For nearly 20 years Cake have been making music that is distinctly their own. Forming in 1991, the band crafted a sound that fused an array of genres as diverse as rock, folk, and elements of hip-hop and spoken word, with dynamic horn parts. This unique sound first reached a small cadre of in-the-know fans in 1994 when Cake’s first LP Motorcade of Generosity hit music stores and college radio stations. It was their 1996 full-length Fashion Nugget that brought Cake to the masses with the hit song “The Distance,” receiving frequent play on major alternative and modern rock radio stations nationwide. Two years later, the aptly named Prolonging the Magic again saw Cake at the top of the charts with the hit song “Never There.”

In the early 2000s, Cake continued to have a strong following, and they released two more albums: Comfort Eagle (2001) and Pressure Chief (2004). Their relationship with the major label system always tenuous, 2007 saw Cake break from the majors, releasing B-Sides and Rarities on their own label Upbeat Records. Not satisfied with existing festival tours, in 2002 Cake launched the Unlimited Sunshine Tour, an annual concert series with a diversity of artists and genres which they headlined along with artists De La Soul, Flaming Lips, and Modest Mouse. In the years since it’s inception, the tour has featured performances by Cheap Trick, Tegan and Sara, Brazilian Girls, and others.

Cake’s sixth studio album, Showroom of Compassion was recorded in the band’s own solar-powered studio, and will again be released on their label Upbeat Records, slated to be available everywhere January 11, 2011. Verbicide was stoked to chat over the phone with Cake lead-singer and principle songwriter John McCrea, and discuss the band’s history, influences, the power of the individual song, and the future of the music industry.

The new studio album Showroom of Compassion is out this January. What was the process of writing this album, and how did it differ from the process of writing Pressure Chief or previous Cake albums?
Well, I think it was a lot more collaborative process. Although I write the songs for the band, I brought them in a lot sooner. It just seems like everyone is sort of getting more confident with their creative process. Everyone in the band is good with something different, so there’s a lot of things that one person sees and another person doesn’t see, so we all just put our heads to it, and I think we got something. It took a long time because we don’t use a fancy producer, so without that objectivity coming in from the outside, it takes us a lot longer to get that objectivity. The only thing that you can really use for that is time. So, after burying ourselves in the music for maybe days and days, we have to come up and out of it for a little while; get away from it and [then] go back to it. It’s sort of like a painter having to step back from the painting. In other words, in order for somebody [who’s] invested so much into getting a guitar part right — spending six hours to get it just right — in order for you to realize that that guitar part sucks and you should erase it, it takes some time away to really have that objectivity.

About how long did it take you to write this album?
I write songs all the time, so it’s impossible for me to say how long it took to write the songs. Certainly, to record the album, it took us about two and a half years — rehearsing the songs with the band, recording them, and then realizing that a song needs a different arrangement and then sort of starting all over again.

Is this the first album that you’ve done at this new studio that you’ve set up?
We did our last album there, but things were more primitive for Pressure Chief. So things are getting better in the studio, and it’s now fully solar-powered. This is our first album that was recorded using 100 percent solar energy.

Completely off the grid, that’s awesome. Do you think this is the first album anywhere that’s been done like this?
I don’t know. I just heard recently that Jack Johnson has a solar panel, too, so who knows. He might have made an album that way, too.

Just listening to the songs Cake has covered over the years, it’s clear that you are inspired by a wide array of music. What are some of the biggest influences you’ve had, both musically and lyrically?
It’s hard for me to list stuff off because there are so many things that…I think I’m influenced by too many things. So if I tell you just like three or four things, it will give you a false impression that those things are the biggest things for me, but I will explain myself a little bit more.

I don’t really listen to bands so much, or artists so much, as I listen to songs. I’m more a fan of songs. I like songwriters that know how to write a good song, and there’s plenty of them, but a lot of times a band will only have a few songs that I like, so I can’t even say I like that band. There are certainly bands that have delivered more than the usual percentage of great songs, though.

