Weekly Neil: A Quick Chat With Mac DeMarco
The indie star talked about his Canadian hero in early 2023: "He's sick. He's amazing."
This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m digging into my own archives to feature a brief conversation with Mac DeMarco from early 2023. In fact, it’s the very conversation that inspired me to begin this newsletter in earnest a few months later.
Mac DeMarco loves Neil Young. It’s not shocking. Many musicians love Neil, especially the musicians existing in the tradition of guitar-based songs who like to get a little loud and/or jammy with it. Mac doesn’t get so loud but he can certainly jam. His biggest songs on streaming are chewy numbers about love that prominently feature him playing a guitar that sounds like it’s melting. Over the past decade or so, his music has mellowed out, to the point where his most recent LP is 35 minutes of instrumentals he mostly recorded in hotels. He called it Five Easy Hot Dogs. (A few months after putting it out, he dropped One Wayne G, a six-hour collection of 200 more. He’s in his data-drop era.)
Ahead of Five Easy Hot Dogs, I got the chance to interview Mac for the first time ever. I’d been a fan and I was eager to connect with the guy at this stage in his career. MTV News, where I worked, wasn’t necessarily covering Mac’s every move but it felt like the right time. He’d largely left the pepperoni playboy persona behind and weathered some big life changes. Because Five Easy Hot Dogs had no lyrics, I couldn’t delve into the usual “what this album means” questions. But I’d remembered seeing a video of Mac covering Neil’s “Unknown Legend” a few years prior and thought it was as good a topic as any.
In fact, “Unknown Legend” had been a Mac setlist staple for brief stretch, played with a prototypical lack of reverence and an abundance of emotion cloaked in irony and slacker energy. A 2014 performance in Atlanta is full of passion, while a 10-minute version in Paris from the same tour treads the line between piss take and fun party trick; naturally it culminates in Mac stage-diving. 2017 was more contemplative: A pretty, stripped-down piano-led rendition threatens to collapse into pure mawkishness before Mac deflates the balloon. “I don’t know the second verse, so let’s just talk about Neil Young,” he offers. “Ontario boy.”
Perhaps Mac’s definitive “Unknown Legend” cover came via a SiriusXMU session that found him thanking Uncle Neil directly midway through. “Thank you for blessing us with your music for so many years,” he rasps while strumming a sunburst acoustic. “Although many people may not consider you Canadian or even know, we know the truth, Neil, and we love for you it. Just a nice boy from a small town in northern Ontario. Us boys, we’re from out west. Edmonton, Alberta. I’m sure you graced our prairies once or twice, three times.” Then a quick laugh. “This one’s for Neil, baby!”
Five Easy Hot Dogs doesn’t sound like Neil Young. But I figured I’d ask Mac about him anyway. And I’m glad I did. We spent almost an hour on the phone, Mac’s engagement level high but his voice calm and steady from a house in Los Angeles. “I kind of feel like this record sounds like it was made in an Ewok village in Star Wars,” he told me. (It does.) We chatted about actual hot dogs, how he loves the soundtrack to Final Fantasy X, and then, I asked him what seemed like an important question.
“You once said Harvest was one of the records you had played most in your life. Is Harvest still the one for you?”
And then Mac opened up the Neil floodgates.
I go back to Harvest more often than his other records just because I'm intrigued by the way it sounds. He recorded this in his barn. Like, why can't I make a record that sounds like this at my house? That record and maybe Paul McCartney RAM, or McCartney II — those ones where I was like, “If they did this at their crib, like, what the fuck,” you know?
Harvest Moon is another one. We used to cover “Unknown Legend” like every night. I mean, we kind of butcher it, but we try and pay our respects to Neil. After The Gold Rush I love a lot. Zuma, we actually used to listen to on tour all the time. We’d play it in the early days of Mac DeMarco band touring. We’d just play it nonstop, and back in those days, we had CDs in the car. Nobody even had fucking an iPhone to get the directions. We had the CDs that we had, and those were what we listened to.
I even paid attention to Neil's new album that he did at Shangri-La with Rick Rubin [World Record]. I think it's amazing. It’s awesome. And the content that he has along with it, where he's got these weird, almost like flip phone quality-looking videos that accompany it. This is so great. I almost feel like what I tried to do with Five Easy Hot Dogs is what he's what he did with that record, too. He's just like, “Well, let's go. We'll just record, make sure it's captured good and just see what the fuck happens.” And Rick Rubin's like, “Yeah, okay.” And it's sick!
He's sick. He's amazing. He's Neil Young! What can you say?
The last part of Mac’s answer — the excitement, the passion, the humor — got me hyped, too. Sometimes I’d stick too close to the usual talking points in artist interviews and make the conversations feel transactional. I genuinely cared what they had to say, but when you’re the fifth or even fifteenth journalist to ask someone about music they’ve spent weeks talking about already, the answers you get begin to feel less special. This is even true for indie artists like Mac, not just the media-trained heavy hitters. It can be a bummer, and ultimately it comes back to me and the questions I’m asking. Why didn’t I ask people about Neil more often?
I started thinking how cool it would be to just talk to other musicians about Neil and hear their voices light up on the other end of the line like Mac’s did. The first person who let me have that conversation with them was Dominic Angelella — whose new album, God Loves A Scammer, is out now, by the way. (It’s good, and it definitely sounds a little like Neil Young.) I’m really grateful to Dom for chatting and proving my hypothesis.
Around the time of my interview with Mac, David Crosby died. That got me thinking about legacy and helped me face the fact that yes Neil will also die. But he’s not dead yet and so let’s just have some fun and play guitar music really loud and talk about it.
I took in Mac’s long and unexpected answer and hit him back with one of my Neil favorites: 2010’s Le Noise.
“Oh yeah, with Daniel Lanois. That’s really sick,” he said. “I think they did that in the neighborhood I’m in right now.”
We couldn’t see each other (this was a phone call). But I bet we both got the far-away look in our eyes. He’s sick. He’s amazing. He’s Neil Young.
Read my conversation with Mac DeMarco for MTV News via the Wayback Machine right here.
“Unknown Legend,” written by Neil Young, from Neil Young Unplugged (1993)
Neil Young: vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica
Ben Keith: dobro
Nils Lofgren: guitar
Tim Drummond: bass
Oscar Butterworth: vocals
Astrid Young: vocals
Nicolette Larson: vocals
Spooner Oldham: piano