Veteran indie rock band Cake will perform Thursday, May 16, at Wave.
The date is part of a run of shows that will extend throughout the summer and comes immediately after two sold-out shows in Kansas City, Mo.
Founded in Sacramento, California, in the early 1990s, the band's 1994 debut album, "Motorcade of Generosity," was buoyed by the radio single, "Rock 'N' Roll Lifestyle." It was followed in 1996 by the album "Fashion Nugget" and what is arguably the band's best-known song, "The Distance."
The group continued to enjoy mainstream success into the early 2000s via the song "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" and its unbridled musical eclecticism (the group has covered songs by both Willie Nelson and Black Sabbath), with dashes of mariachi music, country and more familiar rock sounds fused seamlessly into songs with thought-provoking lyrics and a healthy sense of humor.
John McCrea, lead singer, primary songwriter and lyricist for the group, recently spoke with KMUW about the new music Cake is working on, how the band has survived while the music industry has crumbled, and how a simple — and possibly illegal — act has ultimately fostered a greater sense of community among the group's fans.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Cake is working on new music, and it's likely we'll see a new record from you this year.
It's all getting really close. There's a live [album] coming out in the middle of summer, a recording we made a few years back in Folsom, California. By the end of the year, we'll have a studio album if the cards that I'm reading are correct.
I've read that you're a pretty prolific writer.
I'd like to be. I'm not always. But I have been for a period. It probably relates to my mental health at the time. I carry around a notepad all the time, and I take notes. Eventually, my notebooks fill up. and I sit with the guitar and try to make sense of it. I do that whether or not I'm going to release an album. Eventually, I'll have quite a few songs, and I'll have something to choose from for the band. I definitely have a whole bunch right now. It looks like a record's going to happen.
With that going on and as you're thinking about a new tour, do you bring out new songs for audiences or do you keep them under wraps until they've been released, and people have had time to absorb them?
Every once in a while, if we really feel like it, we'll play a new song that hasn't been released. For the most part, it seems like we can't do that anymore as easily because of YouTube. People can release your song for you without your consent. [Laughs.] I think that's not exactly the way that we'd like to do it. It'd be great if we could play a new song just for the people who are there. But we have to decide if we're ready to release it to the whole world. It's weird.
Over the last decade-plus, we've seen ways that artists have had to pivot with their business models because of streaming and what you were just talking about with YouTube. It seems to me that Cake was ahead of the curve in some ways. You've become increasingly independent over time and have maybe avoided some of the pitfalls that those changes have brought.
We couldn't avoid all of those pitfalls, obviously, but we saw the ship sinking, the big record company ship sinking, and we were able to extricate ourselves from all that. We realized that there's not very much money for this anymore. Why should we have a bunch of record company executives getting paid for something that's not worth very much before we get paid for the music that we make?
The smart thing we did was to extricate ourselves from all that sort of fluff. All that wasteful business model. There's no longer enough money to go around to have people with fancy suits. The record label that we were on, everybody had really expensive suits. Super fancy. Five to $10,000 suits.
I've heard those stories, possibly apocryphal, about record company executives having their sports cars flown from New York to Los Angeles because they were going to be in L.A. for a week on business.
You'll be relieved to know that that's probably not happening anymore. But what also is not happening is that a bluegrass artist can't make a living by [selling] maybe 40-50,000 copies of an album. They can't have medical insurance. Unless you're a big pop star, you can't even be middle class or even lower middle class with this anymore. The wasteful record companies were using musicians as a human shield. I guess, thankfully, that human shield is not there so much, but people I know who I think are really important songwriters are thinking about doing other careers. It was fun to watch the record companies suffer, put it that way.
You have a solar-powered studio and have taken the reins with the business end. What other kinds of things have you done to sustain the group?
The only way for artists to make a living now, again, unless they're Taylor Swift, is to play live shows. That's the bulk of it. We don't play any more shows than we have to. We're not trying to get rich or anything. You can look back and see that we haven't played a ton of shows. That's how we've stayed afloat. Our audience is pretty enthusiastic. They remember that we exist when we come to their town, and I'm super thankful for that. We haven't experimented with any sort of new income streams or anything like that. We haven't invented any new ways of making a living; we have shifted away from making recorded music to being more of a live band.
You've been at this for over 30 years now, and I would imagine you see new fans each year as well as some people who have been there more or less since the beginning.
That's when I know that I'm doing my job, when you have really young people and really old people in the same audience. That's a huge deal. Hopefully, you're actually connecting with people. That's why I'm still doing it, despite all the frustrations. I like making stuff, and I try to make stuff that I would like. If other people like it, that's where I find my purpose.
Humor is central to Cake's music. Is that something that was there from the start or was that something that evolved as you went along?
That's an interesting question. I was just thinking about that recently. I had a friend who said to me, before the band, "Your music is more serious and there's not a lot of humor to it but your personality and your visual sensibility and a lot of other things about you have a ton of humor." I think what happened to change that was I started playing my songs live, solo acoustic, at this café. I think I had to play three hours every Sunday night or something. There was a lot of time to fill so I learned some old standards and old George Jones songs. A bunch of songs that I liked. I also had to blend some humor into it.
It wasn't super obvious humor. Sort of a dry sense of humor. But that's when I really started doing that. Had I not done that, I think Cake would be a much different thing. I don't think the humor and the sadness would be as blended. It was that experience of having to hold everything up with an acoustic guitar by myself for three hours. I had to have some of my personality in there. I couldn't just play songs.
I also started getting a sense of what worked, what kinds of things worked. You can't ignore if there's a boring part of a song. You know it if you're playing solo acoustic. You get the sense of, "That feels really empty. That lyric really worked. I noticed peoples' faces changed with that lyric."
I wanted to ask about this tradition you have of giving away trees at your shows. That's a very cool and different sense of community that you've cultivated.
In the beginning days of the band, I had an apartment, and I bought a tree at a garage sale. It was two feet tall or whatever, and I planted it, I think illegally, in between the sidewalk and the street. Then my life got busy, I started touring more and the band started becoming more successful and I started being home not at all. I moved to a different apartment, then another place. I forgot all about the tree. Then, about 10 or 12 years later, I found myself for some reason in that part of town and walked by this tree that was 27 feet tall. It was a really poignant experience for me, and I thought, "Everybody should do this at least once."
We started asking trivia questions at our shows and would give a tree to whoever could correctly answer the questions. Then, people who won the tree would send us their photographs of them standing next to the newly planted tree. We have a map on our website, a map of the world, and you can click on the various tree icons in different cities and see Hans standing next to his apple tree in Berlin or Jeff standing next to his olive tree in Fresno, California. It's been good, and it's created a weird sense of community.
