“I wanted to make something greasy,” DeMarco says. Here Comes the Cowboy has some lonesome, melancholy songs, like lead singles “Nobody” and “All of Our Yesterdays,” and some goofy ones, like “Choo Choo,” featuring nonsense lyrics about trains over a slick funk groove inspired by Sly and the Family Stone. Which is kind of funny, because then my quiet time turns into everybody time when I show somebody the songs. When he’s writing songs, he adds, “It’s my quiet time. “My girlfriend’s always saying my adrenals get screwed up. “Being on tour for so much of the year, you don’t get that much time to yourself,” he says. The rest of the album came together in January, with DeMarco working late into the night almost entirely on his own, a habit that dates back to the beginning of his career. He was on a short break from the road at the time, stealing a few days between the lengthy full-band tour for his 2017 LP This Old Dog and a more intimate solo jaunt. “I think I was in a confused, exhausted state,” recalls DeMarco, 29. Next came a phrase that he repeated like a mantra: “Here comes the cowboy …” Take the title track, which started as a twangy guitar part that tumbled out when he was messing around in his garage last year. On his fourth album, Here Comes the Cowboy, DeMarco keeps it weirder and more mellow than ever. (He’d rather listen to “Japanese music from the ’60s and ’70s, and The Beatles.”) Since breaking through with 2014’s Salad Days, he’s gone from a cult hero to a bankable live draw with hundreds of millions of Spotify streams - all despite making virtually no effort to keep up with contemporary music. His unflappably chill folk-rock tunes, laced with a surreal sense of humor, have made the Canadian singer-songwriter an unlikely star.
This might be the most Mac DeMarco way possible to begin a conversation. “I don’t really know what’s going on, but let’s rock and roll!” he says. Mac DeMarco is hanging out at home in Los Angeles, playing video games on the couch, when he picks up the phone.