A fresh slice of CAKE

Ahead of the release of their ninth studio album, expected in early 2027, Californian rock band CAKE are bringing An Evening With CAKE to Perth’s Ice Cream Factory on Sunday, March 14. Ahead of their first visit to Australian shores in 15 years, frontman John McCrea spoke to KAREN LOWE ahead of their upcoming tour in March about bin chickens, their upcoming album and squeezing into a freight elevator in Texas to debut their latest song, Billionaire In Space.  

You guys are returning to Australia for the first time in 15 years next March. Are you looking forward to the shows? And what are some of your favourite memories of being in Australia? 

Yes, of course we’re looking forward to the shows. It’s been too long. It’s such a long plane flight; maybe that is what has kept us away. I have good memories of the birds of Australia. I think they’re so different from the birds here. There’s the one with the really hooked beak that’s hooked down and looks really strange.

Oh, an Ibis? Or Bin Chicken?

Yeah. I love that bird.

You are also working on your ninth studio album with one song, Billionaire In Space, being played for the first time in a freight elevator on Texas Public Radio. What was it like playing in a freight elevator with the acoustics? 

Well, it felt like I was going to knock the microphone stand over at any moment. There was not a lot of elbow room, but I think we rose to the occasion and got used to it enough to make a pretty good recording. Yeah, I don’t want to do that anymore, but it was a good experience.

How is the recording process going with the album? 

It’s going really well. I started during the pandemic, so it kind of began as a sort of lone, little isolated experience, and it’s sort of broadening out, and the album’s pretty much finished. I’m just looking for a good mixer to help me mix, and then I should release it sometime; I don’t know, probably early next year.

The band’s solar-powered studio in Sacramento often generates more energy than it consumes. Has it always worked well, or are there a few horror stories of trying to record but the power keeps failing? 

No, it’s connected to the grid, so basically, when the value of recorded music descends into nothing, we still get a credit from the utility. There are no dramatic stories, but when we were touring in Germany, we just saw how many solar panels there were all over the place, and it was cloudy the whole time. We thought to ourselves, ‘We live on the West Coast of the United States.’ We felt guilty about it and went ahead and went for it, and it’s super easy to do.

On that, you have a long-running CAKE Forest initiative. For those that don’t know, what’s that about? And how many trees do you think you have given away since you first started it?

Ooh, I don’t know, but there’s a map of the entire earth on our website, and you can click on various tree icons over different cities and a photograph of Hans in Germany with his apple tree or Jeff in Fresno, California, by his olive tree. Anyway, you could count them there, but I imagine it’s hundreds at this point.

The idea is not really some sort of environmental agenda so much. It’s kind of a fundamental human experience to plant a tree and then maybe walk away and forget about it. I had that experience when the band was first starting out and I planted a tree illegally between the sidewalk and the street in front of my apartment and nobody caught me. Then my life got busy as I started touring a lot. I forgot about the tree and moved to a different apartment and then to a different city.

10 years went by and I was walking… I just happened to be walking that part of town and came upon this tree that was 30 feet high (ten metres high), and it was a good experience. Everybody should do it, so we thought we’d start giving trees away.

You started the band in 1991. Other than members, what have been some of the biggest changes over the years that have influenced the way you write and make music? 

Well… I think I’ve become more proficient with the recording process in terms of engineering my own music. I delegated a lot more of those decisions to other people in the beginning, and now I’m learning how to turn the knobs and make adjustments myself. It’s a good sense of agency, and it’s also sometimes easier than having to use language to describe what you want to somebody else.

What’s a sound you’ve always wanted to sample but haven’t yet found the right song for?

Oh, the song that I wanted to sample? Well, there are a lot of little bits and pieces of classical symphonies that I wonder if I could get away with sampling. I don’t have a specific one. Oh, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you because I don’t want anybody to know.

What’s a moment where you tried to look cool and absolutely did not succeed, but you learned something from the failure anyway?

Oh, that’s a rough one. I don’t really think that I am that into looking cool anymore. I sort of gave up. I’m pretty sure that things that I thought were cool; everyone else thought were not cool, so I’ve always felt a little out of sync with the idea of coolness, and that’s sad but also really freeing too.

You often critique consumerism—what’s an object you own that you feel genuinely conflicted about?

The thing I feel most conflicted about is flying around the world on jets. It’s really one of the worst things you can do in terms of climate change, and increasingly, the threat that the music economy is kind of hanging by that one sort of income, which is live touring. I think it’s super unfortunate, but as the value of recorded music descends, the value of live music is all that’s left. I feel super conflicted about that.

Your lyrics often highlight absurdity—what’s an everyday human behaviour you think future civilisations will find completely baffling?

Well… I think people will find… I hope that people find some of our cruelty baffling. I think there might be an analogue here to the way we treat animals. It’s pretty horrible.

I think people ideally will look back and not understand how sensitive, creative, and empathetic people could treat animals as poorly as we do and in the same way that maybe we look back at some of our ancestors who owned slaves and think, “Well, how could you have that blind spot?” You wrote really good poetry. How could you own human beings?”

Ideally, maybe there’s some of that in the future. We could also go the other direction and become more savage and become more like devil apes. It’s hard to say which way we’re headed right now.

What are some of the good things you have seen that may have restored your faith in humanity?

I think I like how younger people are not uptight about a lot of things that their parents and grandparents were uptight about. Interracial stuff used to be something that people thought was worth noticing, and now it seems really insignificant. Also, gender stuff is just way more fluid and acceptable, so I think in a lot of ways we really are improving.

I didn’t have hope for a long time, but I’m starting to get some hope when I talk to 14-year-olds.

What’s the smallest, dumbest thing that brings you disproportionate joy—the thing that reminds you you’re still alive and paying attention?

Oh, my dog. He makes sure that I remember that we should run around a little bit every day.

What was the best advice that you were given when you first started out? And what advice would you give to someone who was starting out now?

The best advice that I got… There are two people that gave me good advice.

One was East Bay Ray from The Dead Kennedys, and he told me to demand the rights to our first album that we recorded on our own when I was negotiating with the label that signed us. Thanks to him, we own the rights to our first album.

Then also Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers recommended that I keep the volume down and not let the sound people have total control over the volume. I was very controlling about it and kept our volume down in a way that was, I think, more human and more accessible to the human ear. He’s very opinionated about all of that, and I’m lucky that I talked to him at that point.

What bands do you currently have on rotation in your CD player? And are there any bands that you just didn’t get until you saw them live?

Well, I’m really liking this band, Angine de Poitrine. They’re a Canadian trio, and I didn’t like them at first, and now I’m really enjoying it. I think they really groove well. They’re crazy, and they have a lot of microtones and stuff, and at first maybe you won’t think it sounds good, but listen to it a little while, and it sounds good.

I also have… What else have I been listening to? A band called Sault. I also like this band called… gosh, can I look? Hold on, let me just look and see what’s actually in my list.

There’s a band from LA called LA LOM that are really cool. I also really like Fela Kuti. I have the song Colonial Mentality in my playlist, and a song by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, My Adobe Hacienda, is a song that I super love. Also Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser. Those are the ones at the top of my backyard party playlist.

CAKE play at Ice Cream Factory on Sunday, March 14, 2027. Tickets are on sale now from eventbrite.com.au