Cake, the sometimes difficult-to-categorize band from Sacramento, released Comfort Eagle in 2001. Its major hit was “Short Skirt/Long Jacket,” a funny, sharply constructed song that thoroughly deserved its success.
Buried deeper on the album, however, was the even stranger “Commissioning a Symphony in C.” It received very little airplay, perhaps because a song about an Austrian nobleman financing a symphony with money extracted from peasants isn’t the usual recipe for alternative-rock radio.
The premise is funny, but the song becomes darker as it proceeds. The nobleman purchases a magnificent work of art that fills his palace and transfixes everyone in the concert hall. Yet while everyone else is overwhelmed by the music, his thoughts drift toward what is absent—and toward death. He can commission something beautiful, but he cannot buy his way out of mortality.
Cake presents all of this without sounding remotely like a symphony orchestra. John McCrea delivers the story in his dry, matter-of-fact voice while the band supplies a sparse groove, an insistent melody and flashes of trumpet. The restrained arrangement makes the grand subject even funnier and stranger.
It is witty, catchy, unsettling and unlike the subject of almost any other rock song. Give it a listen.