Mac DeMarco invites the fans round: "I don't know what I was thinking"

Mac DeMarco wants to make you coffee. In a parting message at the end of his latest release, the Canadian songwriter plainly states his home address in Queens, NY and invites listeners to “stop on by” for a cup of joe. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he admits. “I’ve had about 15 or 20 people come over so far because the album was leaked a couple of days ago, so yeah, I don’t know how to feel about that yet.”

A rash impulse maybe, but it’s an entirely characteristic move from a known prankster who carries himself with the sort of down-to-earth demeanour and unpretentious goofiness that confounds the traditional rockstar/fan hierarchy. For starters, DeMarco is (to put it bluntly) uncommonly transparent about his personal life. Spend any amount of time searching him on YouTube and before long you’re going to see him naked, probably while using the toilet. His own channel is full of homespun comedy shorts that offer a fairly unfiltered view into his everyday life, most featuring close friends and family. Since his girlfriend Keira began joining him on stage for crowd favourite Still Together their relationship has been prime fan fiction material on Tumblr, and even his mum’s been interviewed by the press after he jokingly directed fans to her Facebook account.

The music has become increasingly more intimate, too. While a relatively odd debut found DeMarco pitching down his voice into a low warble and impersonating a late night radio host between songs, his follow-up, 2, was a much more straightforward insight into the man himself, a collection of charming and preternaturally infectious pop songs that gained overnight recognition. Salad Days continued in much the same vein, though delving into topics of isolation and the emotional toll of this bacchanalian lifestyle on Passing Out Pieces. Throughout, DeMarco has stayed true to a raw and rugged recording style, which combined with an endearing, cracky falsetto that oozes honesty, it’s no surprise that many feel a true connection to the man behind the microphone.

"If they want to come hang, it’s totally fine with me" – Mac DeMarco

More than a pathological oversharer though, DeMarco is hugely appreciative of his fans. For a man already known to spend hours after gigs shaking hands and posing for selfies, inviting fans round for a chit chat seems a natural next step. “I love the people,” he says sincerely. “Everyone that’s come over has been really nice. You’ve got be a freak to want to come all the way over here and a lot the kids are really young, but it’s cool. If they want to come hang, it’s totally fine with me. I mean, I invited them so I’ve got to reap what I sow.”

For DeMarco, friendly and approachable was just the way he always knew musicians to be. “I lived in Edmonton, Alberta, which is in the middle of Canada, way up north. Bands don’t come there. And if they did they’d play, like, a giant place. For me growing up, the bands I really idolised were the local bands, so I got to meet them and after going to, like, two of their shows I was friends with all of them.”

But can he really expect audiences to buy the average Joe shtick now he’s selling out shows in New York and London months in advance? Certainly a venue like Glasgow’s ABC, where he’s headed this month, doesn’t lend itself to the intimate rapport with the crowd he enjoyed as recently as 2013, when he played Nice 'n’ Sleazy.

Audience participation was already levelling up at The Arches last year, where the security team (though just "trying to do their job”) left little to doubt about the distinction between the performer and the punters. “That place was a little sketchy with the security guards and stuff,” he remembers. “Right as we were beginning to play there were security guards standing at the barrier, shining their flashlights in kids' faces and shit and we’re like, ‘man, just relax.’ Usually they just come up for a sec, or someone just wants to crowd surf – no big deal. It’s just a show, that’s what happens at shows. But if kids are just trying to get over a barrier and some big burly guy with a ponytail puts him in a headlock it’s like, ‘Get a grip man, c’mon! These kids are paying to be here, it’s supposed to be a good vibe, relax!’”

While the dynamic of his live show will inevitably be transformed again this time around, long-term fans can rest assured that Another One is business as usual. This is still DeMarco in his bedroom recording all the parts himself, wonky beat-up guitars intact. Furthermore, he claims it's the most candid he’s been on record. “The new songs are probably the most personal songs that I’ve ever written. I feel like they fit together the best.” That being said, listeners shouldn't get too hung up on their lyrical sentiment. “They’re all love songs, all different styles and ways to feel about love. They may mean something to me but the nature of love songs and the nature of pop music is that it doesn’t matter. With Salad Days it was kind of like, 'Oh, this song's about this and this song’s about that. Here’s my life, check it out!' But this one’s kind of like, 'Don’t worry about it, just do what you can with these songs if you want to.'”

