Cake Deal With the Pains of DIY Production for 'Showroom of Compassion'

When Cake finally decided to record their sixth studio album, the California alt-rock band wanted to do things differently. First, they altered their Upbeat Studio to run on solar power, as Spinner previously reported. Then they decided to forget about getting a producer and opted to involve themselves in every aspect of their upcoming record, 'Showroom of Compassion.'

"We took about two and a half years recording the record," Cake frontman John McCrea tells Spinner. "One of the reasons we took a long time was that not only did we have to write the songs and record them ourselves, we don't have a producer and most of the time we don't have an engineer so it's all sort of a do-it-yourself thing. And because we don't have an outside producer coming in, we had to make a lot of decisions for ourselves about things we ourselves did."

Listen to 'Showroom of Compassion'

While they're veterans at making music, the DIY approach was new to Cake. Without another party telling the band what sounded good or how songs could improve, McCrea reveals that they would take breaks from songs soon after writing them. "The only way to get objectivity about things you have done is to stand back from them," he says. "What we do is get away from the song we've been working on and let it sit for a week or two or a month. Then we come back to it and we can hear it again. That takes time for us and it takes work. The whole process, you have to be very patient about it."

'Italian Guy' was just one of the tracks that McCrea took his time with while recording 'Showroom of Compassion,' even though it was a song the lead singer admitted was inspired by a random trip on a New York City subway. "Generally, I don't tell people stories behind songs but I will say that it was just an observational thing," he says. "I was on a subway in New York. I saw this guy and was imagining things about him and started writing things down."

Watch Cake's Video for 'Sick of You' Off of 'Showroom of Compassion'