Cake’s Showroom of Compassion feels for you
Words by Adam Saake | Photo by Robert Knight

Longevity in the music industry has long been an admirable quality when we discuss a band and their merits. Not every musician can be Bob Dylan and few bands can be The Rolling Stones, who just won’t seem to go away. Flashes in the pan are the vast majority and that’s if you’re lucky. At least you have some good stories of what it was like, and maybe, if you had a catchy single, an immortal slot on the alternative radio rotation. The rock star talent that Sacramento has produced (yes, I’m listing them again)–Deftones, Tesla, Jackie Greene and even Far who managed a comeback–have all had pretty steady careers throughout the years. They all continue to put out records, tour on a regular basis and find support in a market that perpetually seems on the verge of collapse. Nobody buys music anymore, right? Cake’s John McCrea has his fingers crossed that that’s not the case.

“Hopefully there’s a few people left that think it’s OK to buy an album at this point,” quips McCrea.

With the upcoming release of their sixth studio album, Showroom of Compassion, slated to hit stores in mid-January, Cake has found a place that the band can find comfort in. Not because after 20 years of being a band they’re set for life, but because they’ve continued to push forward and do what’s right for them; major label support or not.

“Because of the instability of the music business, we had to reinvent what we wanted to do,” says McCrea. “We were able to extricate ourselves from the record label and start our own label.”

Part of this new venture was taking their time recording and engineering the new record, which they did entirely themselves in their Midtown studio.

“We took an old house and hollowed it out and put in microphones and solar panels on the roof,” says McCrea.

Showroom of Compassion, which was a “100-percent solar-powered recording process,” is Cake sounding as good as they ever have. They’ve always been a no-bullshit kind of band that hardly entertains with bells and whistles. Well, unless it’s actual bells and whistles or rattles or keyboards or whatever else the band deems lo-fi enough to make the cut. Songs on the new record are typical of their sound: minimal yet sonically engrossing with lyrics that leave you pondering their meaning. The grit is there, as always, but knowing how much time and personal attention went in to the songs makes the album seem so much more special.

McCrea joined Submerge via telephone from his home in Oakland, where he lives while the band isn’t recording in Sacramento.

Your press release says that you and the band had much more to do with the recording and engineering of the new record. What was the best thing that came out of that experience, besides a great new record?
I think it took forever doing it that way. We’ve always produced our own albums ourselves, which takes a long time. But also, we’ve increasingly been turning the knobs ourselves. I think we might be getting better at producing, which is hopefully the case. The best thing to come out of it is a sense of ownership and a sense of responsibility for what we’ve done. We don’t feel like anyone’s handed us anything. We never have. Even when we went to studios we were very hands-on. I guess early on we didn’t find people who really understood what we wanted to do, because what we wanted to do was very antithetical to what was going on at the time in the mid-‘90s when there was a lot of grunge. The production values were
very bombastic.

It seems like not a lot of people would want to take a chance with that because if they felt it wasn’t going to be successful then they wouldn’t touch it.
Certainly that was the case with record companies but also with producers. We didn’t know of a producer that was doing anything similar to what we wanted to do. In other words, no one was crazy enough to make stuff sound dinky. You know, during a period when everything was sounding very grandiose. We really thought that in a country like the United States, how rebellious is it to sound “big?” How subversive is creating the aural equivalent of deforestation? In a lot of ways it seemed like business as usual. So we thought, in the United States, to turn the volume down would probably be more scary and more subversive than turning it up. Not to say that all music that’s loud is bad; it’s just that we were tired of it at that point. It seemed like people were getting louder and louder. We freaked people out by turning the volume down. People used to yell at us to turn it up.

I see that you, Vincent [DiFiore] and Xan [McCurdy] all played keyboard or synthesizer on Showroom of Compassion. Was it very intentional to incorporate more of that sound into the songs?
Um…well I did allow something on this album that I hadn’t allowed ever before, which was acoustic piano. I always avoided it, because I thought it sounded too classy for us. There’s something really classy about acoustic piano, and I thought that’s not what we’re really about. But with this album, I found this old junker up in Portland [Ore.] and shipped it down here. I think it sounds crappy enough to be on our album, and it doesn’t sound like the good life or anything. As far as the other keyboards, the Nord and other stuff, we used quite a bit of keyboard on Pressure Chief–actually more, maybe, than this album. But certainly we used more keyboard on this album than we did on, say, our first album or our second album.

