Mac DeMarco Ditched 'Weird Rock’n’Roll Motif' For Second Album

Mac DeMarco's second 'proper' album, 2 (he's got, like, hundreds of other self-released recordings), has summer good times written all over it. The Canadian slacker's just announced he's heading our way for an early-summer tour that incorporates Victorian favourite Meredith Music Festival (“I was just on the phone with another guy,” he says, “did he say something about a naked race at the end?”). This latest record is a bit of a jump from the rawness of Rock And Roll Night Club, his 'debut' of last year, but his lazy aura still sprawls throughout. Truth is, the dude's been even busier than usual. He's a bit of a natural travelling spirit and since being snapped up by über-cool NYC label Captured Tracks, touring's been DeMarco's MO.

“I was from a town called Edmonton, Alberta, kinda like mid-western Canada, people call it, like, the Texas of Canada,” says DeMarco of his beginnings. “I played in a bunch of bands, that's pretty much where I got my start. I ended up moving to Vancouver when I was, like, 18 and that was where I started playing a lot of shows in town. I did a little bit of touring and then eventually a couple of years later I ended up in Montreal.”

Montreal proved a tougher nut to crack in terms of regular gigging and led DeMarco to spend more time messing around with recording. “It's like nobody has jobs there 'cause everybody's doin' their art project or something,” he says. “I mean, you've gotta play because you like playin', y'know, it's not about gettin' money, but in Vancouver it just turned out I could make a substantial amount of money and support myself just from playin' in town, which doesn't really make any sense in the first place. So Montreal was a bit different but it gave me the opportunity to work on some other things.

“I kinda slowed down a little bit because I couldn't really hustle it with just show money anymore... I started focusing more on recording I guess and I wound up making that Rock And Roll Night Club album somewhere down the line and then Captured Tracks picked me up and then this year has been very strange... I've pretty much only been on tour this year.”

Somewhere amidst the madness DeMarco conjured 2, which in many ways grounds him as some kind of 'serious artist' more than continuing with the live-fast-die-young, frenetic nature of the debut and previous self-released stuff. “For 2 it was a big change from the first album, I went from weird rock'n'roll motif – like, stereotype leather boots, ride your Harley Davidson-style weird stuff – to, 'Oh, this is who I am and I don't wear lipstick all the time and check it out': that was the second album.” He says that now the relative success of the more even-tempered 2 does put a bit of pressure on him to toe a slightly straighter line, at least in his recorded work.

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