Mac DeMarco
2

At the beginning of 2012, he releases an EP: "Rock And Roll Nightclub". "Rock And Roll Nightclub" is a walk through the '70s on the Rue of Paris (the more decadent and original ones) ending up in front of the Folies de Pigalle from where a heavily drunk Lou Reed emerges arm-in-arm with David Bowie. Anyway, the folks at Captured Tracks like the album and they say, make the next album, and we'll finance it for you.

The album is recorded and titled (with much imagination) "2," and it doesn't lose the singer-songwriter nature a bit chansonnier and home-recorded feel of the previous record (Mac defines what he plays as jizz jazz). Light and lilting strumming. Drunken arpeggios that send your brain into a loop. The lyrics are inspired by everyday life: no visions of the Madonna, leaps into the blue, otherworldly journeys, or world peace. No, pure habit. What usually happens to any average citizen, on any average day. And it's the everyday nature of the lyrics that allows interpreting the album as a typical day (always in Paris, mind you).

One wakes up in the morning with the sleepy and lazy "Cooking Up Something Good", where mom is in the kitchen, dad on the sofa, and "life moves slowly." Breakfast of champions and heading down to catch the Metro. You're dead tired, and the cold keeps you in a very uncomfortable half-sleep state where everything seems like a hallucination, like the melody of "Dreaming" (hey, did I dream of that hottie, or was she real?!).

You arrive at work (or university), coffee, and off you go with "Freaking Out The Neighborhood," with which, despite the album's livelier rhythm, you realize that, as usual, you don't feel like doing anything. Oh! Here's "Annie," your colleague with whom you talk about everything: luckily, she's there; otherwise, who would you complain to about your existential malaise?! And from the background sounds in the chorus, you can tell you're really down.

Cigarette break. "Ode to Viceroy" is Mac's slow and tired dedication to his favorite low-cost cigarettes (in the video, he smokes an immense quantity). Instead, you go to get a coffee (slowly), drink it (slowly), and smoke your Viceroy (very slowly).

The workday continues calmly with "Robson Girl": you're thinking of someone with the wavering concentration of the guitar in this song. You're cooked. Flat electroencephalogram. Finally, you go home, and on the Metro, you see a girl (this time real) whom you fall in love with for the total 15-minute journey, and in your cracked head, you sing "The Stairs Keep On Calling," a serenade to convince her to run away with you.

You arrive at your girlfriend's house (the one who's actually with you), and to greet her, you flaunt the bohemian romanticism of "My Kind Of Woman." You dance with her sweetly to the musical interlude "Boe Zaah." Oh yes, the girl is named "Sherrill" (or Sherrool, as he pronounces it) and at dinner, by candlelight, while you reassure her by holding her hand telling her that you will always be by her side wherever she goes. "Still Together" is the song of two lovers (but deeply in love), and it closes the day in bed with Sherrill, and everything is beautiful: waterfalls of honey, lakes of sentimentality, and mountains of promises ("..let's walk the line together..").

Mac DeMarco thus manages to sing about the day of a common person, no superstar or super-coolness: the simple and humble folk. And he does it with unpretentious and simple lyrics, with a $30 guitar bought at 16 and a pedalboard that, according to him, "no serious artist would use." But as said at the beginning, Mac is crazy, and being crazy is something he excels at.