The EM Poll

PRODUCTION VALUES: Home Cooking with Cake

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Maureen Droney

           

When describing the sound of the band Cake, many music reviewers often have to stretch their imaginations to come up with just the right words. Wry, ironic, iconoclastic, contrarian, sardonic, mechanized, organic — the list goes on and on — are all appropriate descriptions for the band's unusual sound. Although Cake's music may be hard to categorize, the band developed a loyal fan base and a number of hit songs simply by staying true to itself.

Cake's debut album, Motorcade of Generosity, was released in 1994 on the band's own indie label. Picked up by Capricorn Records, Motorcade was rereleased and garnered a college radio hit, “How Do You Afford Your Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle?” Cake's second album, Fashion Nugget (Capricorn, 1996), scored platinum success and spawned the hits “The Distance” and a cover of Gloria Gaynor's disco classic “I Will Survive.” (Cake's penchant for out-of-left-field covers is evident on its latest CD Pressure Chief, which includes a version of Bread's 1972 hit, “Guitar Man.”)

FIG. 1: From an engineering standpoint, the recording of Pressure Chief was essentially on-the-job training for the members of Cake.

Based in the Sacramento, California area, Cake has endured both personnel and label changes. Front man, principal-songwriter, and guitarist John McCrea and trumpeter Vince di Fiore are founding members. Bassist Gabe Nelson has been settled in since 1997, and guitarist Xan McCurdy joined in 2000. (The band currently has no permanent drummer.) It was then that Cake signed with Columbia Records and recorded Comfort Eagle, which produced the hit single and video “Short Skirt/Long Jacket.”

Cake plays a singularly original and intelligent style of pop featuring sparse arrangements, wry lyrics, often-funky grooves, solo trumpet fills and lines, and melodic guitar and synth work. The band members have always produced their own music and videos and designed their own album covers. Pressure Chief (see Fig. 1), the group's fifth and latest release, continues and expands upon that same tradition. The CD was recorded democratically by McCrea, di Fiore, Nelson, and McCurdy in a converted, two-bedroom house in Sacramento (see Fig. 2). Cake's surprisingly modest setup was based around an Apple Macintosh G3 running a Digidesign Pro Tools LE system through Digi 001 and 002 interfaces.

The CD, which was recorded mainly without the benefit of an engineer, is a punchy-sounding delight. In typical Cake fashion, it's skewed, deadpan, and ingenuous. EM caught up with McCrea and di Fiore just a few days before Pressure Chief's release and asked them about the studio, their production techniques, and a lot more.

Why did you choose to record this project outside of a commercial studio?

FIG. 2: The members of Cake in their unassuming Sacramento-based project studio. Left to right: Nelson, McCurdy, McCrea, and di Fiore.

McCrea: Because we finally got smart! We wasted a lot of energy recording in conventional studios. It took us a long time to have the confidence to do this: get an old house, buy microphones, get a computer, and learn how to record ourselves. There's something to be said for not having a stranger in the room with you who's thinking about that TV show he's missing and looking at his watch. It's really about creative expression. I think that, in the past, we were somewhat held back by the false professionalism of conventional recording studios.

It sounds like you've had bad studio experiences.

McCrea: Conventional studios work for a lot of people. I'm not against them. But we've produced ourselves from the very first album, and it was always an effort to communicate. We expended a lot of energy trying to describe to other people the exact color red we wanted in a painting, or how thick the paintbrush should be. All that energy could have been focused solely on music. There's a lot of diplomacy and communication that has to happen when you're trying to get an engineer — who knows the right way to do things — to do something the wrong way. And from the very beginning, we've done things the wrong way — technically. Especially on this album. I think this album hearkens back to the ineptitude of our first album when we really didn't know what we were doing. The engineer back then, who was sort of a hard-rock engineer, was pretty much rolling his eyes. The fact that we wanted things to sound smaller was completely alien to him. I wanted things to sound small and economical, very different from the typical early '90s bombastic, big-time rock.

Did you have any engineering help on Pressure Chief?

di Fiore: We engineered the entire album ourselves, but we brought in an engineer named Patrick Olguin to help during the mix. We needed somebody confident, who could help us organize some of the files that had become disordered. In case anything bad happened that might take us a day or two to fix, we wanted somebody around who wasn't going to make the problem worse.