Salad Days

Album: Salad Days (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • The title track of Mac DeMarco's third album, this song finds him singing:

    Oh dear, act your age and try another year
    Always feeling tired, smiling when required
    Write another year off and kindly resign


    DeMarco told Mojo magazine that he penned the lyrics exhausted after two years of non-stop touring, when he called "the crowd, peasants and s--t."

    He added: "It's easy to become an a--hole on tour, especially with people treating you nice. So those lyrics were me checking up on myself. The verse is like: 'I'm so jaded,' and the chorus is like: 'Act your age.'"
  • "Salad days" is an idiomatic expression referring to youthful inexperience, when people are very green. The phrase was coined in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the Egyptian pharaoh's speech at the end of Act One in which she is regretting her youthful dalliances with Julius Caesar. She says:

    My salad days
    When I was green in judgement, cold in blood
    To say as I said then

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