Is Mac DeMarco the Last Indie Rock Star?

The musician Mac DeMarco recently bought a rambling, hundred-year-old farmhouse on an island off the coast of British Columbia, deep in the Salish Sea and accessible only via boat. A ferry runs a few times a day from Tsawwassen, near Vancouver; the trip takes about two hours. In late June, DeMarco picked me up from the ferry terminal in a vintage Land Cruiser, its halogen headlights covered by yellow smiley faces. The house came with some eighty olive trees, in varying states of vibrancy or decline. DeMarco had been pruning dead branches, attempting to conjure what’s known as the “open vase” shape, gutting the brittle center growth to promote air circulation. During my three days on the island, he was messing around with the trees more or less constantly, hacking away with clippers or an electric saw, hurling tangles of foliage into a wheelbarrow and dumping its contents in the woods. Sometimes I would lodge my recorder between tree limbs so that we could talk while he worked. There, DeMarco was transforming from a rascally indie-rock icon into a gap-toothed, D.I.Y. frontiersman in disintegrating red Vans.

In 2012, DeMarco released his début EP, “Rock and Roll Night Club,” on Captured Tracks, a Brooklyn-based independent record label known for its deep bench of spacey, lo-fi guitar bands. By the time he put out his second full-length album, “Salad Days,” in 2014, he had been anointed a kind of debauched slacker king. DeMarco’s records were easy, loose, and cool, with echoes of Neil Young and Brian Wilson, if they’d been reared on dank memes, legal weed, and back issues of Thrasher. Pitchfork gave “Salad Days” its Best New Music designation. Prior to the album’s release, the rapper Tyler, the Creator tweeted, “DEAR MAC DEMARCO I LOVE YOU YOU ARE AWESOME.” DeMarco’s followers were passionate and occasionally deranged. (That year, a female fan brought him a pig fetus suspended in a jar of formaldehyde; it was tattooed with a picture of DeMarco as a mermaid.) DeMarco described this period of sudden cultural ascendance—“when things started goin’ wackadoodle”—as disorienting. “The cool kids would come from every city, and they were expecting some kind of sexy famous guy, but I was just a dumbass with a tuque on,” he said.

DeMarco has become only more popular in the past decade. “Chamber of Reflection,” a teetering, synth-driven track from “Salad Days,” is ubiquitous on TikTok, and has been streamed nearly a billion times. DeMarco himself has more than twenty million monthly listeners on Spotify, a remarkable number for a dude who plays dazed, quivery guitar songs about whatever’s on his mind. A TikTok account dedicated to his work has more than eight hundred thousand followers and features videos of DeMarco telling jokes that are sometimes scatological and always absurd. (Picture, say, a pleasingly unhinged-looking DeMarco, hoodie up, placing a fake phone call in which he attempts to order half a million dollars’ worth of poop and pee.) DeMarco’s fans have always been young, but he thinks that they might be getting younger. “There was a point where I kind of understood my audience. Now I have no fucking idea,” he said. “I grew up and they didn’t.”

His new house sits in thrilling but somewhat perilous proximity to the ocean. From the deck, which runs parallel to the shoreline, you can spot orcas, humpback whales, bald eagles (a pair were nesting nearby, atop a gargantuan Douglas fir), otters, and harbor seals, whose speckled heads periodically popped out of the water, peering around for snacks. The property had been sold as is. The guest cottage, where I slept, had a handsome, airy bedroom jutting out over the beach, buttressed by an ad-hoc foundation that resembled something a juiced-up toddler might manufacture from glue and Popsicle sticks. At night, I could hear waves crashing loudly against the western wall. (“It’s comin’ down!” DeMarco joked one morning. “C’est la vie! ”)

