Mac DeMarco has spoken to NME about plans for his upcoming UK tour dates, enjoying sobriety, and his thoughts on the hype around Cameron Winter and Mk.gee.
READ MORE: Soundtrack Of My Life: Mac DeMarco
With his three-night run at London’s O2 Academy Brixton this June, and a recently-announced headline slot at Dorset’s End of the Road Festival in September – where he’ll top the bill alongside Pulp and CMAT nearly a decade after first headlining the event – the beloved Canadian troubadour is currently on a victory lap tour of his sixth studio LP ‘Guitar’.
“Some nights I want to create a loving, fun, community vibe,” the 35-year-old said of the ever-changing atmosphere that the new record is bringing to the stage. “Other nights, I want it to be kind of scary. It just all depends on the mood.
“The set is definitely less rockin’ than it used to be, but I think people are into it! I don’t know if ‘mature’ is the right word, but the music is more involved. We’re not doing cover songs anymore. I have a lot of songs, and I try to cover most of the bases of what people want to hear, plus maybe some other stuff where there’ll be one person in the audience who’s like, ‘Wow, they’re doing that song? That’s weird!’”
Alongside his headline performance at the Larmer Tree Gardens weekender, DeMarco will also be presenting a four-artist showcase from Mac’s Record Label at the event, featuring Daryl Johns, Vicky Farewell, Pedro Martins and Tex Crick. All “close friends” and bandmates who’ve been touring as part of the ‘Guitar’ dates, DeMarco described them as “all part of the same universe” of his new record.
“With my shows, and now with the festival too, it’s cool to be able to put these people in front of a bigger audience. Hopefully there’s an opportunity where some people that have no idea [about them] will be like, ‘Well, Mac thinks they’re OK…’ And then they can have a taste,” he said. “Especially with Daryl and Pedro, you never really know what you’re going to get with them, which reminds me of my shows back in the day. It’s sometimes chaotic, but in a beautiful way.”
‘Guitar’ was released via Mac’s Record Label last August and marked his first ‘traditional’ release since 2019’s ‘Here Comes The Cowboy’, following 2023’s instrumental ‘Five Easy Hot Dogs’ and the same year’s ‘One Wayne G’: 199 instrumental demos running to nearly nine hours. Speaking about the trajectory, he described it as “a bit of a clearing of the plate, and then ‘Guitar’ was saying: now it’s time to have dinner”.
He continued: “I’ve always wanted to set an example of how you can do shows, how you can go on tour, or the standard of your recording quality when you’re doing it at home. With ‘One Wayne G’, for me, if I had an artist that aired their nine hours of half-baked ideas, I’d think it was amazing. It’s just what I want to see when I get into an artist.
“But there’s also a utility built into [‘Guitar’]. I’ve experimented with the format in a lot of songs and instrumentals and recording projects and collaborations, but I also admire the tradition of the album and the tradition of promoting it and going out and playing shows. I think I kind of missed that, and I wanted more of a reason to do that, and ‘Guitar’ is the reason.”
Check out the rest of our interview with DeMarco below, where he also talked about his experiences of now touring sober, his intentions to “downsize” his shows, and his thoughts on Cameron Winter and his LA neighbour Mk.gee.
NME: Hi Mac! You’re headlining End of the Road again this summer – the last time you topped the bill was in 2017, what do you remember from that show?
Mac DeMarco: “I remember I smashed one of my guitars, and I think I crowdsurfed from our stage to another stage? I mean, that was in the height of my alcoholism career, so there’s just a lot of memories of like, ‘I’m in the woods and it’s late and there’s a secret bar…’.
Do you like to take the time for a wander in the woods when you’re at a festival?
“Yeah, if we have time to! There’s a thing about English festivals specifically where it’s usually kind of rainy and mucky but people are down, and I react to that well. All the things that are funny about Coachella, like the butt cheeks and the uniforms and the outfits and stuff – I mean, I’m sure there’s a bit of that at Glastonbury or other English festivals, but mainly people are down for the tunes and to get covered in shit.”
Your music isn’t necessarily traditional whistles and bangs headliner fare. What do you try to bring to that slot that gives it the pizzazz needed to end someone’s night?
“Well, we haven’t played many festivals with this show or this band, so hopefully that’ll be the exciting part. It’ll be a push and pull. People will tell us what they want and we’ll give it to them. I don’t know if my crowds these days would know how to deal with crowd-surfing. I mean, they kind of didn’t back in the day either, but I think now they’d be like, ‘Why is he jumping? What’s happening? What’s going on?’ Only one way to find out!”
Your shows back then used to be renowned for various antics: lots of bum-flashing and burping. Do you think you fill the stage in a different way these days?
“I’ve been away from touring for so long, so I’m investigating what it is again. I go out every night and I don’t know how the crowd’s gonna make me feel. I don’t know how I’m going to feel on the stage. Also I’m a sober guy now, so there are nights when I go out there and there’s a feeling of: This is what I do? People get on a stage and do this? This is so strange!
“When we have a really bad show nowadays, too (because they happen!) in the moment, it’s so painful, but it’s almost like I long for that pain after it’s come and gone. Maybe it’s a combination of the sobriety thing and the kind of sombre new album, but when the show’s good, it’s really good, and when the show is bad, it’s so painful. But I think if I was in the crowd and I saw the show where it looked like we were all in pain out there, oh, I would love that…”
What was it like playing shows sober for the first time?
