Mac DeMarco

Broke and living in Montreal with no internet, DeMarco filled his apartment with dollar-bin thrift-store records — one of them was Neil Young's Harvest. "This record I used to listen to several times a day for months and months," he said, and it became the sound he chased on 2, then again years later on This Old Dog: "I've always been trying to make something that sounds like Harvest by Neil Young," he told Tape Op. "Clean, right up in your face... You can crank it up and there's no distortion."

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — Mac DeMarco names 7 musicians who influenced him the most (Neil Young and Steely Dan testimony) ↗share

1972

HarvestNeil Young

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2017

This Old DogMac DeMarco

listen forCue up Harvest's title track, then This Old Dog's: both open on a strummed acoustic guitar sitting close enough to the mic that you can hear fingers sliding on the strings, vocals mixed dry and forward instead of washed in reverb. Where DeMarco usually buries his voice under chorus pedal and tape wobble, here it's bare — the same uncluttered, present mix Young used, chasing the same effect: a record that sounds like someone playing alone in the room with you.

DeMarco was eighteen, hadn't released a note under his own name, when he caught Jonathan Richman playing an outdoor stage at Calgary's Sled Island Festival in 2008. "It was incredible, really great," he said. "That's how you do a show, look at that guy go." He's named Richman a formative influence ever since — telling Pitchfork in 2013 that Richman was his role model: "He's a grown man, and he's having a good time on stage... hopefully, I'll be able to grow up and remain relatively happy like him."

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — The best concert Mac DeMarco ever witnessed (Jonathan Richman, Sled Island 2008) ↗share

1972

RoadrunnerJonathan Richman

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2012

Ode to ViceroyMac DeMarco

listen forRichman's "Roadrunner" rides one chugging two-chord guitar figure for four minutes while he just names what's rolling past his car window — the highway, the neon, the radio on. "Ode to Viceroy" does the same trick with a single circling riff under DeMarco naming his own vice, a cigarette brand, verse after verse. Neither song builds to a big chorus so much as it just keeps driving; the pleasure is the narrator's plain, unembarrassed delight in describing what's right in front of him.

A friend handed DeMarco a copy of Aja, and Steely Dan's "Peg" did something none of his teenage records had: pulled him toward the smoother, session-musician side of pop. "I'd heard them in the past, but 'Peg' was the song that drew me in," he said. "I like Steely Dan's funny, jerky, intellectual New York lyrics... my own music is pulled between both sides. I'm not afraid to play some stupid guitar solo, but at the same time, I'll make a cutesy love song." A Pitchfork profile later noted he "talks about Steely Dan records with authority."

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — Mac DeMarco names 7 musicians who influenced him the most (Neil Young and Steely Dan testimony) ↗share

1977

PegSteely Dan

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2014

Chamber of ReflectionMac DeMarco

listen for"Peg" opens on a slippery, syncopated keyboard vamp that just loops, unhurried, under a smooth, double-tracked vocal — the whole song rides that one hook rather than a chord change. "Chamber of Reflection" does the same move with a synthesizer standing in for the Rhodes: a hypnotic, circular pattern that never resolves, DeMarco's voice gliding over it low and unbothered. It's the polished, unhurried side of pop DeMarco says his own music is pulled toward.