Over the past two-and-a-half years of writing the record, really taking your time, have you discovered that you like a slower pace of writing?
It wasn’t the writing that took a long time, it was the recording process that took a long time. We reconfigured our studio and put solar panels on the roof. We also did the same thing with reinventing our business from the ground up. We had to set up channels of distribution. We had to ask ourselves, what’s going to work now? Certainly we realized that the major-label music business structure wasn’t right for us. For one thing, it’s too expensive. If a really good percentage of people have decided that recorded music should be free, it’s no longer sustainable to have a bunch of record company suits eating out every night on our dime. We wanted to get ourselves away from that. I think we had to re-evaluate and take some time off to think and decide how we wanted to do it and whether there were still enough people to support us. The sales for recorded music have declined precipitously in the last 10 years. We wanted to economize and make sure that we could still pay our bills. By having our own record label, it helped quite a bit. Five or 10 years from now, who knows? There might be a whole different system. It would be nice if there was a different system–a way for musicians to have health insurance.

You’re an outspoken guy when it comes to issues that are important to you, yet your lyrics don’t seem too over the top. Is there a method to your madness when you sit down to write lyrics?
I don’t really sit down to write lyrics. I’m sort of writing lyrics all the time. I’ve had this notebook in my back pocket since I was a kid. I just sort of take notes about things that I find interesting or disturbing or upsetting. Then eventually I sit down and put all these little pieces of paper into songs and that’s my process. I wouldn’t say there’s that much singular intentionality to it. I think it’s a lot of different agendas I have. I do try not to be overly obvious with the songwriting. I describe the way things feel or smell or look rather than telling people exactly what I think. I think also there’s something to be said for a song being somewhat multi-purpose. For instance the song “Sick of You” I think can be looked at more specifically to be about a relationship between two people and it can also, I think, in a broader way be about general societal mood nowadays.

Photo by Teppei

You guys have been known to play secret shows here and there. I know there’s been a few at the Blue Lamp, Old Ironsides and I remember some at the old Capitol Garage too. Is that something that you do for the Sacramento fans? Is it to warm up a new live set before you hit bigger venues? Both?
Yeah, it serves both purposes. It’s hard to figure out what you want to do live without actually playing live. It’s also a thank you to Sacramento for supporting us all these years. And it’s also for our listeners who have signed our mailing list, because without a record company we really depend on the direct connection to our listeners. If it’s the only way for people to find out about those shows by signing the mailing list, then I think it’s a good incentive. It’s a good way for us to stay in touch with people and a good reason for people to want us to stay in touch with them.

When did the whole idea of giving away trees at your shows, the Cake Forest, begin and what prompted that?
I planted a tree in Sacramento in front of one of my apartments where I lived a long time ago. I put it in the median between the sidewalk and the street. It was about as tall as my chest, I imagine. Things happened in my life, I moved away and the band started doing well, and I started being away from home all the time. I forgot about the tree.

Years passed and I went back to it and, oh my god, it was way up there. It’s a profound physical reiteration of the passage of time. That’s really what trees are all about. And I just thought; wow this was a great experience that I had. Being able to plant a tree and come back years later to see what was going on with it. I thought, everybody should have that experience. Everybody should try to plant at least one tree in their whole life. As the tree gets bigger and stronger, you get older and die. I thought, wow we could make a deal with people that if we give them the tree they have to send photographs of themselves standing next to the trees and keep us posted on how the tree’s doing. Even if it dies, people are supposed to send us a photograph and we put it up on our site.

Have you gotten a lot flack for using Cake’s website as a place to educate and discuss the global and local issues that are important to you and the band?
Oh yeah. It’s almost not even worth it to say anything on our website anymore. People just freak out! I feel like some people must be paid operatives from the Heritage Foundation or something. Just freaking out. I think they want to shut us down. I don’t find websites of bands very interesting. I think it’s kind of unhealthy just to focus only on the people and the band. I think it’s better to talk about subjects. Our music is about subjects, and I feel like we shouldn’t be barred from discussing subjects on our website.


Cake’s Showroom of Compassion will be in stores Jan. 11, 2011. If you do still buy albums, this will be a good one for you to get. If you’d like to sign up for Cake’s e-mail newsletter, go to www.cakemusic.com/news and click the link on the top left of the page.

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