Songwriting – Memphis Flyer

CAKE will always be with us. I’ve gleaned this insight after more than 30 years of listening to the band, ever since my days in Dixon, California, when they were merely regional favorites, not international headliners. One indication of their longevity is the simple fact that the interview I conducted with lead singer/songwriter John McCrea for a Graceland Soundstage concert scheduled for five years ago still holds just as true today as it did then. After our chat, a little thing called Covid happened, and the show never took place. Yet here we are: CAKE will finally make their Mid-South appearance by kicking off this year’s season of concerts at the BankPlus Amphitheater at Snowden Grove on Friday, April 18th.

Shockingly, things have only gone from bad to worse since 2020, pandemics aside, but that’s kept the band’s outspoken political activism more relevant than ever. The landing page of their website sports the Turkish proverb, “When a clown enters a palace, he does not become a king, the palace becomes a circus,” and their Facebook page is dotted with exhortations to “never forget who Trump really is.” But they also take their activism in a more positive direction.

In honor of Earth Day and Arbor Day, the band will join forces with BankPlus Amphitheater, Mammoth Live, and Barbian Entertainment to plant a magnolia tree, Mississippi’s official state tree, on the venue grounds. The symbolic planting highlights CAKE’s decades-long commitment to environmental sustainability, including global reforestation efforts, clean energy innovation, and eco-conscious touring practices. The band also operates out of a 100 percent solar-powered recording studio in Sacramento, California, a facility that regularly generates more electricity than it uses. Now, in addition to the on-site planting, one lucky fan attending Friday night’s show will receive their very own magnolia tree to take home and plant.

Through all such efforts, a reliable constant has been the band’s musical aesthetic, yet it can’t be boiled down to any single genre. It’s more accurately characterized by its smallness and sparseness, as McCrea explained when I mentioned seeing the band at a festival of alt-rock superstars in the late ’90s. By then, the band had blown up, with their second album, Fashion Nugget, going platinum in 1997, but they weren’t always comfortable with other groups they were lumped in with at the time.

“It was a very strange experience for me,” said McCrea. “Everything was, like, big dumb rock, even ‘alternative’ was just about this big, sort of bulbous, wide-load sound, right? And we knew people were not gonna get it. I remember one critic called us ‘dinky beats,’ and that was meant to insult us. But for me, it was like, ‘Yes!’ I mean, obviously they didn’t get it, but it was good because I realized, ‘Okay, good. It’s sounding small.’”

Yet while the band’s sound was often sparse, it was expansive stylistically, with Vince DiFiore’s trumpet echoing everything from mariachi to jazz, McCrea’s dry delivery and richly allusive lyrics drawing on all walks of life, and a taste for scrappy, dirty instrumental sounds. It was — and remains — decidedly anti-trendy, right down to the fishing cap McCrea often sports and the beat-up acoustic guitar he plays through “a Fender Sidekick amplifier, the kind that they give away for free when you buy a Telecaster.”

It’s always been a sound that’s resolutely D.I.Y. and unpretentious. Yet McCrea has typically been reluctant to confine the band to any aesthetic, even a sparse one. “I don’t want to make ‘less is more’ sound like the main goal,” he said, “but I think ‘less is more’ in the service of providing musical narrative, I could say that’s our prime directive. It should be a means to an end.”

At the heart of the CAKE experience lie the songs, of course, and the unpredictable turns of phrase which can appear in them. Listing some of his greatest influences, McCrea noted some of the usual suspects: “I love Hank Williams Sr. for his economy, his ability to tell a story with very few words. I love Cole Porter for his cleverness and how he’s clever without being completely annoying. And then I guess Bob Dylan is similarly clever, you know, and mostly not annoying. I like Leonard Cohen a lot for his lyrics and vocal melody. I mean, all of these people write great melodies.”

Turning to his contemporaries, McCrea zeroed in on Stephen Malkmus of Pavement as a favorite. “I would definitely list him as one of my top songwriters, especially of the ’90s.” But he went on to emphasize that, while CAKE are unabashedly political in their practices and in their extra-musical communications, he avoids the vagaries of topical struggles in his craft as a tunesmith.

