CAKE trumpeter Vince DiFiore

Next to the dulcet tones of John McCrea's melodic voice, the most identifiable aspect of CAKE's music is easily the ever-present trumpet: you can hear its strains wafting through almost every song of their just behind the lyrics. For that we have Vince DiFiore to thank. For every moment of the band's twenty years making music together, their stalwart trumpeter has been in the picture, elevating the fruits of their labor to a more distinctive level. Here he and I talk about the band; the new album, Showroom of Compassion; and why trumpets are awesome.

Hi, Vince, how are you?
Hey, I’m doing well, thanks. Thanks for calling; I was expecting your call. Where are you calling from? What city?

I’m in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles? Okay, cool. Well, it’s good to hear from you. How are things?

I’m good. How is the tour going?
It’s going well. We’ve got two left; we’re in Memphis today and Birmingham tomorrow, and then we’ll be heading home for a little bit before we start the next leg.

Are you playing a mixture of old and new songs at your shows, or are you mostly playing songs from the new album?
No, definitely a mixture of old and new. It’s getting easier and easier to play the new songs because more people have heard the album now, but you’ve got to be careful about laying too many new songs on people because they’re just not as familiar. But, yeah, we’ve always gone from the first album to the most recent and tried to spread it pretty evenly from album to album.

I think what has helped ease your listeners into your new album is that, although there are a lot of new elements, there’s still the signature sound running beneath all of it.
Yeah. I think that at the beginning, when the group originally got together, it was a bit of an experiment: the way we had configured the band, the group of people that John chose to be in the band, the way the sound was maybe different from the sound that was being heard on the radio at the time. In that way I guess we were experimental, but we hold true to music fundamentals, and we’re not trying to do something really strange just because we can or just for the sake of experimenting. We’re a guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards, playing songs written from beginning to end with care. That’s what we do.

I feel like the trumpet especially is a signature part of your sound. Let me tell you right now: bitches love trumpets.
Right on! [laughs] That’s cool. You know, I love it when people—men and women—say, “Oh, yeah, I used to play trumpet in high school.” There’s a lot of people I run into that say that, and it’s cool. I think there’s a brotherhood or sisterhood of trumpet-players out there, and they know what it is to play it, so it’s always good to run into those people.

Yeah, I played flute. My brother almost took up the trumpet, but his lips were the wrong shape or something.
[laughs] Well, flute is one of those instruments where it’s not about having a lot of air. The air just dissipates because you’re blowing across the instrument; it’s not being contained by the instrument—

And your arms get tired!
You do have to spend a lot of time holding that thing up to the side, don’t you? The jazz flutists that I see are always moving around a lot in order to keep that balance. It’s like the most crazy isometric exercise to the world.

You should add a flute to your next album. I’m available; I’ll play.
[laughs] Right on. There’s a little bit on “Long Time,” though it’s sympathized, and there’s a marching band remix of one of our songs that has a little bit of piccolo in there.

That’s beautiful.
Yeah, a marching band remix, who would’ve thought? We want marching bands to play our song! The Federal Funding March is an invitation for bands to pick it up. The only issue is that we don’t have any sheet music. I think we’re waiting for someone to step up and bring us an arrangement for marching bands. It’s all there on the recording, though, and I’m not a marching band director so I’m not sure what changes it would need. Anyway, we put it on a vinyl record that we sent out to college stations, and I forget what’s on the A side, but the B side is the Federal Funding March.

As I’m sure people have been reminding you at every opportunity, it’s been quite a long time since your last album. I know working out label stuff took a while; did that eat up most of the time, or did you also spend more time than usual working on the album?
The time gap was kind of like a grocery list receipt: it adds up. Pressure Chief came out; we toured on that for two or three years; and that’s about the time our contract with Columbia was up. We were offered to do another record for them and we decided that we would rather go for it ourselves. Then we put out B-Sides and Rarities, which was a compilation of songs that had never been on any big LP. Then we toured a little bit more, and then we started making the record. John started contributing songs to it about three years ago, and we started working on the album with a sort of editing process, where we would go into the studio and track a bunch of parts, then give it a week and go back to work on that song. It was a cycle of being really musical, then stepping back and looking at it. It made me really envious of those bands that could go into the studio and make an album in one week, whereas we were being so diligent about the value of what we were doing. Anyway, that’s how it all ended up. Those seven years went by so fast, you know? It just seemed like a few years.

John is credited as a writer for every song, but there are also a lot of shared credits. Are the songs developed collaboratively, or does John spearhead it?
John will always write all the words and the melody. We all help out on the arrangements for every single song, but if there’s a song where our arrangement contribution was especially notable we were given that credit on the album. That was kind of a process we’d worked out, too, because a lot of bands break up over the songwriting credits. We’ve had our difficulties with it too, but we’ve been able to figure it out and work through it. That’s something that young bands really ought to think about at the very beginning.

I remember hearing that when the Monkees were really big they gave a studio technician a songwriting credit on one of their songs and with the money from that he was able to buy a house.
Oh, man, I wish I could buy a house from my songwriting credits! That’s cool. Good for them—I guess they felt like he was a part of the process and he deserved it. You know, we have the #1-selling album this week, but it was the lowest total units for a #1 album in history, so it’s sort of a celebration but a little bit of a bummer too just because of how things have changed in the album industry.

I think the music industry in general spent too much time resisting digital and it’s now proving too difficult to catch up.
Yeah, I know. We’re doing what we can. We’ve always been an economical band and have been reasonable about how we do things, and this kind of thing is very historical and is really just something you have to roll with. You can’t kick and scream too much; you have to adapt.

Showroom of Compassion is on sale now. The band is presently touring.