In 1993, when Cake released its first single, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle,” the song found airplay on college radio stations but the band was quickly dismissed as a one-hit wonder. Proving the detractors wrong, Cake’s follow-up album, Fashion Nugget, was far more successful (due in large part to “The Distance”), but similar claims that the band was simply a novelty act reappeared. A decade and three albums later, the band has more than established staying power.
Recently, Cake parted ways with Columbia and decided to release two new albums, B-Sides and Rarities and Live at the Crystal Palace, on its own. Paste spoke with Cake trumpeter Vince DiFiore about his band’s return to independence, keeping politics in Cake’s music, and why the next album’s cover is scratch and sniff.
Paste: Why did you decide to drop your record label and release your new albums independently?
DiFiore: We were at this point with Columbia where we felt like maybe we needed to take the reins, and we have enough optimism with our listener base that we felt, “Why don’t we take advantage of the fact that we’ve worked so hard to get a listener base instead of just letting the label use that?” We didn’t take for granted what they did for us, but we thought maybe we’ll just do things on our own and hire people independently, like everyone that a record label hires to get the word out on a record, and see what we can do that way.
It felt kind of like a kid whose parents are ignoring them. They have so many bands over there at Columbia that, even though it feels great to be on a major label, sometimes you feel like you’re getting lost in the shuffle. Even if you have an album that’s really good, if they’re not feeling like working in a single from that album into the particular radio formats that are happening at that time, then you’re kind of screwed and they might not work on your record so much. With all the music downloading we were feeling like album sales weren’t so great anyways so we might as well just sell the album ourselves.
P: Is that why the b-sides album cover is scratch and sniff?
DiFiore: We’re trying to beat the digital age. You can’t download olfactory smells. There’s something very tangible that brings you into that experience, very grounding about that sense of smell. There’s also a secret smell. You lift up the tray on the inside and there’s a little bird with a gas nozzle and there’s gasoline smell on that gas nozzle too. It’s sort of a secret that we’re hoping will get out so that people can enjoy that. The whole thing is a good solid consumer sort of feeling. I listened to the whole album for the first time through after being the one to take the shrink wrap off of it and it was very satisfying. The songs are from all over the place and all over time from our history. From my perspective, I was just thinking about all the different eras we’ve been through with different players. It was sort of a sentimental journey for me listening to it the first time.
P: Since you and John McCrea are the only founding members of Cake still around, how has such a rotating lineup affected your music?
DiFiore: You build a chemistry. I think that as time has gone on we’ve gone to bigger stages and played to more people so I know that we’ve gotten louder. The music is more aggressive now, I’m playing my trumpets more aggressively, the guitars and bass are more aggressive and so are the drums. But we’re still putting out music that’s based on songs. We’re not blowing things out to unmanageable energy, but once we get the arrangements down we seem to be putting a little more oomph behind them. You can hear the difference; people are different players. You sort of have to work with each other to make someone else’s strengths shine.
P: Has the band kept the same method of songwriting?
DiFiore: Pretty closely. The main way we’ve done things, which has changed a little bit, is that John will come in with a song, he’ll sing it and play rhythm on the guitar and we’ll work from there. He might have some other melodic ideas that we’ll play for him and we build the arrangement that way. Once we feel like we’re almost there, we record it and then maybe work on it a little bit more in the studio once the basic tracks are down. But the way we’re doing it now that we have our own studio is we’ve been putting some rhythm down originally and then adding parts on after that. We want to go back to the other way, we want to work on a song a lot more before we start to track things and get some sort of group consensus going before someone changes the direction of things because they were spending a little extra time in the studio while no one else was there.
P: Why is so much of the band’s music and website politically charged?
DiFiore: Just about everyone is an activist in some way. I read this really revolting bumper sticker on the back of someone’s SUV today. I don’t have anything against SUVs, it just happened to be an SUV. Anyway, there are these bumper stickers that say, “Keep Tahoe blue,” for people who are against pollution, and I meanm who isn’t against pollution? But this one said, “Keep Tahoe red, white and blue.” What is that? Anti-Mexican? Anti-German or something? Like, no one wants a Scandinavian around in Lake Tahoe? But these people are sort of activists; everyone has something to say. I think that’s all we’re doing also. We have a certain political point of view and we happen to have a website because we’re a musical group and whether it’s fair or not for somebody who has people’s attention to express their point of view, the fact is we can, so we do. I think everyone wants to be educated and we’re always looking for people to point us to certain websites if anyone has information they want us to know about. We’re just sharing the way everyone else shares except we have a website that people go to because of the music.