CAKE: Still Going the Distance

Picture this: It's late 1996, you’re perched outside on your porch, fresh from an argument with your parents. Life's hard. They just don’t understand you. You take out your old beat-up Walkman, slide the cushioned headphones over your ears and click play. The bass-heavy beat of CAKE's 'The Distance' fills your ears, and suddenly you’re transported into a high-speed car racing across roads at the speed of light. Fast, furious and downright badass. Californian '90s and early 2000s favourites CAKE have a lasting legacy. Hell, the image above is what my brain conjures up, even as a Gen Z born post-Y2K. The iconic five-piece are on the cusp of something miraculous; after 15 years, they're not only ready to drop a brand-new album, but also returning to Australia on board their An Evening With CAKE tour.

G'day! We're glad to have CAKE back over in Australia next March. Why are you coming back now?

Probably because we've been so remiss in visiting for so many years! It’s about time that we made the trip. There's a new album that we're pretty much finished that we'll release soon, so it corresponds to that a little bit. But knowing us, our timing will probably be somewhat off. Maybe it'll be released. Who knows?

Do you have any memories that stick out from your last Australian tour?

I just remember being so taken aback by the plant life and the birds. It's just really startling coming from the West Coast of the United States where everything is just so strikingly different. I'm trying to remember the name of a bird that really just threw me for a loop when I saw it. The one with the beak that's really long and hooked.

An ibis?

Yeah, it was an ibis! It's such a startling-looking animal. And everybody was just walking around them as if it was no big deal. The noises that

they make are just crazy. You're probably really accustomed to them and it's no big deal, but coming just from a place where I've never heard it before, it was like, "Holy shit. What is going on?"

Looking back on your catalogue, in '96, you released 'The Distance', one of CAKE's most iconic tracks. What do you remember from this time – writing the song and it thrusting CAKE into the stratosphere?

I remember working on 'The Distance' with Greg Brown, who's just actually passed away this year. We were sitting in the park in Los Angeles, near the La Brea tar pits, which are these giant tar pits where maybe hundreds of prehistoric animals met their death by sinking and then being preserved in the tar for millions of years. It definitely stuck in my mind as sort of the perfect place, really, to be in Los Angeles, which is such a car-centric place, and also where there's just so much tar and fossil fuels. It was kind of perfect for that song.

I don’t really think CAKE ever went into the stratosphere, but I think it happened for us rather gradually. We had an album before that album that got a little bit of attention in France and on college radio in the States. After that album, strangers started pointing at my face in the supermarket for a little while, which was a bit unsettling, you know?

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A theme of resistance or rejection of the norm has been present in CAKE's music and ethos since the beginning. Was this something you've always been cognisant of or something that crept up on you?

I think I looked around me in the United States of America and saw a culture that seemed really excessive in a lot of ways. I was a teenager when I started feeling like something doesn't make sense here. Then I went into the music industry, which is also just inherently the most wasteful thing you could imagine.

Now as the value of recorded music descends, the only thing left to sell is a process that basically necessitates us circling the globe endlessly in a fossil fuel cloud of smoke. That’s all that’s left for musicians making a living. So as somebody that would like to be an environmentalist, it’s really rough.

Speaking on climate, the first taste of your new record is single 'Billionaire in Space'. How did this song come about?

That song was basically written for me. In California, we spent the summer after the pandemic just not really able to breathe for a while. The air was so unhealthy and unbreathable because of the wildfires that we couldn't leave our houses for weeks; we didn't know what to do. And then I realised at that moment, all these billionaires that summer were circling the globe in their rockets. And I just thought, this is really poignant. Everything is burning and there's just these rocket ships competing with each other. Wild.

What can audiences expect from your upcoming Australian shows?

It's going to look like some old guys on a stage and it's going to sound like the songs that you've heard on recordings, but messier, more frenetic and louder. There'll be some sing-alongs, and we’ll play songs from all of our albums. We don't write a set list so we'll be flying by the seat of our pants and probably forgetting songs. In Montreal, Canada, we forgot to play 'I Will Survive', which apparently was the only song that anybody wanted to hear. That was an international incident, but I think they've forgiven us now!

Be sure to put that on the set list for Australia; otherwise, there'll be riots.

Well, we don't want civil unrest, do we?

Catch the legends that are CAKE playing their greatest hits and latest tracks at Hindley Street Music Hall on Tuesday 16 March 2027. Tickets on sale at moshtix.com.au.