When Rolling Stone reviewed “Gorilla,” it observed that the track was “sure to sprout cover versions before long.” His friends tried to warn him, he admits, and he can still hear her “lovely lies,” but, despite it all, he emerges from the experience with no regrets-’tis better than to have never cared at all. On “I Was a Fool to Care,” Taylor writes from a universal perspective: a heartbroken “country fool” retraces his steps through a relationship with a woman who has left him limp. Marvin Gaye dominated pop the year before its release for “Gorilla,” Taylor dipped into Gaye’s tender sound as he regrouped from a previous album, “Walking Man,” which bombed. Taylor’s “I Was a Fool to Care” is the best song on his 1975 album, “Gorilla,” next to, maybe, “Music.” It’s honeyed and addicting, all open-palm drums and soul strings, with a two-step R.-&-B. But Jon was in town and we decided, “Might as well cover a little James, we have nothing better to do.” Then Jon was like, “No, no, no, no, no, my friend.” He showed me “Gorilla,” which is an album from 1975, and that’s where that song is from. But I was dabbling with “Sweet Baby James,” “Fire and Rain,” that kinda stuff. I think I was going through a Paul Simon thing, and somehow from that I went to James. But my keyboard player that joined the band last summer, Jon, he’s always been a James Taylor guy. I never really got into James Taylor until very recently. It’s easy to feel guilty about such pop blind spots, but it was comforting to find out that even the loyal nostalgist DeMarco had come to Taylor’s deep cuts late in his twenty-six years. When I brought him up to a friend around my age, he remarked, “I’ve listened to James Taylor, but I don’t listen to James Taylor.” And it’s true we’ve all heard “Fire and Rain,” and Taylor’s “unique brand of bittersweet folk rock”-as “The Simpsons” famously characterized it-remains as widely recognizable as Bart and Lisa. Like Billy Joel, or Bad Brains, or MF Doom, Taylor is so cemented in his stature and cherished by his fans that we take his presence, and his music, as a societal given. Taylor is a daunting artist to engage with, even for devoted young music enthusiasts. His cover of the Taylor song would usually auto-play after his “Ode to Viceroy.” I knew it was special then, but I still don’t know why my brain auto-played it ten months later. I’d heard it last summer, when I went on a brief “Salad Days” bender and would play DeMarco’s music videos on my television every morning. This was the version I was humming, I realized.
#Mac demarco this old dog signed postcard mac#
The first result was “I Was a Fool to Care,” by James Taylor the second, a cover of the Taylor song by the Montreal slack-psych god Mac DeMarco. Soon, the line “I don’t care, even if I was a fool” bubbled up, and I entered the words into the search box. You can’t hum a tune to Shazam or Siri (yet), so I was stuck digging for a lyric or phrase that I could Google. So this is a new endeavor for me.A melody sneaked its way into my head last week, as involuntarily as a dream or a sneeze, and wouldn’t budge. The majority of this album is acoustic guitar, synthesizer, some drum machine, and one song is electric guitar.
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I usually demo on a drum machine and then record real drums, but I liked that machine so much I kept it on the album. “It’s on the album a lot, maybe four or five songs. “That thing helped a ton, especially for demoing,” he says. He also attributes some of the delay to his exploration of new gear he’d purchased, specifically a CR-78 drum machine, which he used while writing and can be heard on his album tracks for the first time ever. DeMarco wrote some demos for This Old Dog on an acoustic guitar, an unusual yet eye-opening method for him. To stay gold, turns out all he needed was some new tricks. But in working-dog years, he could easily qualify for social security.
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The fresh meat you’re now feasting on, This Old Dog, makes for his fifth in just over half a decade – bringing the total to 3 LPs and 2 EPs. Vinyl LP pressing, includes digital download.īefore you ancients out there turn your heads and scoff at the premise of a 20-something rock-and-roll goofball calling himself an old-anything, consider this: said perpetrator, he who answers to the name Mac DeMarco, has spent the better part of his time thus far writing, recording, and releasing an album of his own music pretty much every calendar flip, and pretty much on his own.