A primitive joke
Mac DeMarco's best joke is that, for years, he looked, spoke and behaved as if everything were a joke. The stretched jumper, crooked smile, cigarette stuck to his lip, stage antics, absurd videos and a sense of humour suspended somewhere between a school corridor and a night with your stupidest friends all seemed designed to distract us from the man who would later sit alone in his flat, turn on a tape recorder and make songs so delicate that three minutes were enough for the entire jester's costume to fall to the floor. The audience laughed with him, the media built the figure of a permanently amused slacker, and all the while he wrote melodies about loneliness, attachment, fear of loss and that particular astonishment that appears when someone stays beside us longer than we ourselves would dare expect. DeMarco earned his reputation for childish jokes and stage chaos, but repeatedly reminded interviewers that beyond the caricature was an ordinary person capable of honesty, seriousness and emotional attention. The problem was that the world loves jesters until they begin to tell the truth.
A living room instead of a studio
My Kind of Woman appeared on 2, released by Captured Tracks in October 2012, but the record was not born in a sterile studio surrounded by expensive equipment. It came from a small Montreal flat where DeMarco recorded every instrument and produced the music himself, using an eight-track tape machine, a few microphones, amplifiers in the living room and whatever instruments were at hand. For a month, he virtually shut out the world and built songs from scarcity rather than luxury. That lack of options became one of the most important ingredients in his sound. The guitar on My Kind of Woman does not shine cleanly; it gently wavers like a reflection in the window of an old bus. The bass is dry and without a heavy bottom end, the drums sway with a trace of uncertainty rather than march, and the vocal seems near and far at once, as if recorded beside the listener but sent from another room. DeMarco recalled using cheap Casio keyboards and even routing a guitar through a sampler because he had no grand palette of sounds. That is why 2 feels less like a demonstration of production power than a collection of things found around a flat, placed on a table and turned into a small private cinema.
A song built from nothing
The words of My Kind of Woman are almost provocatively simple. They do not flaunt craft, multiply metaphors, pretend to be literature or put on a smart jacket before confessing a feeling. A man tells a woman that she drives him mad, that he is falling apart a little in front of her, that he does not understand why she is still there, and then returns to one sentence with the persistence of someone who has just discovered the simplest truth of his life. Without the music, it might sound like a crude joke scribbled on a napkin, somewhere between a drunken compliment and an awkward declaration. Yet DeMarco has the rare ability to take the banality out of a banal phrase. He stretches the melody, lets the guitar drift slightly out of tune, leaves soft gaps between chords and sings without a trace of vocal display until the simplest words sound as if they have come after a long silence. Pitchfork described the song as unexpectedly direct, dreamy and gentle, and 2 as the moment when his earlier play with irony gave way to clearer, more personal songs. The joke does not disappear. It changes jobs: it no longer mocks feelings but protects them from too much solemnity.
A voice that does not push
The most beautiful element of My Kind of Woman is the way the vocal never tries to take control of the listener. DeMarco does not sing like a man certain of an answer, but like someone surprised by his own attachment, a little tired, a little amused and a little embarrassed that he has just said too much. The melody descends without a theatrical gesture, returns and repeats until it increasingly resembles rocking. Beneath that calm lies tension, because the song's narrator is not merely asking about intimacy. He is also asking why anyone would want to stay with him when he cannot always stay with himself. Here the joker meets the vulnerable man, and the crudest joke becomes the most human question one person can ask another: what do you actually see in me when I can barely see anything myself?
The woman is not a monument
DeMarco does not describe an ideal woman, catalogue her beauty, turn her into a prize for the hero or place her beside the guitar as romantic decoration. He asks her to show him her world. That small turn changes the perspective of the whole song, because love is no longer about possessing someone but about curiosity towards their interior life. This is why My Kind of Woman can be heard as far more mature than its simplicity suggests. The narrator does not claim to know the woman perfectly. He admits that he would like to know more, enter a place he does not yet understand and learn her rhythm, light, silence and all the small things hidden from the rest of the world. Tenderness does not arrive with a bouquet of grand declarations. It sits beside you, touches your shoulder and asks whether it may stay a little longer.
The video as another dodge
In the video directed by Alex Lill, DeMarco once again puts on a wig, dresses up, stares theatrically into the camera and plays with his own image until the viewer cannot decide whether this is a confession, a parody of one or a joke told by a man afraid someone might take him too seriously. The visual game does not destroy the song; it reveals its mechanism, because this tenderness needed a light disguise from the beginning. Mac DeMarco was never the artist who lights a candle and formally announces the start of intimacy. He is more likely to put on a wig, pull a stupid face, trip over his shoes and then, once everyone is busy laughing, smuggle in one phrase strong enough to make one particular person stay.
A dedication without a name
You can hear My Kind of Woman as an innocent love song, as a model example of early-2010s home-recorded indie, or focus on the characteristic chorus effect on the guitar, the dry bass, simple rhythm and a melody that makes no unnecessary move for more than three minutes. You can also hear something more personal in it without having to say that aloud. Sometimes someone appears around whom simplicity no longer means poverty, silence does not need filling at once, and the plainest sentence suddenly proves sufficient. You keep joking, hiding behind self-mockery and pretending nothing important is happening, but the music already knows better and repeats its one melody with a persistence that reason cannot explain.
Mac DeMarco's best joke, then, is not that he hid tenderness beneath fooling around. It is that the tenderness was visible from the beginning, and everyone was looking at his stupid face.
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