“I don’t enjoy songs that are sort of beating you over the head in any way,” McCrea said. “I do think it’s an emergency right now, like the humans are having a confusing time and we need to focus. And I don’t see why every part of our presence should be about music. I think I’d like to let the music be about music, and let our social media be about whatever the hell we want. But some part of me resists talking about music too much on our page. Somebody wanted to interview me for a book titled something like Rock Stars’ Inspirations, or something like that, and it sounded like a really fascinating book with lots of interesting artists, but I just didn’t want to do it because of the title. You know, ‘rock stars’ — there’s just so much baggage with that, and I’m against it. I’m ideologically opposed to that, you know? I don’t really want to be a celebrity. I don’t want to be talking about what I’m doing as necessarily more important than what anybody else is doing today.”

You can trace the shifts in Chris Milam’s songwriting style through the type of guitar he’s opted to play over the course of his three albums. And music fans who’ve come to appreciate the more sparse Americana of his first two albums, Kids These Days and Meanwhile, will hear the change immediately when they play his latest album, Orchid South. The songs mine an anthemic, power pop vein that he’s hinted at before, but never embraced to this degree. And of course, with power pop comes the sound of electric guitars. In this case, the triple guitar team of Milam, Steve Selvidge, and Luke White.

Electric guitar has always been in Milam’s toolbox, but never in quite this way. “In the lead up to making Kids These Days, and then touring that album in 2017, I was playing solo electric. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar on there, too, but the main guitar you hear me playing on that album is a hollow body, Gibson-sounding, reverbed-out electric. So yeah, there was a couple years there where I was doing a fair amount of electric playing — in solo shows. But then I shifted to acoustic surrounding Meanwhile.”

That sophomore effort, released in 2020, was a sparse masterpiece of which Milam said at the time, “I inadvertently wrote a good album for quarantine, honestly. It’s basically 10 different versions of how we deal with loss, or survive being in limbo.” Along with that pensive mood came pensive music, with acoustic guitar at its foundation.

Now that’s all changed.

“For this one, I don’t know, maybe this is impolitic to say,” he says, “but I’ve just been bored to tears by so many singer-songwriter albums” with acoustic guitar at their heart. “I just was like, I think that you can discuss weighty topics and still make an album that is fun and dynamic and that people actually want to listen to.”

And that’s a fair description of Orchid South, which seems custom-made to burst from radio speakers while blasting down the highway on a hot summer night. “I’ve always been a big fan of power pop from the 1970s and alt-rock of the 1990s,” he says. “That was the stuff that I was listening to when I first picked up a guitar and when I first really fell in love with music. That was really the soundtrack of my adolescence.”

Yet it wasn’t until recently that Milam, now 40, felt he could address those years with the proper tone and voice. And the tone, he knew, would have to be full of jangle and crunch. Who better to bring that sound than Selvidge and White?

“Most of the lead guitar is Steve, and all the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar is Luke, kind of on the left channel. With Steve on the right. I added rhythm guitar, for the most part.” Moreover, the album gains its immediacy and energy by virtue of having largely been tracked live, with the players all in the same room. “At the heart of the album, the core band was Shawn Zorn on drums, Mark Stuart on bass, and then me and Luke. And then Steve came in for an overdub day, and the horns [Art Edmaiston and Marc Franklin] did an overdub day. And that was pretty much it.”

The end product is a big, radio-friendly sound that conjures up the longings and impulsiveness of adolescence. And ironically, though Meanwhile came out during the onset of Covid, this album is even more of a product of that time. “A good chunk of the album was written during quarantine,” Milam says. “And I was probably going a little stir crazy and wanting to be loud and kick out the jams.”

Yet he was also applying his more finely-honed writerly chops to an earlier version of himself, the young man listening to alternative radio in the ’90s. “When I was a teenager, growing up in Memphis, I was listening to 96X [FM],” he recalls. ““Hey Jealousy’ was one of the first songs I learned on guitar, and there’s a lot of Gin Blossoms influence on this album.” But there was more to evoking his youth than turning his amp up to 11.

“My earlier stuff had been more in the Americana or folk realm, and so the lyrics were a little bit more of that narrative style,” reflects Milam. “But when I was a teenager, I didn’t really experience things in that way. It was all very heightened emotions, very amplified feelings, and everything was just evocative and impressionist. That was the type of writing I did when I was that age and I wanted to get back to that again, but hopefully do a better job on it. Instead of narrative lyrics, I wanted stuff that had more freshness, or was a little bit more evocative. That makes emotional sense, even though it doesn’t necessarily make literal sense.”

Chris Milam is in the midst of a national solo tour now, but will celebrate the release of Orchid South with a full band at Railgarten on Saturday, August 10th, with Alexis Grace opening.