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Wheels Off with Rhett Miller

008 - John McCrea: Founder, Lead Singer, and Songwriter for the band Cake

Wheels Off with Rhett Miller

Rhett Miller

Music, Performing Arts, Arts

4.9609 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2019

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

John McCrea is the founder, lead singer, and songwriter for the band Cake. He’s also an activist and the Vice President of the Content Creators Coalition, an artist-run advocacy organization for musicians dedicated to working with songwriters, performers, and musicians for equity in the digital world. John sits down with Rhett to talk about the mathematics of mixing, new music from Cake, and how he keeps his creativity going after years of being an active musician. Rhett asks what advice he’d give his 21-year old self and John determines that he believes you’re supposed to have problems. The two talk about how that applies to parenting, and why it’s important to just figure things out for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Wheels Off, a show about the messy reality of the creative life.

0:05.9

I'm Rhett Miller.

0:07.3

That's when it got wheels off.

0:10.3

We started up and we ain't going to starve.

0:13.5

Oh, I like you.

0:14.5

I could have not.

0:16.0

That's when they got wheels off.

0:19.6

John McCrae is not just the world's foremost vibrous lap player.

0:25.4

He is also the founder and frontman and driving force behind the band Cake and has been since the early

0:33.5

90s. He's a terrific songwriter, unique in almost every way, in the way that he builds

0:42.1

songs, in the way that he delivers the vocals on these songs that he's written. But what's

0:48.7

always impressed me most about John is how thoughtful he is and how conscientious he is and how much he cares about

0:58.9

this world that we all are trying our damnedest to either survive or save or both. John does a lot of

1:07.5

work on behalf of causes in which he believes.

1:12.0

He puts his money where his mouth is.

1:14.2

He devotes his time and his energy.

1:17.3

The reason I got to know John is because we worked together on a group of which he was the primary founder,

1:23.9

although he would spread the credit around, I imagine,

1:26.9

but I remember it being very much

1:28.4

his brainchild.

1:30.2

And then it became something much bigger, a group called the Content Creators Coalition, that

1:36.2

is a group of musicians and creative type people who are coming together to aggregate our power to work on behalf of artists' rights

...

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