Nobody

"Nobody" opens *Here Comes the Cowboy* and functions as DeMarco's most direct statement about the cost of being looked at. The arrangement is almost weightless — a lilting, slightly seasick chord progression, brushed percussion, a bassline that walks rather than drives, and those chorused guitar tones that sound like they're being played underwater in a warm pool. Everything is unhurried to the point of narcotic. His vocal sits high and thin, doubled just enough to feel haunted, and he delivers "no more running from the one I love" and the repeated wish to be left alone without a trace of self-pity, more like a man stating a weather fact. That's what gives it teeth: it's a fame song written without any of fame's melodrama. By 2019 DeMarco had been the internet's designated goofy stoner for half a decade, and this record — recorded largely alone in his Los Angeles house — is the sound of the guy behind the gap-toothed meme retreating into privacy on purpose. The song's genius is that its exhaustion is comfortable rather than bleak; it invites you to disappear alongside him. Right for a slow Sunday when you've declined every invitation and don't regret it, curtains half-drawn, nothing to prove.