Contrary to what the rumor mill has to say, Mac DeMarco is not retiring. His last album Here Comes the Cowboy arrived in 2019, and, right before the new year, DeMarco released his jovial take on the Christmas classic "It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas." Today, there's more: DeMarco announced a new instrumental album called Five Easy Hot Dogs that's out January 20, with vinyl editions out May 12.
The album was made in a cabin in Utah, and every track is named after the town in which it was written. “Some places I stayed longer in than others, some of them I knew from the past, others not so much,” DeMarco said in a press release. “I tried to keep things busy all the time. If I didn’t know what was up in a city, I’d just walk around ‘til someone recognized me and go from there. I met a lot of interesting people this way, and had a bunch of cool experiences.”
He added about the cabin: “It probably could have slept about 20 people, but instead it was just me withdrawing from nicotine with a bunch of taxidermy animals all over the place. No other humans for probably 50 miles in any direction. Horrible idea. I lasted one night and went back to Los Angeles the next day. When I first got back home, I felt as though I had given up on my idea and failed to finish what I was trying to do. But that’s all dog shit.”
“I don’t really care about, like, ‘Oh, this delay pedal is amazing,’” DeMarco shared with us last year when discussing the making of the then-unannounced new album. “I’m interested in, ‘This is an acoustic instrument that makes a real sound in the real world. The real sound and the real world is influenced by what kind of room you’re playing it in.’ It’s like, ‘Well, now I’m in a very strange little motel in Crescent City, California, and I wonder how the drums are gonna sound in here.’ And I get a kick out of that, be it good or bad. It sounds like that hotel room in Crescent City, and I think that’s important.”
Pre-order Five Easy Hot Dogs here.