I can say that early on, what really got me going in song writing, was listening to really simple songwriting: country songwriting by Hank Williams, Sr. — not Jr. — and a lot of country songwriters like Willie Nelson, Mo Haggart, Buck Owens…and, of course, I got into rock, and R&B… I like big band music. At the time when I first started songwriting, I was really into Benny Goodman and Hank Williams, Sr., so that was a weird combination of things to be into.

Big band music…did you ever listen to the artist Raymond Scott?
Yes. Yeah, that’s awesome.

I love his stuff. I was really blown away when I found out all his music was optioned by Warner Bros. for use in all their cartoons.
Yeah, exactly. It’s got so much energy in it. I think it also has a lot of eastern European influence, and I think so does Benny Goodman. There’s a lot of that sort of gypsy stuff in all the big band music, and I really like it when that happens.

You once said, “I don’t believe in gratuitous progression or evolution of a band.” That said, what do fans have to look forward to on Showroom of Compassion?
They can look forward to something without a clunky narrative that music journalists seem to love so well. I don’t mean to put anybody down, but it’s hard to write an article without saying, “They’re moving away from heavy metal and towards jazz fusion” — and that’s great, everyone can picture that in their heads [when they read], that they’re moving ahead towards this new thing. What I would say to that is that each song has its own DNA, and to move a whole bunch of songs that are all part of the same thing into the same direction is, probably, doing a disservice to at least a couple of those songs. You should just let each song do whatever the hell it wants to do rather than imposing some intellectual construct that’s really artificial on top of it. You know, there are artists who can do that, and it doesn’t sound too bad, but I think it might sound better if they just let the song do what it wanted to do.

So it’s always about the individual songs versus anything else?
Each song is its own universe, and you shouldn’t fuck with it based on something else that’s going on outside that song. I think it’s stupid [to do so], and I think a lot of bands let themselves be corralled into that by reading too much music journalism.

In a 2008 interview you said: “I want music to be free, but I would also love sandwiches to be free, and rent to be free.” As a working musician, why would you want music to be free, and how could that desire carry over to free sandwiches and free rent?
Well, I’m a big fan of consistency. I find it really disingenuous when people demand things from other people that they themselves are not willing to provide. Musicians have been in the awkward position of being sort of caught between two major economic movements. One is the internet revolution on one side, which [consists of] huge, multi-billion dollar companies enriching themselves by selling a lot of hardware and a lot of bandwidth that comes with all the free music that has ever been recorded in the history of the universe. So it’s this really amazing added value when you buy a computer.

So on one hand, the economic interests of those companies is on one side, and on the other side is the conventional music industry, which we [the band] have always sort of hated. So we are caught between these monolithic power structures, and I’ve kind of kept my mouth shut with the exception of that quote — I haven’t said a whole lot, but I may start talking a little bit. But I knew that to say anything at certain points was sort of suicidal. You saw what happened to a band as huge as Metallica when they got all freaked out about people downloading their music. I think musicians really just have to sort of keep our mouths at certain points.

But you can also do things as musicians to pull yourself out so you’re not between those two monoliths, like you’ve done. You’ve got your own studio, you’ve got your own label releasing your music.
We get like a 25- or 30-dollar check from the public utility for our excess electricity whether or not our album is popular. Certainly, the conventional music industry has been very wasteful, has been really greedy, and certainly has been good at sharing the wealth with musicians. At a certain point [illegal music downloading] stops being retaliation against these evil record companies, and it starts being carving the stomach out of people that you claim to love. At a certain point it becomes something different than retaliation against the man. It becomes sort of cannibalistic.

Cannibalistic in what way?
I know artists that are really great — I’m not going to mention their names — but they need to sell sixty- or seventy-thousand [copies] of their album in some form or another in order to survive because maybe their wife is having a baby, or whatever reasons — [they’re] middle-class musicians. I’m thinking of someone in particular that influenced a ton of bands, who’s now learning how to become a brick layer. My thinking is that artist is a really important artist who deserves to play music for a living, and it becomes cannibalistic to not support that artist. Especially if you love their music — you’re basically eating a milk cow that could provide milk for the next 17 years, and you’re throwing away 17 years of a milk that you really enjoy for maybe a couple of months of free hamburgers.

