Indie rocker Mac DeMarco chats before Capitol Theatre show

Mac DeMarco, Indie rock’s hardest-working slacker, needed a new passport. So the Canadian was leaving his home in Queens and driving to Montreal when he spoke with The Journal News by phone.

“’For me, I’ve always been the guy who moves around a lot,” says the 25-year-old, rolling out of New York City in a borrowed Toyota Matrix.

DeMarco's stay in his native land won't be long since the so-called king of slacker rock — whose gleeful guitar jams and charmingly mischievous persona has found fandom in his adopted home and around the world — plays the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester on Oct. 10.

The backward-cap-and-overalls-wearing guitarist, who is often seen puffing on a cigarette, and his four-piece band plan to fill the Cap's 1,800-seat interior with their familiar near-anthems for backyard Brooklyn cookouts (“Ode to Viceroy,”“Salad Days”) and songs from his latest record, “Another One,” a “mini album” devoted to music’s most enduring motif — love.

“The songs, being love songs, it doesn’t really matter or have specific meaning or whatever to me,” DeMarco says. “If you want to take it and reflect it on your life, that’s fine. If not, it doesn’t matter anyway.”

The eight-song collection has fans and critics enamored of DeMarco’s signature guitar jangle and a keyboard-heavy backdrop with songs like “The Way You’d Love Her” and “No Other Heart.” It debuted at No. 25 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 one on Top Rock Albums, the best-selling release yet for the artist signed to the independent label Captured Tracks.

“I got a lot of respect for the kids who come out to see us play. They’re supporting me,” DeMarco says. “They’re paying my rent, they’re buying my clothes, they’re buying my toilet paper, buying my breakfast cereal.”

But DeMarco, who is well known for outrageous music videos (in “Dreaming” he sports Victorian-era garb while plucking away at his guitar), public nudity and fart jokes has not let sincere tunes spoil an opportunity to weird-out new fans who have yet to scroll far enough for the singer on Youtube. In footage for the title track, DeMarco wears a Michael Jackson-like mask while mimicking the King of Pop's dance moves on a rock pile.

DeMarco devotees have not only seen him at performing spaces, they have traveled to his home in Far Rockaway to see him at the spot where he recorded “Another One.” It's not stalking. The record ends with DeMarco offering his address and inviting listeners to “stop on by, I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

He made a lot of java.

“’It’s funny, some of the people that came by were like, ‘All right, let’s do the New York sites like the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Mac DeMarco’s house.’ It’s pretty strange,’” says DeMarco, who mentioned that his proximity to local airports was a reason so many guests came by.

DeMarco, who moved from Brooklyn (where his previous career-making album “Salad Days” was recorded in a much smaller bedroom) to Queens, also says that he doesn’t know how much longer he’d live at the Far Rockaway house, and noted that, during his car ride to Canada, he was planning to first stop in Hudson, New York, to look at a home.

"I never made a record twice in the same place, and I don’t think I’ll make another one in that (Queens) house," DeMarco says. "It’s a cool house, out in Rockaway by the water. It’s a weird place to live. I thought I’d remember it that way for myself."

DeMarco grew up in Edmonton, where he first gained attention for a series of a noisy garage-rock albums he did with a band called Makeout Videotape that included his friend Alex Calder, who will open his show at the Cap.

The prankster has since reserved his records for refined indie pop songs, but his future sound and residence are unknown.

“Maybe I’ll get to the point where I keep playing the same thing on the keyboard and I’ll have to pick up a bassoon. My very first bassoon-heavy album. It will be called 'See You Bassoon,'” DeMarco says, keeping an eye out for cops on the road.

Twitter: @Chrisllvaughan

Email: Cvaughan2@lohud.com

If you go

Where: The Capitol Theatre, 149 Westchester Ave., Port Chester 10574

When: Saturday, Oct. 10. Doors open: 7 p.m., show: 8 p.m.

Openers: Alex Calder, Delicate Steve

Tickets: Available; $35-$50