What does a festival offer you that a regular concert doesn’t?
“When you have a bunch of people who love music together, it can be almost religious,” McCrea says. “I used to hate festivals. But in recent years, I think they’ve become less about a spectacle and more about curating a mix tape of sounds, and it’s way more interesting now.”
Cake has a very specific recipe.
“Cake is … high impact easy listening. No, wait. Cake is Sly Stone meets Hank Williams Sr. I said senior. Not junior—I don’t have anything to say about junior. And then you take that, and have, like, an AC/DC record playing backwards.”
That’s how front man John McCrea would describe Cake to an alien. That is, if this alien spoke English, of course.
Cake hasn’t put out any new backwards-record playing music in the past few years, however. And the reason for that is simple enough—McCrea believes that Cake subsists on a principle of less is more, of quality over quantity and of exact inimitability.
Cake has always been known for a certain alternative, deadpan, lyrical sarcasm that drove an entire generation of ’90s kids to bob their heads to crisp rhythms and enigmatic energy. McCrea says this kind of creativity doesn’t have the time it needs in an environment in which artists are forced to be generalists. According to him, musicians aren’t just people who can rock on the guitar anymore. They are businesspeople, marketing experts and financial wizards. Who has time to be unique? McCrea says he would rather not force himself to release an album every two years than waste his fans’ time on something that he doesn’t have the time to make truly spectacular.
McCrea, along with other artists such as Tom Waits, David Byrne and Rosanne Cash, have recently created the Content Creators Coalition. The coalition’s mission is to form a community of artists to fight the corporate sabotage of creative enterprise. “The music business has been hollowed out by a genius concerted effort to empirically feed from the value of our work without paying us,” McCrea says. “There’s a need for a collective voice of artists to stand up against these corporate entities.”
According to the coalition, corporations such as YouTube, Spotify and Google are ripping off artists by populating their music-listening sites with advertisements that the artists themselves do not profit from. This makes it difficult for artists to survive and thrive.
“There’s a devaluation in the economic value of my work, which directly impacts my ability to eat sandwiches and for my band to eat sandwiches,” McCrea says. “Maybe some people think it’s the dream to live in a van and that we don’t need anything else because we are ‘artists,’ but it’s not as simple as that.”
Nevertheless, McCrea has found that a successful band is more about subtraction than addition. He says the chemistry that makes Cake work is by paying attention to the spaces in between and knowing when to pull back. He’s discovered over the years that it’s not about more volume or more songs or more of anything really, but about paying attention to what’s there and what’s pure about it.
Because regardless of the economic state of the business or the spectacle that the business has become, McCrea says that there’s only one reason he got into the business in the first place.
“I got into music because of the music. That’s all there is to it.”
Cake performs on the Forest Park Stage Saturday, September 6th from 7:30-8:30 p.m.