DeMarco and his longtime partner, Kiera McNally, had already fixed up a place in Echo Park, in Los Angeles; he was perhaps overly cognizant of the financial and psychic ferment that accompanies home renovations. Shortly after I arrived, I idly inquired if the property had a well—once you have lived with a well, the health and viability of all wells somehow remain inescapably present in one’s consciousness, a source of endless small talk, like weather, or sports—and his face lit up. “Do you know about wells?” he asked. Freshwater had been on his mind. He’d been monkeying around with an old concrete cistern and a pump, trying to figure out how to irrigate some raised beds. He’d been researching local rules about rainwater collection. The whole situation was making him a little nervous. “This might have been a big mistake,” DeMarco said. But he was eager to be humbled. “I thought I knew everything when I was in my twenties. I want to stay in a place where I’m constantly reminded that I don’t know jack shit, I will never know jack shit, and then someday I’m dead.”

Later this month, DeMarco, who is thirty-five, will release “Guitar,” his tenth record and his first since 2023’s “One Wayne G,” a nine-hour compilation of mostly instrumental demos. DeMarco made “Guitar” at home in L.A. last November, in about two weeks. Just before that, he recorded an entirely different album, “Hear the Music,” which he has played only for McNally. “That’s the only time anyone will hear it, I think,” he said. “With the second one, I played her a bit as I was recording it, but I didn’t tell anyone I worked with for a good four months. I just didn’t want to start the doomsday clock: ‘Well, now, where are the photos?’ It was a really nice experience to have it as a thing I could enjoy for a while.”

“Guitar” is an exceptionally self-contained record. DeMarco played every instrument; produced, engineered, and mixed the songs; shot the album cover and music videos using a tripod; and is releasing it on his own label. He is sometimes modest about his chops—“I can specifically do the little thing that I’ve done that has put me where I am now, but I can pretty much just do the little thing,” he said—but “Guitar” is stunning and deeply idiosyncratic, unlike anything else in his discography. It contains some of his most intimate and sophisticated songwriting. “That’s the advancement,” DeMarco said. (He was more reserved about his musical performance: “The guitar playing sounds like I went back ten years, maybe.”) It’s possible to locate points of comparison—I hear the closeness of Nick Drake’s “Five Leaves Left,” the psychedelic wobble of David Crosby circa “If I Could Only Remember My Name”—but it is hard to tether DeMarco to any particular tradition. “I just don’t feel unsure about it at all,” he said of the album.

DeMarco spoke about the work of songwriting as compulsory, as if he were fulfilling a prophecy. “I think if I don’t do it, I will be punished by the universe,” he said. “When I’m making the songs, I feel satisfaction, and maybe that’s also some kind of addiction—‘You did it again, pal!’—but I think it’s just that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” He went on, “I can have other hobbies. I can poorly renovate houses or fuck up motorcycle engines. But when I do those things I feel guilty.” That notion—an ineluctable vocational calling—is central to “Punishment,” a new song featuring a swaying guitar line:

Backwards, but without plans to regress
You can have all of me, a pound of my flesh
’Cause Mama, I was told that punishment will come to
Those of us who don’t do what we’re made to.

On the night of my arrival, DeMarco became briefly preoccupied by a wobbly deck chair. After dinner, he retrieved a saw from the shed, cut a new support beam, and held court for a bit on the utility and character of the Robertson screw, which features a tapered square at its center and was patented by a Canadian tool salesman in 1909. DeMarco eventually got the chair stabilized, though the next day he brought it up as an example of his innate antsiness. “Sometimes all this just feels like a distraction from something,” he said. “I just get a little . . . homed in.”

DeMarco was born in 1990 in British Columbia, and was brought up in Edmonton, Alberta. His birth name, Vernor Winfield MacBriare Smith IV, has an aristocratic jangle, though his mother, Agnes DeMarco, changed it to MacBriare Samuel Lanyon DeMarco after his father left, when Mac was five, and failed to pay child support. “On my dad’s side of the family, there was money, but I just didn’t really know those people,” he said. He believes that being reared by a single mom might have given him a certain scrappiness. He referred to his fellow-Albertans as “utility people.” “In Canada, especially out here, even the tradespeople are, like, ‘I could do it for ya, but framin’ somethin’s not that hard,’ ” he said. “It’s almost like ‘What, you can’t do it yourself?’ I appreciate that.”

