Smiling When Required: Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days at 10

Given his self-appointed position as the Cheshire cat on indie rock’s shoulder, it can be easy to forget that Mac DeMarco is a very traditional singer-songwriter. His songs don’t often exceed three minutes, and he writes in a simple and idiomatic style that seems to belong to an older generation. He likes to say things like “I’ll put the sparkle back into your eye,” which would seem to have no place in the vernacular of a late millennial, but DeMarco seems to have preemptively grown old as a defense mechanism. Another One was almost an early-retirement record, documenting his stay in Rockaway Beach and evoking an older East Coast of carousels and hot dog stands. This Old Dog found him fretting about turning into his dad; Here Comes the Cowboy found him looking for escape routes, and his recent instrumental albums evoke the sad clarity of a newfound sobriety. But DeMarco’s post-adolescent hangover began on Salad Days, his third and best album.

The person singing these songs seems to be conscious of mortality for the first time in his life, aware that alcohol may actually be killing his brain cells and cigarettes may actually be destroying his lung capacity. “What Mom don’t know has taken its toll on me,” from “Picking Up Pieces,” is one of the best lines ever written about this realization. More blunt is a later line from “Let My Baby Stay”: “Half my life I’ve been an addict.” Yet, Mac DeMarco still seems buoyed by the naïve hope that the world will protect him, that his baby would rather stay than demand he change his behavior or leave. And he can still find solace in his talent, which he clearly understood was at some kind of zenith in 2014. The way he rushes from “Blue Boy” into “Brother” suggests he couldn’t wait to finish getting the first song down so he could start the next. This lifestyle still works for him, at least creatively.

All of this is rendered in music DeMarco describes as “jizz jazz”—a tag in line with his aesthetic of secondhand disgustingness, but which is true to the way DeMarco’s notes seem to drip off the neck of his guitar, not to mention the way his slides from one note to the next require him to move his hand up and down his guitar in a frankly masturbatory fashion. It’s a new way of using the instrument as a phallus, not as a thrusting machine of sexual domination but as something to play with when you’re bored. DeMarco uses practically the same tone on every song, and the 11 tracks on Salad Days bleed into each other like the endless, languid days they nod to. You could call it yacht rock, but this character is a long way from being able to afford a yacht, and the album’s sense of relaxation feels unearned and guilt-ridden—more of a pervasive couchlock, where being idle isn’t always a choice.

Listening to Salad Days 10 years later, one of the most striking things about its sound is how thin it is. That doesn’t mean it’s poorly produced so much as that psych-pop became substantially bigger and more festival-friendly following its release. The next year, Tame Impala put out Currents, which, along with records from DeMarco’s former bandmate Homeshake, helped pave a lane for a form of mainstream psych music capable of booming from Coachella speakers. You hear this sound everywhere now, from the mainstream bedroom pop of Steve Lacy and Rex Orange County to the indica R&B of SZA and Doja Cat—and Mac’s dewy guitars and chilled-out attitude were undoubtedly a catalyst. My Pitchfork colleague Philip Sherburne has remarked on legalized weed coinciding with an explosion in aggressively “chill” EDM like Odesza, and it can be heard just as easily in psychedelia’s recent intrusion into the pop charts. DeMarco has shocked some fans by claiming not to smoke, but Salad Days is like the last gasp of stoner music’s outlaw era.

Another thing that’s striking is how straight-faced Salad Days is. DeMarco says “shit” before kicking into “Brother,” and it ends with him thanking the audience for listening to the record, but that’s really it as far as “jokes” go. There’s always been an acute contrast between DeMarco’s easy-going music and his larger-than-life persona. One of the earliest anecdotes about DeMarco to make the rounds online involved the singer shoving a drumstick up his ass while belting U2’s “Beautiful Day.” The screechy, ironic covers have remained a staple of his setlist, though by the time most of those who read interviews circa his breakthrough album 2 were able to see him live, he’d dialed down the onstage antics to a potentially disappointing degree. He still managed to scrounge a star persona out of his gap-toothed grin, penchant for beat-up hats, cigarettes and an unseemly sense of potty-mouth humor. There are probably thousands of people who only know him from what he looks like and assume his music is a lot funnier and more provocative than it is.

