A melody sneaked its way into my head last week, as involuntarily as a dream or a sneeze, and wouldn’t budge. You can’t hum a tune to Shazam or Siri (yet), so I was stuck digging for a lyric or phrase that I could Google. This works about as often as it doesn’t. Soon, the line “I don’t care, even if I was a fool” bubbled up, and I entered the words into the search box. The first result was “I Was a Fool to Care,” by James Taylor; the second, a cover of the Taylor song by the Montreal slack-psych god Mac DeMarco. This was the version I was humming, I realized. I’d heard it last summer, when I went on a brief “Salad Days” bender and would play DeMarco’s music videos on my television every morning. His cover of the Taylor song would usually auto-play after his “Ode to Viceroy.” I knew it was special then, but I still don’t know why my brain auto-played it ten months later.

Taylor is a daunting artist to engage with, even for devoted young music enthusiasts. Like Billy Joel, or Bad Brains, or MF Doom, Taylor is so cemented in his stature and cherished by his fans that we take his presence, and his music, as a societal given. When I brought him up to a friend around my age, he remarked, “I’ve listened to James Taylor, but I don’t listen to James Taylor.” And it’s true; we’ve all heard “Fire and Rain,” and Taylor’s “unique brand of bittersweet folk rock”—as “The Simpsons” famously characterized it—remains as widely recognizable as Bart and Lisa. It’s easy to feel guilty about such pop blind spots, but it was comforting to find out that even the loyal nostalgist DeMarco had come to Taylor’s deep cuts late in his twenty-six years. He told Spin magazine last May:

I never really got into James Taylor until very recently. . . . But my keyboard player that joined the band last summer, Jon [Lent], he’s always been a James Taylor guy. I never really knew about it. I think I was going through a Paul Simon thing, and somehow from that I went to James. But I was dabbling with “Sweet Baby James,” “Fire and Rain,” that kinda stuff. Then Jon was like, “No, no, no, no, no, my friend.” He showed me “Gorilla,” which is an album from 1975, and that’s where that song is from. But Jon was in town and we decided, “Might as well cover a little James, we have nothing better to do.”

Taylor’s “I Was a Fool to Care” is the best song on his 1975 album, “Gorilla,” next to, maybe, “Music.” It’s honeyed and addicting, all open-palm drums and soul strings, with a two-step R.-&-B. bounce that rocks you to sleep. Marvin Gaye dominated pop the year before its release; for “Gorilla,” Taylor dipped into Gaye’s tender sound as he regrouped from a previous album, “Walking Man,” which bombed. On “I Was a Fool to Care,” Taylor writes from a universal perspective: a heartbroken “country fool” retraces his steps through a relationship with a woman who has left him limp. His friends tried to warn him, he admits, and he can still hear her “lovely lies,” but, despite it all, he emerges from the experience with no regrets—’tis better than to have never cared at all. When Rolling Stone reviewed “Gorilla,” it observed that the track was “sure to sprout cover versions before long.”

Forty-two years later, “Care” fits DeMarco like a worn cap. The lyrics bear the tightrope balance of happy/sad wistfulness that he perfected on “Salad Days,” and his hangdog voice hugs the melody effortlessly. The lines “I wish I was an old man, and love was through with me / I wish I was a baby on my mother’s knee” read like an answer to DeMarco’s “Blue Boy,” a perfect précis of his mid-twenties disaffection. He and his keyboardist Jon Lent update Taylor’s mustache-soul with indie quirk: their guitar notes twist upward at the end of each phrase, their drums jangle and hiss a bit more loosely, and their pastel synth tones smolder through fuzz. The one-off cover was released directly to YouTube on the day that Prince died; its most popular comments still include “Makes me nostalgic” and “rip to anyone who listens to this after a breakup.” The few fans who clocked the fact that it was a cover weren’t afraid to suggest that DeMarco had matched, or surpassed, Taylor’s original.

It’s always cool to find congruities like this cover. They confirm that a truly great song exists outside of time and trend. But parallels between DeMarco and Taylor extend beyond their sound: they’ve both been known as boyish wild men who are fond of the bottle, and whose unpredictable, spastic personalities are at odds with the mellow, emotive songs they write. In an uneasy way, this friction is part of their appeal: Taylor’s struggles with addiction carried well in gushing rock profiles, like the one in which he tells a story about biting a hole in his friend’s guitar after playing a song at a party for eight hours straight. DeMarco’s early shows were marked by such charming destruction, and infamous reports that he once got nude onstage and committed an unspeakable act with a drumstick helped buoy his notoriety and sell out subsequent tours.

Of course, the scales have changed. Taylor has sold more than a hundred million albums of soft folk, and enjoyed the mainstream celebrity he deserved; by contrast, DeMarco’s “Salad Days” topped out at a little more than a hundred thousand copies sold, which was surely received as a victory at his modest label, Captured Tracks. But the shift goes both ways: DeMarco’s version of “I Was a Fool to Care” has gained close to 1.5 million views on YouTube, versus Taylor’s, which tops out around a quarter million. There is a ceiling for the popularity of the kind of music that DeMarco has mastered, but the strength of his celebrity stands to inch it up with each release. In this way, Taylor provides more of an archetype for the modern guitar man than his peers. As DeMarco prepares to release his third album, “This Old Dog,” on May 5th, he might have inherited the James Taylor slot in more ways than one: in 2017, a guy with an acoustic guitar is much more interesting wearing a leather gimp mask.