DeMarco doesn’t smoke or drink anymore. It’s hard to overstate his prior dedication to these vices. There was a period of time in which it was not unusual for him to empty an entire bottle of Jameson during a set. In 2012, he wrote a woozy, lovesick ballad, “Ode to Viceroy,” about his preferred brand of smokes. (“And oh, don’t let me see you cryin’ / ’Cause oh, honey, I’ll smoke you ’til I’m dyin’,” he sang, his voice notably scratchy.) The photographer Danny Cohen once shot a portrait of DeMarco submerged in a bathtub brimming with cigarettes; he was also photographed under what appeared to be a gentle rain of loosies. (“So you made cigs popular with kids?” the podcaster Adam Friedland once asked him.) Back then, DeMarco’s unabashed libertinism was sort of charming—he is almost preternaturally charismatic—though on occasion it felt depraved. (If your tolerance for tomfoolery, body horror, and the gnarliest corners of the internet is high, you can find a video online of a nude DeMarco onstage, drunk, consummating his relationship with a drumstick.) “I definitely had a pretty severe drinking problem,” he said. “It was bad. I’m glad I’m away from it. Would I be here doing the peaceful thing if I hadn’t gotten sober? Probably not. Would I even be alive? I don’t know. I see photos of myself in 2018 or 2019 and I look near-dead.”

Now DeMarco wakes up early, around seven. He and McNally make coffee and sit on the deck with their dog, Bear. One morning, DeMarco put on a record by the electronic composer Tim Story, whose ambient works, though elegant, would not be out of place in a fantasy series about dragons. That quality—a kind of fundamental uncoolness, or at least a disregard for the demands of the marketplace—is appealing to DeMarco. “That’s what I like about it,” he said of the album.

After breakfast, DeMarco and I scrambled down a pebbly embankment to the beach. “This fell over,” DeMarco observed, cocking his head at a small tree that had recently been uprooted. “Whatever. Wabi-sabi—imperfect. But you keep it tidy, and that feels good enough.” The idea of finding something beautiful in impermanence and inevitable decay is essential to his art.

For years, DeMarco has held fast to a salty ethos of self-reliance that includes resistance to the notion of scaling up. He has at times also willfully disregarded his own celebrity. At the end of “My House by the Water,” which closes “Another One,” his fifth release, he recited his home address, then a four-bedroom house in the Rockaways, along the ocean in Queens. “Stop on by—I’ll make you a cup of coffee,” he said. “See ya later!” Thousands made the pilgrimage and were amicably received. When I asked McNally if DeMarco had cleared it with her first, she gave me a look like What do you think?

“Nothing that insane ever really happened,” DeMarco piped up. “It just was a little overwhelming.”

McNally laughed. She is easygoing and gentle. “It was like a really silly, lighthearted version of the movie ‘Mother!’ He invited everyone for a cup of coffee. But we didn’t have a coffee maker. We had this antique hand grinder, and one French press, so we could only make half a pot at a time. People would be, like, ‘I’m here for my coffee!’ It was so insane.” (The couple moved eleven months later.)

The same year, DeMarco hosted a barbecue on a street in Brooklyn. “I grilled hot dogs for five hundred kids or something,” he said. Those sorts of stunts—vaguely reckless, endearing, kind of funny—feel indicative of DeMarco’s general lack of interest in taking himself too seriously. During my time in Canada, he periodically slipped into a booming patrician voice, as though he were narrating an episode of “Masterpiece Theatre.” This allowed him to make comedic observations at some remove, but also to defuse any conversational threads that felt too self-aggrandizing. Though DeMarco can be incredibly serious, even obsessive, about his work, he is also constitutionally averse—in a way that feels self-protective—to sounding pretentious or gassy.