But Mac DeMarco’s canny self-promotion made him a lot bigger than he would be otherwise. Had he been as mild-mannered as Tobias Jesso Jr., he’d probably be remembered as a pleasant blip on the indie rock radar and would enjoy respectful nods of admiration rather than cultish devotion. The result, though, is that DeMarco’s music has been saddled with a lot of baggage that such traditionally straightforward music can’t necessarily support. One irksome trend has been the association of DeMarco’s music with the “male manipulator” archetype, a specific kind of late-millennial male who wallows in trashiness and cultivated apathy rather than taking the steps to improve himself, who can often be find posing in late-night Polaroids with a cigarette dangling limply from his lips. When DeMarco released Here Comes The Cowboy in 2019, it was discussed more on the Twitterverse for “stealing” its title from Mitski’s Be The Cowboy than for its musical merits; the subtext was an implied conflict between DeMarco’s dudebro slacker indie and a more inclusive, principled new era led by women and queer singer-songwriters.

It’s easy to see why men who revel in arrested development might find comfort in his music. That it pairs well with weed and beer is obvious. His surface-level self-interrogation, where regret hangs in the air like a stale fart rather than translating into meaningful change, will connect with many men in the final stages of developing their frontal lobes. A common response to dealing with one’s deficiencies in the Internet era is to transmute them into an aesthetic—and DeMarco makes being a wastrel look cool and has for more than a decade. Is DeMarco the same kind of man he seems to attract? A nasty story about him filming a friend jerking off at a party full of high schoolers continues to make the rounds on Reddit and elsewhere, cropping up every so often as a bannister for why DeMarco’s cool-guy aesthetic hasn’t always been so cool. It was only well after the release of Salad Days that listeners started to realize he’d stolen “Chamber of Reflection” wholesale from obscure Japanese musician Shigeo Sekito’s “The Word II.” The guy on the record doesn’t sound like much of a boyfriend.

But his music doesn’t valorize shittiness so much as it captures a specific stage in male development where one must decide to either take initiative or coast on decline. His reputation as shitty-boyfriend rock has more to do with the hold he had on straight men in the mid-2010s than any deficiency in his art or personality (unlike the latter-day Kanye cult, which is directly tied to the artist’s personal failings and which exalts freedom from consequence more than good songwriting). Ditto the wave of bedroom projects with pearly guitars and mumbled lyrics that sprung up in DeMarco’s wake, leaving the singer-songwriter with a touch of Fleet Foxes Disease: the predicament of being vastly superior to your more annoying and ubiquitous imitators, who retroactively infect your music in the ears of subsequent generations of listeners. Perhaps it doesn’t help how doggedly true DeMarco has been to his style over the years, with his later albums slowing the tempo but staying true to the same simple palette of a few sounds.

Yet the main reason Mac DeMarco the signifier has lingered in the cultural memory so much longer than Mac DeMarco the musician, I suspect, is because his music takes up a lot less space than he does. He has no songs that wedge their foot in the door and demand the world pay attention, simply because he’s not that kind of musician. Pitchfork described the 11-track, 35-minute Salad Days as a “no-big-deal great album,” which is exactly right—and had Captured Tracks not demanded he add “Let Her Go” to the album at the last minute, it would’ve been an even less big-deal masterpiece. It’s not hard to imagine someone who knows DeMarco’s face but not his sound coming back to this album and deciding it’s not that big of a deal at all. But few songwriters since the Lennon-McCartney of Rubber Soul and Revolver have conjured such a universe of feeling from such simple phrasing, presented so straightforwardly and beautifully—and few indie-rock records sound better on a lazy Sunday afternoon, where the big decisions can wait another day.

Daniel Bromfield is a writer, editor and musician from San Francisco, CA. He currently works as Calendar Editor at the Marin Independent Journal and is a prolific freelancer, with bylines at Pitchfork, Atlas Obscura, Resident Advisor and local media in the Bay Area. He runs the popular @RegionalUSFood Twitter account, highlighting obscure dishes from across the US. Find him on Twitter at @bromf3.