Mac DeMarco sees himself as an old man nowadays. In fact, he says it frequently throughout our interview. He’s five years sober, is growing tired of what he calls the “profit-driven” music industry and is increasingly spending time out in the sticks of his Canadian homeland. His new album, Guitar, is “just a record from an old man who wants to go on tour and sing for his fans a couple times a week, that’s all,” Mac sighs, speaking with the tobacco-hardened croak that has endeared him to slackers worldwide. But, get Mac talking about wells (yes, the things that go in the ground and bring up fresh water), and he’ll go for hours.
Still, to call Guitar ‘just a record’ is a bit of an understatement. At the very least, it’s an accurate reflection of Mac’s current stage in life. Literally everything on the record was done by him alone – the music videos, the press shots, the mixing – while the tracks themselves are just Mac and his guitar, nothing more. He even tells me how, in the final stages of making the album, when he noticed a single synth line on one of the tracks, he instantly removed it. “It’s just nice to make something that feels genuine,” he explains. “I want to make music that comes from me.”
And it is in this misanthropic bubble that Mac’s lyrics take on a particularly personal tone. “These days I’d much rather be on my own, No more walking those streets, that I once called my home,” he sings on lead single “Home”, with a voice that wanders in and out of key much like his life spent on the road. “Every place that I’ve lived in has shaped what I think home to be, you know, what makes your roots dig in where they dig in,” Mac reflects, having moved to LA back in 2016 and only recently begun to gravitate back to Canada. “It’s funny, I’ve lived away from the country I’m from for so long that I don’t even feel Canadian. LA is an inherently transient place. You just start feeling weird. Maybe I’m just getting old.”
But it is precisely this nomadic spirit that has formed a central part of Mac’s appeal. His last record, One Wayne G, was a sprawling nine-hour compilation of demos that was impossible to package or press on vinyl – which, he admits, “was kind of the point.” Today, he looks back with nostalgia at the early days in his career, spent gigging in old New York venues without a real alcohol license and playing “true blue, working class jams”. His latest release evokes this history, offering an escapism that seems to have captivated a new generation of listeners who have grown up submerged in digital hyperconnectivity.
Indeed, far from fulfilling his expected role as one of the 21st century’s eminent songwriters, Mac describes the five years since his last release as a time spent learning “weird skills” and getting into his “retiree, uncle things”. He’s been canoeing in the Canadian wilderness, building wells and learning Amish farming techniques, leaning into an off-grid lifestyle that seems to have at least slightly reframed his approach to music. “I love utilities,” Mac concludes. “I like fixing things, I like being alive. Now, I want to travel, I want to go out on tour and do the whole thing – that’s Guitar’s utility.”
Below, in a special ‘Unplugged’ edition of our Dazed Faves series, the slacker rock anti-hero shares his favourite offline hobbies.
Mac DeMarco: In the last couple of months, I’ve become obsessed with wells. I love it because the water is free, but here’s the thing: If the water’s in the ground, a common problem is that you’ll have a few too many mineral deposits in your water. So, how do you get those out? You’ve got to filter them. So, I’ve become a plumber now. I have a four-stage filter system. You don’t want manganese in your water because, over a certain amount in your water, there’s a brain disease you can get. Even if you have a slight amount, it’s going to stain your sinks, your plates and your clothes. So, you gotta filter that out. Then, you soften the water with salt in this big machine. Then, you run it through a UV light that kills all the bacteria. After that, you can drink crystal clear, beautiful, free water. But, if you drink a little too much in a day, the level goes down and you got to bring it back up. The amount of juice-up I get, being my own water treatment plant… I love it.
Mac DeMarco: I’ve been watching a lot of videos on Amish farming techniques. Like, building their barn, weaving their baskets, their furniture, the way they make their clothing… but what’s most interesting to me is their rain catchment. They catch all this rain in cisterns and, in order to keep the bacteria low in, they fill the cistern with fish, like goldfish or something. So, there’s a fish floating around, softening the water like the UV treatment that I was talking about earlier. The water is free, and that’s even free treatment if you can keep the fish alive. You don’t even have an electrical bill with that. I think that’s just unbelievable.
I don’t have fish yet. I’m getting my roof replaced this week, then I’m gonna start thinking about a PVC system to route it down to some tanks and then shoot it up to a cistern. I may try fish, but I feel like I’m not going to be at this house enough where I can tend to fish properly.
Mac DeMarco: It’s funny. I’ve lived away from Canada so long that I feel disconnected from it. Now, I’m trying to reinvigorate my roots, and the caricature of a Canadian has become more appealing to me because I’ve been away from it. I’m like, ‘Oh, Canadians are so cute’. I feel like I’m LARPing as a Canadian.
Canoeing is the most Canadian thing you can do. I’d never really done it until last year, but now I love it. There’s this guy, Bill Mason. He’s a filmmaker from Canada who made all these movies for The National Film Board of Canada. He would strap 35-millimetre cameras to his canoe and get all of these beautiful nature shots. Bruce Coburn – a Canadian legend, folk guitarist-kind-of-rock musician – made the soundtrack for one of these great movies. I feel like I’m able to come to Canada now and have this fantasy of canoes, nature and wildlife. It’s a beautiful way to travel. It’s how they settled this country. It’s a traditional vessel for the First Nations. It’s played a big part in the fibre of our nation.
Mac DeMarco: I love motorcycles. I’ve got a Honda XL 600 here, an old dirt bike from the late 80s. I love all motorcycles, but I’ve had mostly Enduro, adventure and off-road-ish motorcycles. I got into fixing cars and engines during Covid, and it turns out that working on bikes just sucks less than doing cars, because the engine is right in front of you. You don’t have to get underneath something. I had a Ducati for a while – that was a little too fast for my blood, I think. I went up the West Coast on a bike last summer. You can drive in a beautiful place and it will look beautiful, but until you do it on a bike… it feels like you’re watching a place on TV. You do it on a bike, and it’s just a new experience. I feel like I’m getting into all my retiree, uncle things.
Mac DeMarco: My relationship with guitars kind of goes in and out. There are times when I’m like, ‘Guitars, whatever.’ But right now, I’m in a zone where I’m like, ‘Guitars are cool’. I like guitars because they’re the everyman’s instrument. Everybody can play a little bit of guitar, you know?
For a long time, it was, ‘Ooh, synthesiser’. Now, I don’t care. I just want a guitar. I don’t even want any effects on the guitar. I just want it clean, nothing fancy. People are gonna see this album title and they’re gonna think, ‘Ooh, Mac’s playing electric guitar’. The guitar is not even doing anything that crazy on the project. Without even thinking, after I finished making all the songs, I looked back at them, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s only synth on one song’. So, I went back and I deleted the synth. Then I was like, ‘Well, now I can just call it Guitar’.
The funny thing about Guitar is, on this tour coming up, I’m gonna try not to play guitar. I don’t want to play guitar anymore. I just want to do my middle-aged Frank Sinatra vibe. We’ll see how it goes.
Guitar is out now