DeMarco and McNally met as teen-agers in Edmonton. They have the type of instinctive, knowing rapport that develops when you come of age alongside someone. “Kiera was part of the crew I hung out with,” he said. “I went to a high school where I didn’t have very many friends. It was kind of a jock high school, close to my house. Kiera went to the performing-arts high school.” He slipped into the voice. “Which I longed to have gone to . . .”

“It was all girls,” McNally added.

“It wasn’t about that, Kiera!” DeMarco interrupted, still in character. “I wanted to express myself artistically, to fit in with people who understood my guitar playing!”

DeMarco moved to Vancouver after high school. He began releasing music under the name Makeout Videotape, often recording songs with his friend Alex Calder. In 2011, he and McNally moved to Montreal, joining a young and slightly lawless D.I.Y. loft scene that included the electronic musician Grimes and the experimental-pop trio Braids. DeMarco signed with Captured Tracks in 2012, and moved to Brooklyn shortly thereafter. He had not previously considered the possibility that making music could be a full-time profession. “I did road construction, I worked at a veterinary hospital,” he said. “I did these medical tests in Montreal. There was one where they made me dip my hand into a nearly freezing bucket of water, then they’d come in and say, ‘We forgot to turn on the test equipment. We have to run it again.’ The whole test was to see how you reacted to them being, like, ‘Psych!’ ”

Back then, indie rock had not yet been subsumed and neutered by the mainstream. Today, the idea of adhering to the internal politics of a scene (avoiding a major label, not selling a song to a corporation) seems quaint, if not incomprehensible; an ethos of relentless growth has mostly replaced any spirit of rebelliousness. In many ways, DeMarco feels like the genre’s final ambassador. This summer and fall, he will tour the U.S. and Canada in a Sprinter van with just his band and two crew members, an unusually low-key operation for a tour that includes consecutive sold-out nights at Radio City Music Hall. DeMarco is planning to do the bulk of the driving himself. “The way the music industry operates is that everybody wants to push it, to get the bigger thing. I don’t want to do that,” he said, then paused. “We could, you know? I haven’t done anything for five years, and, somehow, things keep getting bigger and bigger. Which is great—I can’t complain about it. But I don’t want to play a fucking pavilion. I don’t want to play a fucking arena.” He went on, “It’s not cool. I don’t want to have to get a fucking video wall to supplement the size of stage we’re playing on. That’s not my vibe.” Sometimes, DeMarco said, if a venue felt too vast or professional, “we’d just kinda throw the show. Like, fuck this place—this sucks.” Even that brought him a perverse pleasure. “I like being at the level where you can play a really bad show,” he said. “I want to see the bad show. I don’t want to see the perfect show. I think it’s important to shit the bed every once in a while.”

DeMarco suffers from something he calls “demo-itis,” wherein he ends up preferring the earliest recording of a song—scrappy, crooked, lo-fi—to the formalized version that follows. He spends most of his time in the studio chasing after the magic of that first iteration. “Purity and cohesiveness are more important to me at this point than if people like the songs,” he said. DeMarco often uses the phrase “no masters” to describe a particular sort of self-sufficiency, in which he is not beholden to anything but his own taste and instinct. “I tried to have somebody else mix it,” he said of “Guitar.” “It sounded great.” In the end, he didn’t use the mix. “It’s not about something getting better or worse. It’s just about it being me.” For “Here Comes the Cowboy,” from 2019, DeMarco rented a suite at Capitol Records. “We’ll put it on the big board, and do it big-dog style,” he remembered thinking. “I lasted twelve hours before I was, like, ‘Let’s go back to the garage. I feel so fucked up in here.’ ”

Grousing about purity can seem petulant or out of touch—DeMarco enjoys pejoratively referring to himself as a boomer—but he’s right that in the past couple of decades we’ve loosened our grip when it comes to our standards for art-making, particularly the way we consider intentionality or even truthfulness. It’s easy now, possibly advantageous, not to think too critically about the machinery that motivates culture, especially when nobody has to worry about getting called a poser or a sellout. Anything goes. In that context, DeMarco’s gestures at sovereignty feel less cranky and more radical. He is simply trying to reclaim some ground.

