Mac DeMarco’s Next Album ‘Five Easy Hot Dogs’ Chronicles an Epic Road Trip

Jon Blistein
·2 min read
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Mac-Demarco-by-Monika-Mogi - Credit: Monika Mogi
Mac-Demarco-by-Monika-Mogi - Credit: Monika Mogi

Mac DeMarco — fresh off his annual Christmas cover — will kick off 2023 with his first new album in four years, Five Easy Hot Dogs. The instrumental album will arrive on Jan. 20 on digital/CD, while a vinyl drop is scheduled for May 12 via Mac’s Record Label.

The album serves as a kind of musical diary of an extensive road trip DeMarco took last year. It began last January, after a show in California, with DeMarco driving north into Canada, turning back to the United States, and continuing until he arrived back in Los Angeles. Every song on Five Easy Hot Dogs was recorded and mixed in the city that the song is named after, and the track list reflects the chronological order in which the songs were made (it begins in Gualala, California, and ends in Rockaway, New York).

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“Some places I stayed longer in than others, some of them I knew from the past, others not so much,” DeMarco said in a statement. “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.”

During his journey, DeMarco trucked around a minimal assortment of recording equipment and instruments, including a guitar, a bass, and what he described as “a word little drum kit with a kick drum we sawed in half in Golden Gate Park.”

He added of this uniquely itinerant creative process, “The nature of ripping around and recording and traveling 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.”

Five Easy Hot Dogs marks DeMarco’s first album since 2019’s Here Comes the Cowboy.

Five Easy Hot Dogs Track List

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
13. Chicago 2
14. Rockaway

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