With their new record Showroom of Compassion debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, American alternative rock legends Cake are still going strong twenty years on. Larry Heath from the AU review spent some time talking with trumpet and keys man Vince DiFiore about the new album, touring Australia, and why they should win a Webby.

Whereabouts are you now?

I’m in Sacramento, California at my home, and we’re just about to go to the mid-western United States in a couple of days, to Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit Cleveland and Canada, that sort of thing. In between tours right now.

Just looking at your tour dates now, it’s a pretty massive tour and most of the dates have sold out, it should be a fun few weeks.
Yeah, we’re looking forward to it. We’re going back to a lot of spots we’ve been to before, and you know when you’re there you’re not sure if you’ll ever be back. But lo and behold here we are. The music is sounding good, the band is playing well together and it’s a good experience right now.

You have the new album out, how have you found people have been receiving it so far?

Really well. You know it was seven years in between albums and everyone seemed to bring that up at first and I was a little bit deceptive about it, explaining all the things we had done in the interim, like put up B-sides and Rarities, get off the label, put up solar panels, work on the album, tour on the last album, but really when I think about it seven years is a really good arc of time to develop as a group.

Sort of like that first album that a band puts out, it’s a really good focus of energy with everyone narrowing in together, having a common goal that we pursue very intensely. This had the flavour of that just because of the period of time between the albums and people like it. We’re on Facebook now, on the social media sites and people put comments up and inevitably you’re going to get some people who aren’t so keen on it. For the most part we’ve had really good critical reviews and good responses from the listeners.

It’s certainly a different album compared to what people are used to, and you’ll always get a mixed response from that but it’s interesting to see you tackle areas that you haven’t before from adding in piano to reverb and things like that.

Yeah there’s not that much reverb on this album but I know that John (McCrea) has made that comment before about adding reverb to things. Really what that means is that we weren’t worried so much, we didn’t want to make this that low to the ground, we were willing to put a little bit of oomph into it and some studio production so that it didn’t have to sound like such a garage band and so lo-fi.

There were some conventions that maybe we had turned our back on because maybe it represented excess in music and maybe it was an attempt to be sentimental or grandiose so we didn’t do it although maybe now its ok to try those things. Although everything was very measured and thought out, hopefully we’ve kept on to our good taste.

When it comes to the tour you’re about to do, what can people expect from that, is it going to be a good mix of new and old? And also how is the new music translating live?

Really well, we’re doing about five songs off the new album and a mix of songs off the other albums. It’s about six studio albums and the b-sides so we do a handful of songs from each record. As a performer in the band it’s so great having those new songs in the setlist. Those are the songs I enjoy playing the most are the new songs. I can remember on the other albums playing the new songs and feeling a bit more nervous about them.

I don’t feel nervous about the new songs I just feel a lot of adrenaline and feeling about them. It’s a good set. We seemed to have turned a corner, our stage show is more realised than it’s ever been.

You mentioned before sites like Twitter and Facebook, and this is the first studio album you’ve released in the midst of all this mayhem. Did that at all affect the making and release of the album?

Yeah it’s true. It is always good to feel the support, and the criticism. It’s funny because we really focussed on the negative comments a lot. Somebody would say something that was very offensive to us, almost hurtful, and we would, for some reason maybe it was masochistic, we would put it on our homepage.

Maybe it was a way to prove we were open to all comments. And not only the feedback from listeners, but I think it helped us create a similar world view. There are a lot of political posts on our newspage and that is actually where a lot of the negative comments came from. They felt that we were being politicians and not musicians. The good thing for us is that it puts our heads together in a very real way and then gives us a very clear time and place and point of view in which to move forward together, or even just to have discussions on the bus or in breaks at rehearsal.

It is a different world out there with the social networking sites I’d have to say. It’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time on, and I don’t know if it’s too much, but certainly we’re paying our dues. I’m still waiting to get some sort of award for a website. Somebody needs to start an organisation specifically geared towards giving awards for websites.

We should petition the Webby’s just to have the Cake Web Award

Yeah, there’s the Webby’s, why haven’t we gotten a Webby? I feel really gypped about that, I feel like we really deserve a Webby (laughs).

Have you had many people send through photos of those bee tattoos?

Yeah we included one of those in every album. I believe anywhere someone buys the album there is one inside. And requests too, we had this campaign going for a while that if you sent in a self addressed stamped envelope we’d send you a bee tattoo. It’s a nice tattoo. I’ve only applied one myself and it’s long since worn off. But there was something satisfying about it, I felt like I had an extra tattoo for a while there. You know, life is too short not to have a tattoo. And if you’re not going to get an actual tattoo, you know markers, felt tip pens or temporary tattoos really fit the bill.

Are you going to be making it down to Australia anytime soon?

I sure hope so. It’s a long plane ride but it depends on which direction you go. If we head west from California we’d get there a lot faster. I sure hope so. We’ve had several trips there. One of them we went to seven or eight cities, and then a couple of other trips we certainly went to Sydney and Melbourne. It’s a very unique place.

I’m from California and the whole country reminds me of the Southern California beach. Some sort of combination of San Francisco and San Diego on every single coast. It’s really quite amazing. It’s a really special place and I sure hope we go. I know we are drawing up some plans about it.

Cake’s sixth studio album Showroom of Compassion is out now through Inertia.