DeMarco stopped drinking in 2020, but he didn’t give up smoking until 2022, when he drove alone from New York to Los Angeles. “I left New York and I was, like, ‘I’m just gonna quit, right now.’ ” At the time, he was also using a Juul. “I put it down in the cup holder in my truck. I thought it would be three and a half hours of discomfort and then I’d just be done. It was the worst thing ever. It was so horrible. Very classic withdrawal: angry, sweaty, couldn’t sleep, I’m callin’ Kiera, just, like, screaming about nothing. I stopped in Lincoln, Nebraska, and tried to go to this Italian restaurant, get a chicken Parmesan. I was so dizzy that I couldn’t order.”

Along the way, he wrote and recorded the spindly instrumental songs that would eventually make up “Five Easy Hot Dogs,” his eighth record. “When I got back to L.A., I shelved those songs, and then when I listened back a while later I was, like, ‘Oh, I like this a lot.’ I put it out, and people had been waiting for a while, and they were, like, ‘Yeah, it would be really nice if he sang on this.’ Go fuck yourself. Take it or leave it.”

His sobriety has felt more complicated recently. “The first couple years, I was, like, This is fine, everything is the same,” he said. “But, as you keep going through it, the harder it becomes.” He added, “Emotions become amplified, slowly. Someone’s turning the dial up. Things become more painful, but the magic increases as well. That slide from up to down can be steep.”

On “Nothing at All,” a new song, he sings of having to contend with the harrowing work of being fully conscious:

Hairpin trigger, volatile
No denying
Tread much lighter, try to smile
But feel like crying
With all your cures up on the shelf
You’ve no control now.

Earlier in the summer, DeMarco had discovered a small aluminum fishing boat overturned in some tall grasses by the shoreline; in the garage, he found a rusty outboard motor of indeterminate age. Now he’d enlisted Ryan, an old friend living in Vancouver, to help get the boat running. First, they had to scrub untold decades of gunk off the motor. “Bit of filth, but nothing we can’t handle, right, Ry?” DeMarco said. They started messing around with the starter cord. “That thing looks funkadelic,” DeMarco observed. (It came whipping off when they pulled it.) Eventually, after searching the garage for a gas tank and a new sparkplug, they got the motor running; DeMarco threw his head back and let out a peal of laughter. Minutes later, they clamped it to the back of the boat and took a victory lap around the bay.

DeMarco has always been invested in this style of improvisational repair, in part because it allows him to hold on to objects that he’s imbued with meaning. “I used to play this old piece-of-shit guitar,” he said. “That was my style of fixing back in the day: ‘Oh, I found a piece of siding in an alley, and I’ll use it as the pick guard.’ I needed that guitar or I couldn’t do my show.” For years, he was superstitious about leaving a venue between load-in and showtime, a self-imposed stricture that he now described as “a load of fuckin’ dog shit. I’m trying all the time to not be insane about shit like that. Those curses are just like smoking cigs—I’m done.”

He had a brief foray into obsessively following hockey (he is a supporter of the Edmonton Oilers, who were defeated in the Stanley Cup Finals the past two years), though, in the same spirit of no masters, he is contemplating some time off. “The Cup final two years ago, the Oilers lost the first three—it was depressing,” he said. “It was also consuming my life. So, for Game Four, I rented a movie theatre in Hollywood and I went, alone, to watch. I thought, I’m gonna quit hockey in the same way I quit smoking. It’ll be like ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ They’ll whoop our ass and I’ll never wanna watch hockey again. Walking in, the guy was, like, ‘Just you?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Sportsnet?’ ‘Yeah. You got popcorn?’ ‘Uh-huh.’ We won 8–1. Then we go to Game Seven and we lose.” He continued, “Why did I just waste all this time watching sports?”

