Cake’s been gypped, and fans don’t care. There’s no controlling the Internet, and for Cake, file sharing has eclipsed an otherwise successful new album, two and a half years in the making. It’s pure Cake, with the understated guitar, wailing horns, synthetic keyboards, pounding base, and those California dry, desert lyrics that can send a heart racing, elated by their simplicity and wit. Seriously, charts are meaningless. This should have been Cake’s triumphant return to remind rock ‘n’ roll fans everywhere that everything is contrived, even grunge. Their album hit number one on Billboard the week it was released, and only sold 44,000 copies. That’s less than any other number one album in history. Now Cake is on tour promoting their album the old fashioned way, and they’ll be at the Wang Center in Boston on April 22nd.

The lead singer of Cake took some time for a phone chat with the Mass Media before leaving his home in California on a tour of the East Coast.

With media changing, with file sharing and all that stuff, how does that affect you as an artist?

It makes it so that we have to travel in order to put food on the table. And I hate travel, so eventually I’ll probably reach my limit unless there’s a new system that’s figured out. If the current precipitous decline in recorded music sales, unless that levels out somewhere comfortable for me, I’m going to quit. Which is fine. I mean I’m just going to do something else.

At a certain point I’m going to be unwilling to tour anymore. I’ll continue to play music, cause I’m in love with music, but for my friends, people that support me, not just people that are trying to get the best of the deal.

Is there a good way of filtering out people like that?

I can’t talk for everyone, but I feel caught between a rock and a hard place, because I don’t really believe in touring. I don’t like it, and I think it’s a lot of fossil fuel being burnt. All these bands being squeezed on one end, because they’re not selling records anymore. So there are all these bands that shouldn’t even be touring anymore, like bands from the 80s or 70s that are just squeezing into the touring marketplace. I mean I believe in science, and I think that there’s just no way that 97% of all climatologists are lying about something. I believe more that oil companies and politicians are lying about something, so if I believe in that and I’m still circling the globe in airplanes and busses, at a certain point I’ve got to ask myself some hard questions. There’s only so long that I can stave off this sort of sinking feeling that I’m doing something that isn’t in line with my sense of values.

So it’s a little bit of a crisis for me.

Where do you like touring?

Honestly, anyplace that’s close. So I would say the West Coast I suppose. I really don’t like burning all that fuel to play music.

Let’s talk about recording your latest album without burning any fuels. How did that work?

It worked fine. It really wasn’t a problem. It was really easy to slap some solar panels on our roof and we didn’t think about it that much afterwards.

What’s your song writing process like?

A lot of times I’ll just have a melody in my head. Sometimes when I’m walking down the street or doing something else, I’ll just have to stop what I’m doing and remember it. Sometimes there are words affixed to that melody. Sometimes it’s all at once. Also, Sometimes I’m just writing words. I have notebook that I carry around with me and I sort of take notes on things that I find troubling or interesting or exciting.

How did you guys develop your sound?

It wasn’t a conscious process. It was sort of reactionary against a lot of music that we hated at the time, when we started out.

Like what?

There was a lot of grunge that I thought was really stupid. I felt like it was really disingenuous.

There was a lot of sort of loudly proclaimed low self-esteem that I just found suspicious. In other words, if you really hate yourself so much why is your guitar turned up to 11? It seems like just white guys and big dumb rock in different clothing, like Ted Nugent in different clothing, nothing against Ted Nugent or anything. In a way Ted Nugent is better because he’s being honest about it. He’s saying hell yes I want to kill the elephant with my bare hands. In some ways the music was saying one thing, and I found it odd that the lyrics had to fain low-self-esteem.

As a reaction against that we wanted to sound small. For our instrumental melody parts, we wanted to avoid the heroic searing lead guitar solo. We thought that had been over done and didn’t really mean anything anymore, or mean what it would have meant twenty years ago. I was listening to a lot of Mexican music at the time, and I just happened to hear Vincent Dufour playing trumpet at a punk rock jazz improve night in Sacramento, and it just occurred to me that there’d be something less hackneyed about trumpet. Unfortunately it worked out as far as our sensibilities were concerned. We actually ended up making music that fit the bill of what we were aiming for, but for a lot of people it was misinterpreted as just a big joke because there was trumpet in it, or because we covered a disco song, or whatever reason, it couldn’t be serious music. It had to be a laugh fest. But honestly, we were more hate filled, especially starting out than a lot of the punk or post punk bands that I ever met.

I thought that it was really weird and racist that people automatically assumed that our song, We Will Survive, a long time ago had to be a joke because it was a disco song. You know, like, “What?” The fact that disco was the first mass cultural, multicultural movement in the United States. It was the first really huge multicultural event where Mexican Americans, African Americans, White people, Asians were all hanging out together. Maybe it was a sort of sleazy way that they were hanging out with their gold chains and cocaine and everything, but it was really the first truly massive mixing of cultures and the reaction against it seemed to me to be more than just a little bit racist.

A Few of John McCrea’s Favorite Songs

I don’t really have a genre that I feel all that attached to. I really think that there’s great music to be found in just about every genera. There was a time when I was young that I thought there were certain genres that I didn’t like, but I bet you that I could dig around and find something good almost anywhere.

Silver Wings – Merle Haggard

Out on the Tiles – Led Zeppelin

Watermelon Man – Herby Hancock

Everything Hits at Once – Spoon

Great Atomic Power – Louvin Brothers

July Flame – Laura Veers

Let’s Get Lost – Chet Baker

Holiday in Cambodia – Dead Kennedys

A guy from the Dead Kennedys, East Bay Ray, actually helped me negotiate our first record deal . . . He helped me ask for the things that we needed in order to not be trampled when we negotiated our first deal.