** Family Matters: Mac DeMarco and His Mom Talk Love and Fearlessness **Photo by: Photos by Jason Lester
Family Matters features conversations with artists and their relatives about the bonds that tie them together.
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“His songs always make me cry.”
This is not the typical reaction to smirking indie goofball Mac DeMarco’s music. But then, Agnes DeMarco is not a typical Mac DeMarco fan. “You’re beautiful, you know?” she says, turning to her son. Moms will be moms, but there’s something deeper to her understanding of Mac’s ambling tracks, and the sadness that’s often muddled beneath all that smeared reverb.
Walking around Mac’s freshly christened new home in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, it’s clear the two have a strong bond. Agnes raised Mac and his brother Hank on her own in Edmonton, Alberta, after their father left when Mac was just 4. Over the years, she held a handful of jobs, including stints at furniture stores and restaurants, as she supported Mac’s burgeoning love of music, eventually driving him to some of his early local gigs.
By now, Mac’s onstage antics have spanned from hoisting his longtime girlfriend Kiera onto his shoulders mid-song to performing a U2 cover nude with a drumstick up his butt. On this sunny February afternoon, the vibe is much more subdued: Kiera is doing dishes in the kitchen, while Mac brushes his teeth and makes his way through a pack of Marlboro Reds, blowing smoke out of the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street.
“He does OK for himself,” says a beaming Agnes on a tour of the pale blue house. It’s spacious, cluttered with broken and working instruments kept in the foyer as well as in a separate garage that’s currently being converted into a studio. The expansive backyard is suitable for a dog, and it’s a little surprising Mac doesn’t have one given his canine proclivity—in the self-helmed video for the title track from his upcoming album This Old Dog, he and several bystanders hang out in various L.A. locales, wearing dog masks. Agnes puts it simply: “He tours too much for dogs.”
The new record breaks through Mac’s trademark levity with ruminations on growing older, and the hindsight that comes with it. On the bleary “Dreams from Yesterday,” he mourns the loss of would-be aspirations and the time you can never get back, while “My Old Man” has him grappling with the inevitability and fear of becoming your parents, particularly his dad. As Mac discusses his music and how he got here, Agnes listens intently on the sofa beside him, hanging on his every word.
*Pitchfork: Mac, on “My Old Man,” you talk about how you “see my old man in me.” What was your thought process behind that song?*
Mac DeMarco: Well, I have a strange relationship with my dad. He’s kind of a piece of shit. But he’s my dad, so god bless him.
*Agnes, what do you make of the song?*
Agnes DeMarco: I liked it...
MD: You’re going, “Oh boy.”
AD: Yeah, OK, how do I approach this? I think you do see your parents in yourself, and it’s good to recognize certain elements of somebody else that perhaps you don’t want to carry on. Nobody can get away from who they are or where they’ve come from, and you have to love your parents for who they are and forgive them for what they’ve done and move on and be the best person you can.
MD: Amen, sister!
*What was it like raising Mac and his brother Hank on your own?*
AD: It was a challenge. I moved [Mac’s dad] out one day and I had no money. But we had a great house, and I just did whatever job, and we had a lot of fun. We lived low-key. We had our little routines. We’d do milkshake and hamburger Fridays and watch “Power Rangers” together. It was a simple life, but good. We’d get the wagon and go through the alleys, or go treasure hunting. We had a great backyard and a little kiddie pool, lots of family around, lots of barbecues. Both of the guys were really creative.
MD: Who, us?
AD: Yeah, you and Hank. Don’t you remember “Giraffe News”?
MD: I don’t.
AD: It was so awesome. They were just little and I was working at a restaurant called Normand’s in Edmonton—fabulous restaurant if you ever go there—and one of the guys who worked there agreed to be their big brother, because of course I was absolutely loaded with guilt: They have no male influence, oh my god! So this guy would come over, and one day we had an empty Doritos box and these guys had it set up like a theater. Mac had a giraffe toy, and they were doing “Giraffe News.”
*Mac, did you ever think about not having that male influence when you were growing up?*
MD: When you’re growing up, you just take what you’ve got. So not really. I think I turned out OK.
AD: He turned out just great. I was dating a Harley-Davidson guy one time, and he had a garage that was all tricked-out. I took the boys over to his house one day, and I remember you said to him, “Do all dads have garages like this?” I didn’t cry, so that’s good. But yeah, that just wasn’t something that he saw or knew.
