Five Easy

With waitress girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) and lesbian hitchers Palm and Terry (Helena Kallianiotes, Toni Basil), Robert (Jack Nicholson) pulls over for the famous restaurant scene with waitress Lorna Thayer, in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, 1970.

A listless album about being listless, Mac DeMarco’s new collection of instrumentals summons the bleary, exhausted feeling of time spent on the road. Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces ends with the hero, played by Jack Nicholson, hitching a ride on a northbound truck and disappearing into anonymity. Mac DeMarco is too larger-than-life to ever be anonymous, but this scene is a good starting place for considering his new Five Easy Hot Dogs. Ever since he sang “What mom don’t know has taken its toll on me” on 2014’s Salad Days, he has been exploring a long post-adolescent hangover, the feeling of emerging on the other side of your young and carefree days and seeing little that looks exciting in your future. This thread came to a head on 2019’s Here Comes the Cowboy, a record whose burnt-out ballads were full of dead friends, departed lovers, and uncertain plans. Now here are 14 instrumentals made on a long and spontaneous solo road trip, where DeMarco pledged “not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record.” This is a listless album about being listless, and it’s a pretty accurate picture of the stretches of useless, money-burning time that come with being on the road.