Mac in July, 2017.   25POST DESIGN. PHOTO: HARMONY GERBER/FILMMAGIC

Ahead are discussions of death and compulsive thoughts, which readers may find triggering.

When I look in the mirror, it seems as though I’ll live forever. In that brief moment, at least, time stands still. My blank complexion stares back at me, unchanging, as if carved into the glass. Nothing moves. The air stands still. Only my breathing, the buzzing of the lights, and the ticking of the clock are there to remind me of the passage of time — of reality.

The night before I turned twenty, I stared at the mirror for the longest time. I finally had to confront the fact that I, too, was a victim-to-be of age. As a teenager, I could live, somewhat, knowing that I had my whole life ahead of me — climate change, political strife, and the like notwithstanding. But that excuse didn’t really work anymore. My life was really starting now. And there was no going back.

I thought ahead, as I always do. After my twenties came my thirties, and, after my thirties, my forties; middle age, then old age, then death. I had no choice in this matter. All the billions of lives, great to good to downright horrible, that had flickered by on this planet had that same ending.

I’ve always felt wallowing in this existential dread was a little childish — impractical, illogical, irrational, otherwise a waste of my energy — but, time and time again, I find myself returning to it. It’s the silent question that haunts everyone, but that no one ever wants to talk about.

That night, I sat back at my desk and turned to a familiar source of comfort: Mac DeMarco.

I first discovered Mac DeMarco — properly discovered; I had known of him at least for a few years — at a low point in my life. I was at the roof of a seven-story car park. It was past midnight. The sprawl of Los Angeles glimmered in the distant horizon as fluorescent dots. I pondered these dots for a while, then, needing something to fill the void, pulled out my headphones and hit shuffle on One Wayne G.

20191009 I Like Her started playing. Over the characteristic twangy guitar lines and minimal kick and snare:

I'd give the world to her

As long as my heart's still beating

As long as she's next to me

As long as this love's still fleeting

Because I like her

There was an openness about him that struck me. One Wayne G invites anyone who cares to listen into a vulnerable space, the interior of the mind journaling its thoughts in notes and lyrics. Even standing on that car park rooftop, all alone in a sea of dozens of empty cars, I felt seen, and safe, and loved.

When I had the time, I went all the way back to the first track and listened from start to finish. 20180512 is a splash of cold water over an otherwise groovy, laid-back beat. 20180519 is bare-essentials lo-fi — an arpeggiating synth over a drum track, nothing else besides the sparse, rhythmic knocking of wood blocks. The electric guitar in 20180701 has a surreal banjo-like timbre. And so on and so forth, for 199 tracks. It’s that familiar melancholic-upbeat sound that Mac has been cultivating over the past decade, yet somehow inscrutably different. Perhaps the eerie, ambient synth tracks — 20190205 2, for instance — intermixed in the album have something to do with it; yet even those seem more a hazy dream than a nightmare.

And that’s what Mac’s music is. A hazy dream, in his utopian world. Listening to One Wayne G, or Five Easy Hot Dogs, or This Old Dog, I instantly go into a trance; and when I snap out of it, I find myself profoundly moved, but having remembered nothing of the actual music — only that I had been transported to somewhere that was certainly not here.

Of course, at times, he breaks the mold. “Choo Choo” from Here Comes the Cowboy is hardly a meditative track, with such philosophical lyrics as “Choo choo, take a ride with me / Choo choo, take a ride with me / Choo choo, take a ride with me / Choo choo, come and die with me.” He’s light when he needs to be — or whenever he wants to be, frankly.

But, overall, the trend is clear — even as far back as Another (Demo) One or “My Kind of Woman” (from 2), his songs had betrayed an affinity toward the sort of liminal, trance-like alt-rock sound that garnered such a devout following.

I always come back to his Take Away Show for La Blogothèque. It’s akin to a stress test for his dream-world aesthetic: he sets out on a park in Paris, France, with nothing but a guitar with no strap and a wordless cameraman following him from behind. Children scream on the playground, people come up to him to “sing along” (by the loosest definition of the term) or tell him that he’s good, blaring sirens threaten to drown him out. But he only laughs; and he keeps walking; and he keeps singing:

Often a heart tends to change its mind

A new day decides on a new design

A new day gets set on another way

As long as I live, all I've got to say is

This old dog ain't about to forget

All we've had

And all that's next

'Long as my heart's beating in my chest

This old dog ain't about to forget

I would be lying if I said Mac DeMarco helped me reach some grandiose conclusion about Life and My Place in the Universe, or whatever. I am still scared, to death, of death; I am terrified about its knowns and its unknowns, and its inevitability. But his music helps me to, at least, find a temporary peace in the moment, knowing that I am alive and relishing the sensation of it all, knowing that there is not just despair, but joy and calm in the ends of things. There is a brief and beautiful existence, and then there is a gentle silence. And the silence smiles, knowing it has lived.

I once saw a TikTok that said, “I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch at a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” 

I hope death is like a Mac DeMarco song. And I hope death is like the end of a Mac DeMarco song: just you, the people you love, and the satisfaction of remembering that you were happy. ■