DeMarco has wondered if his fixations are somehow linked to his addictions—if he’s merely rerouting energy, supplanting one pathological behavior with another. “I don’t wanna replace it, I wanna erase it, which I don’t think is fully possible,” he said. “The secret—and everybody fucking says it—is that you have to train yourself to enjoy every step. Even when I’m here, I’m kind of, like, ‘This is good, but I felt a certain way when I was in L.A. . . . Why don’t I feel that here?’ But in a few months, when I’m in Rotterdam, playing some venue that smells like cigarette butts, I’m gonna think, Sitting with Amanda looking at the island was pretty good.”

DeMarco also recently bought and renovated a house in Victoria for his mother. He retiled the bathroom himself. “Even getting Mom set up with the house—it’s all great, but there are things that are ingrained in me that will never go away: ‘This is nice, but who knows if it’ll be here tomorrow?’ That’s a quote-unquote poor-person mentality. I think even the D.I.Y. thing—I mean, I enjoy it,” he said. “Here I am, snipping fucking trees. But I see things crashing. I’ll look at the bank account and be, like, ‘Soon it’s all gonna be gone!’ ”

One evening, after dinner, DeMarco and I took a canoe out on the water. The night was chilly and noiseless. Earlier, DeMarco had shown me some videos of the Canadian naturalist Bill Mason (in one, titled “Waterwalker,” Mason calls the canoe “the most beautiful and functional craft ever created”), and talked me through the J-stroke, a paddling technique that helps a canoe travel in a straight line. I practiced. We glided around the bay. As the sun set, we waited for a ferry to pass, taking temporary cover on a beach littered with the bleached bones of some midsize animal. When we got back to the house, DeMarco built a bonfire on the beach, and we basked in the glow and crackle until the tide pushed in.

In 2021, DeMarco’s father died of cancer. Four years earlier, DeMarco had made a record, “This Old Dog,” about their stifled, anemic relationship. “I didn’t know him very well,” DeMarco said. “He was a heavy drug-and-alcohol user. His body was slowly shutting down for seven years or something. There were a lot of times he would go into the hospital and we’d be, like, ‘Well, see ya.’ Then he’d get out. When he was passing away, I tried to—not heal it, but I got him an iPad, and, even when I was speaking with him a lot, he had this attitude of ‘Why are you doing this? Really? You wanna call me again today?’ ” DeMarco went on, “I don’t know why I did it. It would’ve been cool to understand more about where I came from. It’s almost an animalistic thing—that’s my blood.” Yet DeMarco said that when his and McNally’s tabby cat, Pickles, died, in 2023, he felt a more acute grief. “It’s crazy to even say that out loud: I knew the cat way better than I knew my dad.”

“This Old Dog” is a beautiful and emotionally charged album. On “My Old Man,” a mournful folk song with a jaunty synthesizer beat, he reckons with the inevitability of genetics. “Uh-oh, looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me,” he sings, his voice low.

“I was at a point where I was, like, ‘Fuck you, I’ll write this record about you, motherfucker.’ Would I do that now? I don’t think so,” he said. “When I was making ‘This Old Dog,’ I was thinking, I don’t have a choice, I’m shackled to the path that my father has cut. That’s not true. His passing away was a relief in a lot of ways. For me, making music was always either about impressing girls, acceptance from my peers, or revenge against my father. Now one of those just gets ticked off, washed away.”

DeMarco left Captured Tracks and started Mac’s Record Label in 2018. “Yeah, things go well” is how he described his commercial success. DeMarco founded the label because he wanted control over his work, though he also believes that the mainstream music industry is mercenary and corrupt, and that it’s benefitting from the uncertainty wrought by streaming and social media. “Labels were, like, ‘Shit! TikTok! We don’t know how to get the money outta TikTok! Oh, fuck!’ But I think they’ve figured it out,” he said, laughing. “They’d just like it to still appear confusing.”

