporwave was a subgenre of soft pop music that was starting to gain consciousness in the internet. Mac took inspiration from this, layering over distant vocals with close range instrumentals to create an ethereal-like sound. In the song “No Other Heart”, he uses a skinny tone bass to accompany the harmony pinching guitar to flow together with the majorly present riff that the piano presents. “Then come on give this lover boy a try, I'll put the sparkle right back in your eyes”. There’s a girl that he wants to be with, but she doesn’t recognize him for what he is, simple but sweet little poetry from good old Macky. Though he may feel heartbroken from the girl not recognizing him, he’s overall okay with it happening. He understands that life continues to go on. He exemplifies this in the song “Without Me”, where he loses his love to another person, but he will move on from it if they’re friends either way. This theme of love is the focus of Another One and it wasn’t very different from his other works thematically, but experimenting with new sounds and techniques would soon evolve his work into his largest project to this day.

With age comes experience. This is a fact that has been proven over and over with artists from the past, and Mac is no exception when it comes to this. As a 27-year-old, he now has shaped his philosophy to have more sustenance than when he was 18 years old back in Makeout Videotape. Now, as he’s hailed to be one of the biggest names in indie music, he has held his place by his most recent release this year, This Old Dog. As he shifts away from his joking tunes of 2 and Salad Days, he takes the synthesizer he had practiced with back in Another One and took it to a whole new level in This Old Dog. By turning the rock and roll factor to a zero, Mac’s approach to psychedelic jangle pop allowed him to present more serious concepts and themes to this album. Throughout This Old Dog, Mac delves into his relationship with his father, his commitment with Kiki, and his feelings on life in general. While recording, he learned that a vibrato pedal would fit his current theme more than a chorus or reverb pedal, creating a new sound that has a tonal difference than his older works when closely paid attention to. On the opening track, “My Old Man”, Mac reflects on his age and the comparison of him and his father. When Mac was young, his father was kicked out of home by Mac’s mother because of his alcoholism and crystal meth addiction. Since then, Mac wanted to separate from being anything like his father, wanting to create something that he couldn’t. But life caught up to Mac, because his father got seriously ill while creating This Old Dog, so Mac had to confront his father again after years of not seeing him. While Mac was trying to be everything that his dad wasn’t, he eventually started turning into him both physically and mentally. He conveys this by saying, “Look in the mirror, ho do you see, someone familiar, but surely not me, for he can't be me”. Even though Mac doesn’t have any addictions or mental problems like his father, he still feels like he is him. In an interview with Dazed Digital, he told them that “A lot of this music is not necessarily like, ‘I love you, I hate you’ or anything like that. It’s more me trying to understand what a relationship (with my father) is supposed to look like”. In the song “For the First Time”, Mac is grieving over a girl that has left him and he still imagines that it was all a dream and they will get back together. He sorrows this with the line, “Without her at my side, simply being alive has been rough”. But the truth is, most of the time we don’t get second chances and we must live with the choices we make. The climax of this album, the second-to-last song, is at least by my standards, Mac’s grandest piece he has ever done. “Moonlight on the River” starts off with a very tense guitar riff, caked with the vibrato previously mentioned and a subtle three chord acoustic part that fills the song. This composition comes straight from Mac’s heart, creating a ballad with extremely interpretive lyrics that melodically accompany the smoothness of the instrumentals. The way I see it, he is looking back on his relationship with his father and life in general. He knows his father will be gone soon, but he doesn’t know how to feel about it. They never had a relationship together, so he can’t feel sorry for him, but he can’t rid the tension of never being able to love him. A prime example of this is, “I'd say, see you later, if I thought I'd see you later, and I'd tell you, that I loved you, if I did”. Mac has lived the most important times of his life without him, but for him to come back to just to say goodbye, this has taken a large toll in Mac’s thought process on life and what love is. He concludes the song with this final line in the chorus with, “I'm home, there's moonlight on the river, everybody dies”. He takes the imagery of him looking out at the sun setting on river and the moon coming up, consuming it with white light. The sun setting is his father’s imminent death, while the moon rising is whatever awaits for Mac as he has to go on with life knowing his father is permanently gone. The song ends with waves of loud crashes of guitar, drums, bass, and a siren-like drone in the background that eventually consumes the song. As the strongest song in his entire discography up to this date, Mac displays his very emotional and deep-thinking side to the listeners. With Mac’s past being revealed to the fans, we can see him in a new light that shapes his new personality. This is personally one of my favorite albums of all time due to themes that are presented, the style of music, and just the amount of energy it took Mac to put into this for it to become a fully-fledged album.

From goofball to philosopher, Mac has grown and shaped himself due to the events that have unfolded in his life. With his gap-tooth grin, he shows the world that he excels in creating music that has a deep connection with love and experiences throughout life. Whether gowning a crappy 80$ Yamaha guitar or a 1000$ Stratocaster, he expresses himself most efficiently through his music that has touched the hearts of many listeners that continue to support him from Makeout Videotape’s thrash surf to his now psychedelic ballads. Mac doesn’t seem to act like he’s going away any time soon, and I hope that this proves true because I don’t think I can forget his rich, playful songs all around his discography.