Tracks 4, 12, 16, and 22 from Comfort Eagle (2001)

Tracks 6, 18, and 23 from Pressure Chief (2004)

Track 15 from B-Sides and Rarities (2007)

Tracks 3, 14, and 20 from Showroom of Compassion (2011)

I was very amused by the minor hit from Cake's debut, "Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle." And then I loved the big hit from their second album, "The Distance" and had a friend or two who bought Fashion Nugget, but I never got deep into the band at the time. Frontman John McCrea has always been Cake's primary songwriter and Greg Brown was only in the band for those first two albums, but Brown had the largest number of co-writing credits on those albums, including "Open Book" and "Is This Love?" and "Mr. Mastodon Farm" and "Nugget." The only Cake song solely written by Brown was actually "The Distance." I don't know the circumstances of his death, or the circumstances of leaving the band shortly after writing their signature song, but I gotta give him respect for that masterpiece. Brown also returned to guest on one later Cake song, 2011's "Bound Away." 

In the era of countless interchangeable guitar bands on alternative radio, I really appreciated the '90s bands that actually had a unique and instantly identifiable configuration of instruments and voices like Morphine or Soul Coughing or They Might Be Giants or Cake. Those bands could sometimes be dismissed as "quirky" and had cult followings, but Cake managed to be pretty reliable hitmakers. Half of their six albums went platinum (one multi-platinum), and their most recent album, the self-released Showroom of Compassion, actually debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 in 2011, which is pretty impressive. There's only been one new Cake song in the last 15 years, the pretty good 2018 single "Sinking Ship," but the band has played hundreds of shows in that time. They've been in that "active band saying an album is coming this year or next year" mode for almost as long as The Cure was between 4:13 Dream and Songs of a Lost World at this point. 

Almost every Cake song has most or all of the same familiar elements. John McCrea's droll talk-singing and acoustic strumming, the strutting electric guitar riffs by Greg Brown and members of later lineups, Vince DiFiore's clarion call trumpet lines, the nimble rhythm section, the Moog melodies, the frequent vibraslap and other auxiliary percussion, the gang shout vocals and McCrea's ad libs. McCrea is almost as consistent as Jeezy in saying the same phrases over so many songs whenever there's a a few open bars of the band grooving out: "Hyaa," "allllllright," "so good!" or "so sad!" and so on. I wouldn't call it a formula per set, but again, I like that Cake had such a specific sound. 

Cake had some straight up country songs (and a pretty cool repertoire of '60s country covers) but weren't alt-country. They had one horn player but never ventured into ska. They had staccato vocals but no hip-hop influence outside of an occasional breakbeat loop. There was a sort of general thrift shop retro sensibility to the band's sound, clothing, and album covers, but they weren't really revivalists of any particular era. You put all that together and it's all uniquely Cake's own thing. Comfort Eagle's title track was apparently all set to be the album's second single but that plan was changed after 9/11, although I feel like the song's lyrics could only be abstractly interpreted as in poor taste.