In 2023, when DeMarco released “One Wayne G,” which comprises a hundred and ninety-nine demo recordings, some critics interpreted it as cynical: more songs, more streams. “It’s none of that,” DeMarco said. “Some of it sounds like I’m banging on a pipe in a boiler room. Which I love! For me, that’s so interesting. There are a lot of songs on there I like. I thought, Well, I could maybe put these on a record later. But that would be the demo-itis thing again.” He paused. “Putting it on Spotify was just free web hosting for me.”

There’s a tenderness to “Guitar” that feels unusual for DeMarco. “I think I’m being a little less defensive than usual,” he said. One night, I asked if he thought of his work as autobiographical. “I mean, it always is,” he said after a while. “It means something to me, but it can also mean whatever to whoever. Maybe that’s some kind of line of defense. But, when music touches me, I’m not thinking, What exactly did this mean to the Moody Blues?”

The unexpected grace of “Guitar” can feel slightly at odds with DeMarco’s jokester persona. “It’s got the Robin Williams effect,” he said. “Which is what I’ve always strived for—I just need a little more body hair.” He continued, “Robin Williams is all fun and games, and then you watch ‘Good Will Hunting’ and you’re like—fuck. It’s good.” He paused. “I think this is the record where you can hear me the most.”

The next day, we stopped by the farmers’ market, placed an order at the hardware store, got ice-cream cones at the marina. DeMarco and McNally’s life on the island is sweet, easy. Friends come through. DeMarco rips around on his motorcycle. He carts things to the recycling center. He churns the compost. He spends a lot of time in the olive grove. It is challenging for him to sit still. “Nearly impossible,” he said. “If I’m idle, I feel like I should be working on music. But I have a complicated relationship with music, too, because I just want to have this pure experience with it, as opposed to thinking, Well, maybe I should put the b.p.m. up on this one, because they’ll want us to play it on Jimmy Fallon’s show.”

I supposed that was part of the job. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I will never call this a job. I get paid. But a job is fixing an engine, mowing a lawn. Writing songs? Going on vacation for free? Sometimes younger bands are, like, ‘Touring is so hard.’ Maybe these people have been going on vacation their whole life? For me, I’m kinda, like, ‘I’m in Chinaaaaa!’ It’s a paid rock-and-roll adventure! What is wrong with you?” He continued, “I get it. Not for everybody. But I love it. I didn’t get to go to these places, and now I’ve been to fuckin’ China! I wiped my ass with used toilet paper in the Forbidden City. Gave me giardia. It was horrible. Nobody told me that you need to take your own toilet paper. There were a lot of toilets with no amenities. That is amazing! Because I wrote some little songs? What a gift!”

In 2017, DeMarco did an interview with Charlie Rose, in which he referred to himself as a con artist. “I do feel like a con man sometimes,” he said. He was back in the olive grove now, slicing away at some branches. “There was a run-and-gun vibe back in the day,” he continued. “We barely rehearsed. When you’re making money off of something that doesn’t feel like real work—con man.” He went on, “I never understood people who were, like, ‘I wouldn’t want to be famous.’ Why? Now I get it. You’d rather trim trees. If I worked at a hardware store, I would do the job well. I would make sure my hardware store was clean, and I would treat the customers nice. That would be that.”

But could he be happy in a hardware store, year after year, organizing garden hoses, mopping floors? “Probably not,” he said. “I’m not tuned that way.” He paused. “But you tune yourself at a certain point.” He thought about it for another minute. “It would drive me crazy. It would drive me crazy in that store. I feel like this place is almost an experiment,” he said, gesturing around. “It’s a hardware-store-style experiment. We’ll see what happens.” ♦