Q&A: Cake returns to the L.A. stage while staying true to its sound

Cake has started touring once again, and the band’s second show this year will be at the Hollywood Palladium Saturday. The band’s founder, John McCrea, spoke with Daily Bruin’s Noor Eid about the band’s musical distinction, approach and the new projects it is pursuing.

Daily Bruin: Cake formed in the early ’90s. How has the band managed to outlast ever-changing musical trends?
John McCrea: I think by being outsiders. … We’ve always felt that there has been really big stuff going on in music, and we have been on the outskirts of it. … There are brief periods where people notice us, or mainstream culture notices us but it’s mostly sort of outsider music.

DB: How would you describe the band’s sound?
JM: I think that the song writing is actually fairly old-fashioned in structure, and I mean that in a good way hopefully. It has elements of country and jazz and ranchero music, but it’s not really any of those things. I guess it obviously has elements of rock, but it’s not gratuitously heavy in the way that rock has become.

DB: On top of writing, producing and performing your own music, your band now has its own record label. What drove you guys to take the band in this direction?
JM: In a time where a lot of the structures in the music business and society are crumbling, we thought it would be smart to take more things into our own hands. … (For) our first album that released a long time ago, “Motorcade of Generosity,” we found our own label and distribution ourselves. We’ve made our own album covers and directed our own videos. It was easy for us to go back to where we started. … The theme of this is sort of extricating ourselves from maybe failing systems and structure””mdash;one of them the music business, another the power grid. There are a lot of things that are fragile now and in a state of flux and in a time like this, we should have more control over our destiny, not less.

DB: Do you think all of this involvement and hands-on approach makes better music? What’s the benefit?
JM: It’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of time, and that in a way sucks. We produce our own albums and the reason why we started doing it this way is because we had a sound that no producer in his or her right mind would allow us to do … and it was sort of antithetical to the fashion trends of production at that time. Originally it was in the early 90s that music was starting to sound really big and bombastic and grandiose, and we just wanted to sound small. We thought that would be the most aversive thing you could do in a country like the United States of America, where a lot of the music that was sort of feigning rebelliousness, really just sounded like the sound or equivalent to deforestation. So, we had to have this hands-on approach, and we just got used to it. … We would have had less pride of ownership and it’s sort of a do it yourself project.

DB: “The Showroom of Compassion,” still keeps the quirky tone and clever lyrics, but was this album especially different in any way?
JM: Well, I think the level of participation of the whole band is higher. We all sat together in a room and made decisions from very big decisions to very, very minute decisions. It has been a gradual increase of participation over the years but now we are more engaged than ever as a band. We are doing more of our own engineering and more of our own fixing than ever before, which is good and bad. It is very arduous but also satisfying at the end.

DB: Cake is working with US Scholastic Band Association for the nationwide contest “The Federal Funding March.” Why did you feel it was important to create something like this?
JM: Well, for one thing there is a lot of federal funding being removed from music programs generally, and we thought that would be perfect given the topic of the song “Federal Funding.” You have this amazing tradition of music in schools and this culture around it that needs to be preserved. … Right now it is a philosophical question … for the United States: What do we want to pay for and what do we not want to pay for? The adult thing to do is invest in the future and not to be selfish. If that means I’ll be able to afford one less Japanese electronic item this year, I’ll survive.

DB: Recently, the band has come out with a book called “Bound Away.” Could you talk a bit about it?
JM: Well, there is a woman who was working with a nonprofit whose aim was preserving printing culture and weather-press printing, since it’s fast disappearing. It is something that needs to be preserved and remembered. They approached us and asked us if we wanted to make a book. So we worked with them to create this book and we actually printed it using our old T-shirts and jeans to make the paper. We made the paper ourselves and printed it ourselves and bound it ourselves. It’s a great process.

DB: From a solar-powered studio to giving away trees at concerts, Cake shows a lot of love for the environment. Could you talk about the group’s tie to the environment?
JM: For one thing it seems to me such a fundamental issue, why would anyway ask us why we’re interested in the environment? That’s always puzzled me. We have become so disengaged from the reality of our own situation that we would marginalize these kinds of issues by calling them political. Any issue – political or not – all stems back to the fact that you have air that is clean enough to breathe and water that is clean enough to drink and an ecosystem that can support itself and life. That being said, we had just visited Germany where they produce more solar electricity than any other country. Whenever we are there it is pretty cloudy and they are still the number one producers of solar electricity and, having a studio in sunny California, this humbled us into taking action. We produce more power than we use and so we feed electricity back into the grid. As the value of recorded music descends into the garbage, we get this $25 credit every month for the electricity we put back into the grid, so we can buy a sandwich.