So [illegal music downloading] is the free hamburger now versus the years of milk in the future?
Yeah. Maybe they don’t really like the artist very much, maybe that’s the truth of the situation. Maybe people subconsciously really hate musicians? That could be it. Maybe they’re jealous, that they think we’re living some kind of crazy lifestyle or something? So maybe consciously they love music and musicians but subconsciously maybe there’s some deep-seated resentment.

Could it also be how impersonal the internet is, and the lack of accountability?
That’s true, too. Certainly people are really potty-mouthing each other over the internet.

But it’s also like the “Well, I can go download this because no one will ever know” mentality.
Totally. And I can also insult people I’ve never met before, and no one will know. So there you go, maybe it’s a therapeutic hostility that maybe people are really getting off on right now.

I have often heard Cake described as a political band because of your vocal defense of the environment. Which of your songs best embodies the politics of the band? Do any of them?
I don’t think we’re really political. I did write a song a long time ago about a nuclear power plant that I wanted it to go away. That was, I think, my first record that I ever released; I was a kid, and I was solo. But I didn’t really look at it as a political issue, and I guess I still don’t. Calling something “politics” sort of marginalizes the importance of it, and marginalizes the reality of it, too.

For instance, with the nuclear power plant: it’s not a political issue that you have this thing in your backyard that is dangerous to you, and it’s releasing radioactive waste into the air bypassing county laws for releasing radiation into the stream. What they did was instead of releasing this radioactive waste in a liquid form, they decided to make it into steam and then release it into the air, which was really the same thing, but anyways — it wasn’t a political issue that I didn’t want to breath radioactive steam right? A lot of people marginalize [other] people’s basic human life concerns by calling them “political issues.”  I don’t think it’s political for me not to want mercury in all the fish in the world. How does that become political?

I think we should be very careful about allowing people to call environmental issues political. You can certainly take them into the political arena, but there’s just something very basic and fundamental about wanting to breathe clean air. So to allow people to even call that a political issue, you’ve already lost ground.

That said, I think in our music there are places where our politics sort of leak through, but it’s not the intention of our music, [and] it’s not the primary motivation for playing music. Our primary reason for music are the notes themselves, and just the experience of listening to music, which is ultimately not a political experience — it’s a visceral experience.

In previous interviews, you have addressed what can be summed up as “the death of the music industry.” In nearly 20 years as a band, how has Cake adapted to the radical changes in the music industry, and how do you see the future for professional musicians?
If I plot the current trajectory into the future, I see music for most musicians not really as a job anymore; I see it as a hobby that you do for maybe a few years or a few weeks. I think people will have songs that will become popular on the internet without any consensus from cultural gatekeepers like the “music industry.”  I think people are going to be able to get a lot of attention really easily for very short periods of time. I don’t think people will be able to put food on their table with that music, unless they find really sort of glaring corporate sponsorships, you know, like really weirdly obvious corporate sponsorships. It’s sort of like race car drivers.

Having all your sponsors on your shirt or whatever?
I thought that Cake should do that, just dress up in jump suits with patches of all these different corporations. [laughter] But I think music is really going to be more of a hobby in about 10 years. I hope I’m wrong, but I think you get what you pay for, and if you’re not willing to pay for someone who makes good shoes to live in your town, if you’re not willing to sort of support that person, that person will go to a different town, or find a different job.

Do you think a similar thing can be said of the arts in general?
Yeah, absolutely. I dunno, in my mind I just keep going back to this idea that there’s a subconscious hostility towards people in the arts, without realizing it. Or maybe like in the case of these people who are threatening us on our website, maybe in some cases it’s conscious. There are actually a lot of, I think, conservatives or tea party people that are fans, I guess, telling us to shut up on our website, and that if we post another political posting that they will only steal our record from now on, and they’re going to get everyone they know to only steal our music. Which I find really fascinating, that they’re using that as a political retaliation. But I think that a lot of these people might have subconscious hostility towards music workers. Because maybe they think that we’re rich, which really isn’t true, or that we’re living some kind of life that they wish that they could live.

But I have to say that all those clichés about musicians from the ’70s are really outdated. So if you’re jealous of a musician because of something that you somehow got from the cultural landscape of the ’70s, you’re probably misusing your energy.