Though far from constituting a complete sonic overhaul, keys play a bigger role on the recording. While he has used synthesisers in the past, DeMarco's recently taken to playing them like pianos, a learning process that’s also shaken up his songwriting. “It’s kinda like just starting from scratch again. It’s easier to be creative too because you’re not like, ‘I like to go to this chord because it’s the 6th major chord in this key or whatever.’ I don’t know where that is. I have no fucking idea with chord shapes or variations or anything. But as you keep doing it that way you learn.”

His guitar solos are also more flamboyant, apparently the upshot of recently kindled affection for rock’s least glamorous guitar god. “I think I fell in love with the Grateful Dead the last couple years," he explains. "My friend Chad plays in this band the Meatbodies; we went on tour with them and there was this one weekend where we were staying in our drummer’s cabin out in the mountains. We were all jamming and he got really drunk and he asked, ‘What scales do you use?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know... pentatonic, major scales?’” Chad suggested he try out mixolydian mode, a jazzy sounding scale favoured by the Dead’s scraggly lead guitarist. “It sounds like Jerry Garcia. So I tried that and got hooked immediately and now any opportunity I have to play in mixolydian mode I’m just like “Yeauuh!”

Whatever his muse, it’s working. Regardless of what you want to call it – “I’m calling it an EP because it’s getting so confusing,” says DeMarco, but his label prefers 'mini-LP' – Another One marks his third substantial release in as many years. As if that wasn't enough, he’s just topped it off with a free download of instrumentals on his Bandcamp page. Appropriately named Some Other Ones, the effort comprises nine new tracks written and recorded seemingly on a whim and is yet another testament to his obvious drive and work ethic, flying in the face of the 'slacker' characterisation with which he’s so often labelled. He’s predictably nonchalant about it all, though. “It’s only instrumentals. If I had written lyrics it would have taken me a lot longer. With instruments it’s easier to get a vibe or whatever. You can just do what you want. It’s just easier. "Everyone’s calling it the BBQ soundtrack but it’s just nine songs I recorded last week and felt like sharing with people. When it works, it works, I guess."

The BBQ in question was a foodbank drive DeMarco hosted in Brooklyn where he cooked fans hotdogs in exchange for donations. The Skinny wonders whether he might continue to leverage his growing cachet for charitable causes? “Maybe? The only time I’ve ever done it is when I thought it'd be funny to sell my shoes on the internet and I was like, ‘I can’t justify keeping the money from that, that’s too fucking stupid.’” His annihilated Vans fetched a handsome $21,100, but the bidder didn't follow through and DeMarco ended up footing half the bill himself. “The charity got a lot of publicity, so regardless of whether the kid fucked me over it doesn’t really matter.”

Both the shoes and the BBQ are just further examples of how DeMarco casually eludes cliches of rockstar self-rightousness, his humble sense of social responsibility a far cry from the saviour complexes of would-be Christ figures like Bono. “It’s kinda like – what am I going to do, go out there and sell hotdogs? So I thought might as well do a food bank drive -– you gotta give back to the neighbourhood every once and a while, you know.”

This generosity comes across in Another One’s lyrics too. "Is it wrong to think my love could really help you out?” he asks on No Other Heart, promising to “put the sparkle right back in your eye.” Without Me, on the other hand, finds him reconciling with an old flame, wishing them the best and hoping they’ll “find love tomorrow.”

Still, there’s only so long even Mac DeMarco can play the gracious host to a living room full of strange teenagers, even if they also happen to be his biggest fans. “I do have to get a little bit better at being like, 'OK guys, you’ve been here for three hours already, it’s time to go.'”