Cake — Comfort Eagle

I suspect there’s a certain type of nostalgia-prone socially anxious everteen who gravitates to Cake’s music. There’s a certain type of person who finds kinship in Vince DiFiore’s trumpet and John McCrea’s sardonic speak-singing. It takes a certain kind of person to argue, absent irony, that the greatest cover song ever recorded is Cake’s version of I Will Survive, even when faced with well-made arguments and protestations. I’m the certain type of person that prevents emotional freefall with sessions of Nugget heard on loop, these sessions serving up the kind of pep no talk can give me. Nobody’s allowed to tough-love me. Nobody, that is, with the exception of John McCrea. 

I’ve started gathering the courage to sit in socially distanced cafes and chart my path to untold professional success. I’ve started looking back from the precipice of my thirties, scouring my turdies for nuggets of blink-like wisdom, accessing lasting memories of aimless afternoon drives spent muttering self-help tirades against the soundtrack of Cake’s Comfort Eagle. All it takes for me to be transported to Sunday afternoons in my red hatchback is the drum machine intro to Opera Singer. 

There’s very little unpacking needed to explain the allure of Comfort Eagle. It’s simple, catchy, funky alt-rock. Its fantastical, almost nonsensical narratives are comforting, ‘chill’. It’s like that old friend of yours with whom an afternoon hang-out becomes an evening session, a night-time chill and can I just crash here? You know too much of that sort of scene is detrimental to future-planning, to ambition, to a one-day villa settled with a someday family with neatly planned chore lists, but every once in a while, isn’t it nice? 

Wasn’t it?

Nowadays, every subsequent playing of Comfort Eagle is a little less chill, a little more wistful. Meanwhile Rick James has become a dirge, representative of youth being wasted on the young, of adulthood’s rude awakenings. Shadow Stabbing reminds you a little less of getting your hands on an Orange County Original Soundtrack in a bargain bin for a tenth of its list price, and a little bit more about the time you had to pause it halfway through when you struggled into work one hot Monday morning. A little less of the drive to the music store where you found it as a youngin, a little more of the red hatchback where you realised that filling the tank was now your responsibility. 

The opening four track run of Comfort Eagle is among the strongest in the alt-rock canon, culminating in Short Skirt / Long Jacket, a song that to me has always sounded like a fantasy of an unreasonable, entitled manchild. With every subsequent listening the manchild seems less endearing. With each passing year, the song sounds more terrifying. I don’t want to be like that. I hope I’m not like that. What’s going to happen to me? Will I ever grow up? Will I always be this guy?

I associated none of this existential chaos with Comfort Eagle, Commissioning a Symphony in C never caused me to freeze. This was an album that soundtracked escape. It soundtracked driving around purposelessly on Sunday afternoons, putting away thoughts of inevitable Mondays, inevitable questions of career and settling down and growing up. A break from quotidian crises. Here’s how I know I’ve crossed a certain Rubicon. Here I am, listening to it at a socially-distanced Starbucks thinking not of the implications of the local cafe being usurped by a multinational coffee experience merchant. I’m thinking what’s going to happen with you, what’re you going to do, will you ever grow up, will you ever settle down. The caffeine is getting to me, my breaths come thick and fast.

Of all the things that adulthood has stolen from me, Comfort Eagle feels like a particularly personal loss. Being able to zone out to this album, and particularly its title track, was something I never assumed was a privilege. It’s something I just took for granted. I assumed I’d always be able to kick back to this album, and for 36 minutes, leave it all behind, breathe a little easier. I didn’t expect to be white-knuckled, out-of-breath, wide-eyed, terrified. 

Well that’s not entirely true. 

By the time Long Line of Cars rolled around, even back in those days, I’d become painfully aware of the album coming to a close, the drive coming to an end, Sunday afternoon becoming Sunday evening. I’d get white-knuckled, wide-eyed; something obvious would break past my muttered escapism: afternoon > evening > night > Monday morning. All my life I’ve dreaded the start of a week. What kinds of choices does a person have to make to always dread the inevitable arrival of a Monday? And irrespective of the source of this fear, if it has come to become its own thing, isn’t it a deficiency in attitude?

The great thing about deficiencies in attitude is that once you recognise them, they’re within your power to change. Action, man. It’s within your power to act. It is, for instance, within your power to remind yourself not to lionise your past experiences; not to magnify the scale of challenges the future holds. It’s within your power to reclaim Comfort Eagle for yourself. No nebulous abstract noun like adulthood can steal that from you. It’s within your power to derive as much pleasure from Love You Madly as you always did. 

I mean isn’t that what the Buddha spake? Or something in that general region? Uncertainty exists. Fear exists. Your reaction to uncertainty and fear is within your control. You don’t need to be overwhelmed by these things. It’s hard, but it’s doable. You can do it.

I will enjoy Pretty Pink Ribbon. I will enjoy World of Two. Once the album is done, I will get up from this table. I will leave this cafe. I will go home. I will shower. I will get to work. One step at a time, things will fall into place. Sometimes, they fall apart, other times, they don’t, but your response to things is within your control. You wouldn’t have made it this far if you were weak. Go back home. Hold your loved ones tight. Breathe. It’ll happen.

How many albums do you know that can elicit such a visceral response? I know very few. This is why music exists; if it weren’t for this album, I wouldn’t have felt these feelings today. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have resolved them. So long, Comfort Eagle. I’ll be back soon.