Cake goes the distance while improving sound
By Daily Bruin Staff
July 15, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Sony Music Rock group Cake’s latest single "Short Skirt,
Long Jacket" is featured on its soon-to-be released album "Comfort
Eagle."
By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Cake doesn’t seem to be in any rush.
For two years, the alternative rock band has managed to ignore
the lure of the spotlight and the demand for a new album.
Instead of touring, the group has worked methodically for a
better guitar riff or keyboard sound, according to the
group’s trumpet player, Vincent DiFiore, a UCLA psychology
student who graduated in ’86.
“It’s not just the first thing that comes to us when
we write the song,” said DiFiore in a phone interview from
the backyard of his Sacramento home. “We have to go through
like 20 major changes for a song before we’ve arrived on the
final version.”
Now, Cake is back. With a new album, “Comfort
Eagle,” and an upcoming tour, the quartet is picking up where
they left off.
Recent music industry wisdom would suggest that a band
couldn’t successfully reenter the capricious scene of popular
music after so long an absence. The trend is for bands to release
follow-up albums within a year of their hit to make the most of
their success.
Cake, known for their singles “The Distance,” from
the album “Fashion Nugget” and “Never
There,” from “Prolonging the Magic,”
haven’t, however, subscribed to this theory.
Instead, singer/songwriter John McCrea, guitarist Xan McCurdy,
bassist Gabriel Nelson and DiFiore, took their time creating the
band’s fourth album.
“There is only so much space you have to make some
coherent music, and we’re just trying to be really careful
about that space. There is nothing on a record that is wasteful.
It’s a very economical approach and a resourceful
approach,” DiFiore said.
“We never rested. Even though we haven’t played a
show in two years, we’ve been working,” he
continued.
The new album will not be released until July 24, but the radio
hit “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” is ninth on the
Billboard modern rock singles chart. The track is also among the 20
most frequently played songs on the Los Angeles area radio station
KROQ.
“We’ve had two big songs from them that worked for
us before, and when this came out we just added it, thinking
we’ve had success with the last two songs,” said Lisa
Warden, KROQ’s music director. “We just sort of put it
on in blind faith.”
Warden added that although they have received mixed response, it
is too early to gauge the song’s success with listeners.
Even with a promising amount of radio airplay, Cake isn’t
rushing out on tour. The band has decided to ease back into playing
for large audiences.
The group will be playing a few small shows in the Sacramento
and Los Angeles areas, for crowds of around 100 people, before
starting their nationwide tour.
“The smaller venues are kind of like training wheels
before we get to the big bike that is our regular touring,”
DiFiore said.
After two years of playing only in studios, the band is
concerned about losing cohesiveness if they jump into shows at
bigger venues, according to DiFiore.
“If all of a sudden you throw your music into a big venue
you can kind of lose control of it, and the band can lose its
groove,” he said. “So we’re sort of taking some
smaller steps up to the bigger stages because we don’t want
to lose all the groove we have so far from rehearsing.”
This process of constant musical improvement is by no means
over. After this tour the band plans to go back in the studio.
DiFiore said that he hopes the group can improve its method of
touring, and of course, be working on another record.
“It always seems like touring can be a little bit
difficult, especially if people have families and
everything,” he said. “We want to make another good
album, and sort of improve everything, the way that we have up to
this point.”
