CAKE to bring 'more frenetic, louder, messier' show to close Calgary Folk Music Festival

Calgary Herald

2 days ago

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When John McCrea returned to the stage after a lengthy break caused by the pandemic, he felt rare pangs of stage fright.
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It was a strange development since the lead singer of CAKE has been performing as part of the California band since 1991, often in front of large festival or amphitheatre crowds.
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'Weirdly, after playing thousands of shows, I started having a bit of anxiety,' says McCrea, in an interview with Postmedia. 'I think I was just having anxiety about everything, about the world. But getting on the stage when you have anxiety is a tall order.'
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So, in the tradition of NASCAR races and Nickelback concerts, McCrea began to incorporate the T-shirt cannon into his band's act.
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'Having that foil, as it were, this excuse for distance, this powerful T-shirt gun thing that made a nice, satisfying (pop), it actually got me back on stage,' he says. 'I could be playing music, but mostly here's what I'm doing: I'm shooting something into the sky. I guess that explains a lot of the gun-fetish culture. It gives you a reason to exist, I guess, in that moment. I'm not making any pro or con statement. I'm saying I'm playing music, but mainly I've got this physically demonstrative gesture. I can't explain it, but it really helps me.'
It should add another layer of colour to CAKE's live show, which will take over the ATB Main Stage Sunday night to close the Calgary Folk Music Festival. Like most artists, McCrea has other ways of dealing with the anxiety the world, and his country in particular, has increasingly brought. At the end of 2024, the band released a single called Billionaire in Space. Initially broadcast as part of Texas Public Radio's Live from the Freight Elevator, the song has a folk-punk flavour and features McCrea's trademark nasally delivery. It's also the band's first new material since 2011's Showroom of Compassion and will be part of an album likely to come out in early 2026.
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While the title Billionaire in Space may seem on the nose in terms of the point McCrea is trying to make, the song has broader content than simply criticizing Jeff Bezos' and Richard Branson's costly and self-indulgent jaunts into the cosmos. It was inspired by wildfires in 2020.
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'We were going through the pandemic and down here on the West Coast, we were covered in smoke for weeks,' he says. 'There was a period of time when we were just buried, and it was very surreal. In the sky, the only colours you could see were brown and orange and grey for weeks, and there was very little difference between day and night, and the air was just toxic. It wasn't just trees of smoke, it was burned-down sporting-goods-store smoke. Anyway, at that same moment, we had two billionaires flying their rockets, orbiting the planet. It was poignant at that moment.'
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Of course, politically thorny times have tended to produce good music in the past.
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'Inspire is a nice word for it, but I think maybe trigger would be a better word,' he says. '… I'm sort of at the mercy of whatever is going on around me in terms of subject matter.'
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While the new album will have what McCrea refers to as veiled political content, he seems reluctant to pinpoint specific themes or musical direction it may take. Since forming in 1991, CAKE has never followed any rule book, except to offer a droll, dance-ready antidote to the humourless grunge acts that were ruling the music world in the mid-1990s.
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CAKE became an unlikely platinum-selling group, offering a mix of disco, funk, folk, country and alt-pop — gamely referred to as 'quirk-rock' by some critics — that seemed to arrive fully formed on the band's 1993 self-released debut Motorcade of Generosity and its massive follow-up,1996's Fashion Nugget. Songs such as The Distance and an endearingly deadpan cover of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive became staples on the radio.
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The band's early success was with the independent label Capricorn Records, although they did eventually sign with Columbia for a short period. While CAKE did face occasional pressure from label brass, their early success put them in a good place to steer their own ship creatively.
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'We released our first album on our own label and we were lucky enough to find distribution and it did pretty OK before we got signed,' he says. 'I'm pretty sure our song (Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle) was on the college-radio charts before we got signed. So they were kind of like, 'We don't know what this is, so let's just let them do whatever the hell this is.' That was cool. Mostly that's what they did. Here and there, they messed with us. A lot of bands, when they sign, it's a very unequal relationship and they can dress them up funny, put them with producers that are wrong for them, etc., etc.'
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As for the live show, we will presumably see some T-shirt cannon action, but beyond that, the band tends to be unpredictable on stage. CAKE never relies on a setlist for concerts, which should give the Sunday night showcase a sense of spontaneity.
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'We do that to stay alive inside and not feel like a machine that is being forced to play a certain song at a certain time,' McCrea says. 'That said, we tend to play songs from all of our albums. Most of the time, we remember to play a song that was popular in a country or a town. We remember to play that song sometimes, and sometimes we don't. But it is a more spontaneous, slightly more frenetic, louder, messier than our studio albums.'