Mac DeMarco - Five Easy Hot Dogs (2023) [Hi-Res]

“The plan was to start driving north, and not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record,” Five Easy Hot Dogs is a collection of instrumental recordings from Mac’s time on the road. “Kind of like being on tour, except there weren’t any shows, and I’d just be burning money.” All of the songs on Five Easy Hot Dogs were recorded and mixed in the corresponding city from each song title, and the tracklisting reflects the chronological order in which the songs were produced.

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

“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.”