Only “Baby Bye Bye” expresses any kind of elation, as he sighs with relief after shedding a toxic lover. Here Comes the Cowboy is full of dead friends, departed lovers and disappearing yesterdays. On “Little Dogs March” he’s telling himself to “march on”, and at the end, the cowboy finally arrives in an unsettling dust-storm of “yee-haws”, as if to tell him it’s time to stop fucking around on the guitar and do something else. He refers to himself as “little doggy”, like how cowboys refer to cattle in cheesy old songs, on two separate songs. I think it’s a red herring: the cowboy is the unseen force at his back, keeping him on his linear path through life-not necessarily his conscience, but something in that wheelhouse. Per DeMarco, “cowboy” is a term of endearment he likes to use for his friends, an admission that drew some derisive laughs in the wake of the “yee-haw agenda’s” subversion of the all-American white-male cowboy ideal. Cowboy‘s eerie calm reflects the domestic quietness every adolescent party animal fears stumbling into when they get older. The Rockaway Beach ruminations of Another One and the existential horns and thorns of This Old Dog paint a picture of a rock-star hedonist acutely aware of the toll of the touring life and not entirely willing to give it up. It’s something he’s been chronicling in real time since he first let loose the words “what mom don’t know has taken its toll on me” on his 2014 record Salad Days.
It’d be a shame if everyone treated Here Comes the Cowboy as the last stand of early 2010s slacker indie against the genre’s more principled and inclusive new wave, because Mac DeMarco’s Here Comes the Cowboy is a thorny, frightening, often frustrating record about the passage of time.
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