Mac DeMarco announces new instrumental album ‘Five Easy Hot Dogs’
American indie icon Mac DeMarco is returning with a brand new album. This time around, he’s leaving the singing on the cutting room floor. The new release, Five Easy Hot Dogs, was recorded while DeMarco was on a road trip across America and Canada.
“The plan was to start driving north, and not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record,” DeMarco said in a press release. “Kind of like being on tour, except there weren’t any shows, and I’d just be burning money.”
“Some places I stayed longer in than others, some of them I knew from the past, others not so much,” he continued. “I tried to keep things busy all the time. If I didn’t know what was up in a city, I’d just walk around ‘til someone recognized me and go from there. I met a lot of interesting people this way and had a bunch of cool experiences.”
DeMarco isn’t exactly the kind of guy to release traditional albums. He’s got demos, mini-LPs, quasi-compilations, and even some releases under pseudonyms. But Five Easy Hot Dogs appears to be more traditional, apart from the lack of vocals. The last proper DeMarco LP came back in 2019 with Here Comes the Cowboy.
Each of the song’s titles corresponds to where the song was recorded and mixed, and the tracklisting is a deliberate recreation of DeMarco’s cross-continental hike. DeMarco shlepped his own his own equipment, which was purposefully kept to a minimum for ease of travel.
“I had my guitars with me, a bass, a weird little drum kit with a kick drum we sawed in half in Golden Gate Park, all the stands and cabling I’d need, a couple of mics, an old model D, and a TX7,” DeMarco says. “I wound up picking a bunch of stuff as I went as well, trying to keep it as travel friendly as possible though.”
DeMarco originally planned to end his trek in Utah (not Rockaway Creek, California, as indicated in the tracklisting), but only lasted a single night in a roomy cabin. “It probably could have slept about 20 people, but instead, it was just me withdrawing from nicotine with a bunch of taxidermy animals all over the place. No other humans for probably 50 miles in any direction. Horrible idea. I lasted one night and went back to Los Angeles the next day,” he says. “When I first got back home, I felt as though I had given up on my idea and failed to finish what I was trying to do. But that’s all dog shit.”
Adding: “The nature of ripping around and recording and travelling in this manner doesn’t lend well to sitting around and planning or thinking about what it was that I was setting out to do. I didn’t ever have a sound in mind, or a theme or anything, I would just start recording. Luckily the collection of recordings from this period all shake hands, they have a present musical identity as a whole. I was in it while I was in it, and this is what came out of it, just the way it was. “This record sounds like what rolling around like that feels like. I hope you enjoy.”
Check out the track listing for Five Easy Hot Dogs down below.
Five Easy Hot Dogs tracklist:
1. ‘Gualala’
2. Gualala 2′
3. ‘Crescent City’
4. ‘Portland’
5. ‘Portland 2’
6. ‘Victoria’
7. ‘Vancouver’
8. ‘Vancouver 2’
9. ‘Vancouver 3’
10. ‘Edmonton’
11. ‘Edmonton 2’
12. ‘Chicago 1’
13. ‘Chicago 2’
14. ‘Rockaway’
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