MD: Like I said, you don’t really know—I think it was for the better in some cases.
AD: Well, I didn’t have to fight anybody about child raising and what was right or wrong—it was my way or all the way.
*Would you consider your mom a strict disciplinarian?*
MD: When I was pretty young, yeah. I was a little bit of a shit-stirrer then, I did some things. But by the time I was 13, she was kind of like, “Go ahead, who cares.” Well, not “Who cares…”
AD: I just said to them, “You’re smart and you know what? I trust you.”
MD: For better or for worse.
AD: “If you get in trouble, call me. I’ll come get you.”
*When did you take notice that Mac had a flair for music?*
AD: My mom got both boys music lessons at Alberta College, because she was a music teacher. Mac picked up guitar and never put it down. It was just natural for him. Then he started writing. When I heard this one song he did, “Heat Wave,” I was like, “That’s it. He’s going to be a star.” I did!
MD: I don’t know about that...
AD: I knew!
MD: I didn’t want to play music because the whole family did it. I wanted to work in a cubicle. I saw Office Space as a young tween and missed the point of the movie. I was like, “This looks good!” I liked computers and video games. I was a little nerd kid. But in junior high, you want to become more social. I started hanging out with other dudes who played guitar, so I took lessons on-and-off for a while. When I started, it wasn’t like, [whispers] “I’m a real guitar guy!” But then I was meeting older kids and singing in local shows and it was like, “OK, this is cool. Fuck high school, let’s do this.”
AD: After grade 12, he said, “Mom, should I go to university or do this music thing?”
MD: I asked you?
AD: Yeah. I said, “Do the music thing. You’re young. If it doesn’t work out, you can go to university when you’re 30, and you’ll be credible by the time you get out. This is something you’ve got, run with it.”
*How would you describe Mac in his teenage years?*
AD: He was a good kid. Basically good. He was! [laughs] He didn’t get into too much trouble that I knew about. He got into a little bit of trouble, like that time you guys got busted for sitting on top of the High Level Bridge. It was stupid. But he was never a tough, fighting, bad kid like that. He was just full of energy.
MD: I never got into fights with anybody.
AD: He wasn’t a scrappy boy. [laughs]
MD: I was a shrimp.
AD: It’s true, you were little.
MD: I was a scrawny dude. I just kind of played shows.
AD: I’d drive Mac to shows sometimes. I remember driving him up to one he wasn’t playing at on 118th Avenue, which was not the best area in town, and then when I came back to pick him up, and he was up on stage. I just thought, This kid is fearless.
*Do you remember the first show you saw of his?*
AD: Well, he was playing keyboards for his friend Michael Rault, it was at West Edmonton Mall, and my sister and I stood up on the upper level and watched.
MD: It was so strange. At one point West Edmonton Mall was the biggest mall in the world. We had sharks, flamingos, full-scale pirate ships, an indoor water park and theme park, whatever you need. A really fucked up place. It sounded fucking awful because it was this huge echo chamber. We played in front of an audience of people who were doing an exercise bike marathon.
AD: Everybody was doing their thing, but I could see Mac’s energy just wanting to bust open.
*What was your relationship like with your brother Hank growing up? *
MD: There was a thing in him, I think—especially when we were younger—where if I was doing something, he wanted nothing to do with it. It was just different strokes. I was going out to shows and I would say, “Do you want to come?” He’d be like, “Fuck no!” To each his own.
*Hank is now a professional ballet dancer. Agnes, are you surprised they went in such different directions?*
AD: No. I was a ballet dancer when I was young. They were just different personalities and they each found something they loved. What more could a mother want for her kids to do something that makes them happy?
*Dancing has such a different sort of discipline than what you do, Mac.*
MD: What I do has no discipline.
*Did you ever think about trying to do ballet?*
MD: No, afraid not. It never crossed my mind.
*So not a dancer.*
MD: No. Well, I have some moves, just no plié-ing. It’s crazy, Hank is shredded as fuck. He looks like Michael Phelps. All of his homies, his whole crew, are all shredded too. I’ve actually never seen him dance, which is probably bad. I will eventually.
*What do you hope for Mac to achieve?*
AD: I hope he has a good life. That’s what I want. The rest is totally up to him. I hope that we stay connected.
MD: After this, Ma, I’m cutting you off! Reported by Pitchfork 5 hours ago.