“I used to do it sometimes when I was still drinking a lot. Every once in a while, back in the day, I’d be bored of playing drunk and switch it up a bit and go out stone cold sober. But it’s funny touring again in a high volume. There’s a lot of emotions. People talk about touring being hard and I always just charged it to being hungover all the time; I’m sick all the time because I drink all the time. But now I’m never hungover and I’m pretty much never sick, but I still get anxious and feel insane performing every night. I think just spiking your adrenaline every night, it fucks you up! I mean, I’m sure a lot of it was the substance abuse, but I think now it’s uncovering different things. It’s interesting.”
What do you do to pass the time in the dressing room now?
“Honestly, we’re usually so busy. We’ve been taking a long time to soundcheck, so we’re pretty much just working all day, every day. And then I’ll see if there’s kids in the alley who want me to take photos with them, and if there are I’ll stay and do them all, so sometimes I’m back there saying hello to people til 2am. There’s no going to the bar after the show with that! It’s kind of insane, but I love it.”
Do you get a lot of mad fan gifts in those situations?
“After one of Daryl and Pedro’s shows in Copenhagen, this girl who was from Greenland gave me an antelope antler – not a whole antler obviously, just a piece. Somebody gave me this [figurine] that’s a 3D-printed me. Then I met this guy at the bar in Winnipeg and he drew us on stage playing the show – he’s an older man called Ed Ackerman who’s in his 70s and we’re going to use some of his drawings for some shows we have coming up.”
‘Guitar’ has a lot of reflective and quite heavy themes looking back at certain elements of your life. How has it been playing those tracks every night?
“It’s a little bit cathartic but those songs are a little bit evil too, so there’s a fork in the road with every song. You can walk it down the nice road, or you can walk it down the road of [puts on scary voice]: ‘Welcome to the show!’ I’ve been enjoying it. The songs are pretty stripped back and I think some of them are kind of spooky, so doing them in these old theaters, sometimes it’s pretty weird. But it’s cool to be able to sing something and feel overwhelmed every once in a while. It doesn’t happen every night, but sometimes it does.
Is any part of you surprised that you’re still at the level of being able to headline festivals and play big shows like this, so far into your career?
“It’s cool but what we’re trying to actively do with the new record and the new touring is to downsize in a tasteful way; to play nicer, smaller venues, and create a different environment. I think that it’s backfired a little bit where some of the booking has just been smaller venues that aren’t super nice, and then the fans are like, ‘Well, we couldn’t get a ticket, then the resale was $400’, which is not what I was trying to do. So we’re figuring it out. I want to keep going forward with my art and my music, but if it’s palatable to a giant-er and giant-er audience? It’s not something I [aspire to]. I didn’t really think about it back in the day either though, really. I’m just happy that I’m able to make whatever the fuck I feel like, and we’re still able to go out do things on whatever scale.”
What makes you want to downsize the operation?
“There’s a focus on growing something bigger and bigger and bigger, but you reach a threshold. When you wind up in a gigantic square box, and it’s this lifeless echoey venue where you need to supplement the size of the place with video screens and cameras – that’s not what I want to be doing. That’s not where I wanna put my energy, I’d rather put it somewhere that’s more fulfilling for me.”
As someone signing new artists to their label, do you feel excited about new music at the moment, Mac?
“Some of it, yeah. I’m pretty bad at keeping up to be honest, but it depends. I think the way that social media has changed, and the way the internet is, it’s like I almost don’t want a face. I just want the music. If I can have an experience with the music and not really have to think about what it’s attached to, that’s great. Because I feel like even now, with new artists or whatever, independent artists in alternative lanes have kind of gotten bulldozed. [People] want realness or legitimacy and that sells, so [labels have] found really sneaky ways to fabricate that and a lot of people are eating it up. Everybody just wants to get rich. Like, fuck this shit. But getting rich is fine! I’m not telling anybody what to do! I just think I’m just trying to do my little thing over here.”
Does the buzz around an unlikely band like Geese feel authentic to you?
“It seems cool! I have a thing when I see someone like Cameron [Winter, frontman] or Mk.gee and it’s like, ‘I was there once. The hype was coming for me… Have fun, but it gets weirder!’ I think also, when there’s something that’s that popping, the hype makes it so I don’t know how to consume it right now. But Mk.gee lives down the street from me, he’s a sweet guy. I gave away a lot of stuff from my studio a couple of years ago and he took some cables and showed me his Honda bike. I haven’t seen him in a long time, but God bless. That’s my neighbour.”
Now you’ve put out ‘Guitar’, what’s on the cards next? A big archive dump or another more classic album or…?
“In between all the tours, I’ve been making recordings and then burning them to CDs and giving them to people after the shows in the alleys. You give me something, I’ll give you something. But then you do something like that as a cool gesture, and then somebody puts it on social media, and then all of a sudden it’s expected and then it’s like, ‘Well, you just sucked the blood right out of this whole operation didn’t ya?’ But I’ve done it in a couple of different ways over the years where it’s just an immediate feed of the music I’m working on rather than waiting and having to put it through the machine and release it. I’m just trying to keep the motor oiled up, just trying to keep it fun.”
‘Guitar’ by Mac DeMarco is out now. He’ll play three nights at London’s O2 Academy Brixton on June 10, 11 and 12, before playing End Of The Road from September 3-6 where he’ll host Mac’s Record Label showcase on September 4. Visit here for tickets and more information.