Here Comes the Cowboy
Mac DeMarco; "Heart to Heart"; from Goodwill Seattle
After the debut of indie rock, an entire generation of musicians displayed their resignation toward the norms and conventions of popular music—the bombast, the operatic grandiosity—by adopting a posture of not caring. They didn’t care about their songwriting, didn’t care about their musicianship—they just wanted to have a good time. The paradigmatic band in this category, for me, is Pavement—I never understood their free-associative burnout pothead lyrics, jangly pop riffs, or their popular acclaim, and I likely never will.
Other groups doing their thing during the same era resonated much more with me, perhaps because they were decidedly hard-working foils to the guys who couldn’t be bothered: Guided by Voices comes to mind, with their seemingly endless catalogue of albums, Jonathan Richman with his willingness to write about anything from transgressive dancing to pizza. Each essentially rejected at least one thing that the conventional record contract-having musician would otherwise have to: audio fidelity, song length, number of choruses or verses, lyrics. Perhaps the musical world is better for this approach of dispensing with imperfection.
As the world of media transformed with the internet, listeners like me found ourselves in a proverbial melting pot of listening options. The curious thing, however, was that the rapidly-oscillating trends that emerged on social media would often cohere into something resembling a genre or a movement, only to be supplanted by the next big thing.
In 2019, when Here Comes the Cowboy came out, we were in a musical moment focused on post-ASMR close-miked vocals, singer-songwriter bedroom pop, exoticism of other people’s nostalgia (the ‘80’s writ-large, but also Japanese City Pop and environmental music), and the utterly inescapable low-pass filtered beats of lo-fi hip-hop beats you can relax and study to. If you add up all these attributes and run them through some kind of algorithmic forecasting machine, you get a high likelihood of blowing and drifting low-energy music which sits comfortably in the background, not calling attention to itself. Perhaps this is a modern take on ambient--and a metaphor for the current orientation of society toward the arts: singer-songwriters who put themselves deeply, intensely into their work just to have it intentionally ignored by their audience.
Such music is often minimal and repetitive, a skeleton of a song. Mac Demarco, in particular, had made his music full of hooks up until that point, so people were confused by how empty the performances sounded. The vocals on the songs are very present, basically right in your ear, unadorned with effects like reverb. Everything else is stripped down, fairly clean and without noise, perhaps a contrast to his previously fuzzed-out bedroom tape machine recordings. Of course, on Here Comes the Cowboy, he still does his usual major-key tonal centering with 7th and 9th chord extensions to make things sound jazzy. He’s still doing his own version of speak-singing for the most part, but the harmonic language of the record is much slower to unfold and less likely to start the party.
Pity the earnest slacker, the goofy slacker. Once you’ve typecast yourself as such, how do you reinvent yourself? There aren’t many archetypes you can follow, but maybe Mac’s is one route—retreating to a more private notebook of songs and putting them to tape, leaning into the sprezzatura of their assembly so the pieces feel unforced rather than carefully “produced.”
It seems that approach worked. Listening to these mostly diaristic, plainspoken love ballads (”K” and “Heart to Heart” come to mind), people believed in the album enough to briefly propel it into the Billboard Top 10.
Though I’ve not spent a lot of time with this record, I am impressed by the ethos surrounding its production and where it sits in Mac’s discography. Admittedly, outside of the tones and timbre of the instrumentation, the songs themselves don’t do a lot for me. I’ll be leaving this one behind, but looking out for another reinvention.
Verdict: Set it Free
Are all of our yesterdays gone now?