CAKE

Two decades after forming as a “convulsive gesture,” an alt-rock stalwart doesn’t look back

Cake frontman John McCrea isn’t given to retrospective analysis of how he, his music or his band has evolved over the past 20 years. “I feel strongly that the song should be its own universe,” he says. McCrea sees no need to find the threads that tie together either the band’s career or its new album, Showroom of Compassion. Fair enough. But McCrea does allow that adding piano to Cake’s trademark sound on Showroom—the gritty guitars, dry trumpet lines and deadpan lyrical delivery of hits like 1996’s “The Distance”—represents a shift. “In the early days of the band, I felt strongly about not wanting certain instruments that symbolized things culturally that I found repugnant,” McCrea says. “I thought keyboards were really dangerous, and piano was too classy. I still won’t use saxophone. But my feelings have changed about piano.”

Piano wasn’t the only change: Cake’s sixth album is the first the band has recorded in its solar-powered Sacramento studio. It’s also the first time the band has self-released an album since its 1993 debut, Motorcade of Generosity (later picked up by Capricorn Records). “The more control we have over the music, the better,” McCrea says. “We saw things becoming far less stable, so we thought we should have our own label and decide on distribution album by album.” The approach paid off: The album’s first single, “Sick of You,” is Cake’s biggest radio hit since 2001.

Showroom of Compassion is the most collaborative Cake album to date, with all five band members contributing to the writing, recording and producing. “Our process is very hands-on,” the singer says. “We not only record and engineer our songs but we also produce, and those sorts of production decisions require a lot of objectivity. The only way to gain objectivity about what makes a good record is experience.”

That would be the experience of 20 years as a group, which has brought McRea and his cohorts a long way from their original vision. “The band was started as a reactionary, almost convulsive gesture against a lot of the music that was going on in the ’90s,” he says. “We wanted to be stridently small-sounding, because of how big and bulbous we felt rock sounded at the time—rock that was purporting to be really rebellious and was in our minds just another form of big, dumb American rock.”

–Eric R. Danton

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