SFBG: I assume you didn't have a consuming day job.

JM: What I did was I screenprinted T-shirts a few days in my bedroom and worked as few days a week as possible - the rest of the time was spent seven days a week, working on music. What doing anything amounts to, is spending a lot of time on it. Unfortunately people don’t like to spend money on music. In terms of just starting out, I'd say, try to live somewhere that’s cheap and allows to spend the most possible days a week on your band. I think that was the turning point for me: I was living somewhere that was expensive and when I moved someplace that was cheap all these hours opened up to me. So you have to tread water a lot.

Most of the musicians that I know moved in last 10 years or so. It's rough. There have been unpleasant changes here, as far as I'm concerned. I like having neighbors that have more variance in occupation, rather than just doctors and lawyers.

I'm near Lake Merritt in Oakland, and yeah, it's just a really, really aggressive gentrification process that’s happening here. But I think crime will scare it back a bit - reduce property values a bit. I think last summer five houses on my street were burglarized, one at gunpoint, and the neighborhood bar people were getting held up at 2 a.m. It's been actually violating lately. It wasn’t that way five or six years ago. But I think there's a crime party going on - people feelin' really groovy with the crime. It's pretty intense, pretty amazing, really. It’s a pretty cool place to be a criminal actually: it's not dense with cops. Everyone victimized feels guilty, like they're at fault. So it's a perfect environment.

SFBG: What are you up to right now?

JM: I'm working on songwriting for now. I'm aiming to release an album with the band sometime in the summer, maybe the fall, of next year. It's the typical studio album kind of thing, but I'm not really sure if that’s what people want anymore. Maybe we should release ringtones only, I don’t know. It just seems like the listening experience has changed a lot. I'm not sure if people can listen to albums anymore - maybe something easy to download, for short attention spans.

SFBG: Have your listening habits changed?

JM: Actually, no - for me. I'm sort of intentionally changing them back. I decided that, um, I guess the listening habits of America in general and me in particular have become very acquisitional.

SFBG: You mean in terms of specially packaged releases and box sets...?

JM: There's that! And then a lot of it is just listening to a song for 30 seconds and deciding if you want to download it, and it's all about gorging your music player as quickly as possible. Music that, in your lifetime, you won't have time to listen to. It's more of a music acquisition trip. As opposed to the '60s and '70s, when you waited for an album to come out and anticipated the release and maybe waited in line at a record store, and then you got home and listened to one side, took a break, and then listened to other side. It was ritualistic. I see that as completely gone.

So I've been buying albums at the thrift store and listening to them that way, and I've been buying CDs as well, and I try to sit down with them rather than just gobble them up and rip the songs to the computer. I think you get what you pay for, and I think if you're gorging your mouth, there's not a lot of time to listen to the music itself. I could be wrong. But it seems like people are just music fatties. It's a use-and-discard thing, but mostly it's just acquisitional. In a way the fetish of music has been shifted from music itself or musicians to the music player - the shiny iPod that is the most treasured.

SFBG: Do you think you'll have to write songs differently?

JM: I don’t know. I'm not sure. I think I'll go on writing songs, but I'm not sure if I want to write them for this culture...much longer. I think farming would be much better. Actual farming. I'm thinking about figs and walnuts and grapes and just things that I like. And, y'know, I'll eat them and maybe sell some. I think that would be great - and lots of fruit trees. And things to eat.

I think there's something to be said for not using fossil fuels to get your food and for having your food in your backyard. There's a friend of mine, her son is a great horn player, and she was encouraging him to think about music as a career. He said, 'Mom, I don’t think music is going to be a career in 10 years.' I think he's right. He knows better than older people: music will be a career if you want to sociopathically tour endlessly, circus-style. That's the vortex we are being spun into. Lawyers and accountants still get the same hourly rate. Thankfully we’re off of our label deal, but it still doesn't make much a difference. If the curve of decline is as steep as looks, there's not much hope.

We did self-release our B-sides and album, just to see what it would be like. It's kind of a schlep to mail out CDs to people and do that all by yourself, but it certainly was a salutary feeling compared to working with people we couldn’t relate to - our record company - and yeah, it's pretty exciting because it’s a scratch-and-sniff CD – you scratch them and some smell like grape...or cut grass.

SFBG: No wonder your group is called Cake - everything seems to revolve around food, taste, or sensory experiences for you.

JM: I think of things maybe more tactilely and viscerally than theoretically sometimes. Not that I think theoretically - I certainly think…

SFBG: Of late, Cake has been known for its activist stance, by way of its Web site...

JM: Oh, but I don’t think that's our job as musicians. I'm conflicted about taking that activist role. On the Web site we ask a lot of questions and we try to not to tell people exactly what to think. We try to bring up topics but not be oppressively didactic. It certainly doesn’t seem like the job of the music monkey!

SFBG: With its cymbals and the way it hops up and down ceaselessly!

JM: Exactly! That’s a noble endeavor - to give people respite from their everyday lives. By the same token, it seems we’re in emergency times, so here and there we give people a Web address to an activist group. But we want it to be secondary: I'm still writing about human things, male-female disappointment and misunderstandings. Mostly just plaintive-voice music, complaining about life, which I think can be cathartic. When people are all complaining together in same room, it doesn't feel sad anymore because everyone is miserable. There's a purity to the hopelessness that doesn’t exist in the activist voice.

I guess I don’t feel a lot of hope, but by same token, I think we should do what we can - just to have a full human life. Even though it's hopeless.

SFBG: How have the dynamics of the band developed over the years?

JM: They have gotten a lot easier! I think men, especially, become less hormonal and less weirdly unnecessarily aggressive as they get older. There are always power struggles with musicians. They're not people who are focusing on words so much as they're focusing on notes, so communication can be weird. But I think we’ve sort of refined our process. That gives me hope, actually - in a way that gives me hope for our musical future. Not necessarily our economic future, but musically, I think we’ll do some things that we'll find very exciting. We’re never sure what they are. It’s a weird soup of whatever different things people are into at the time. Generally it’s a lot of things pulling all at once.

It's pretty exciting and also perhaps dangerous. Sometimes bad things can happen. Sometimes it can be scary.

Generally I think what I think musical vigor comes from is bastardization. And generally the strident adherence to purity in music is a hallmark of a no longer vibrant music form. For instance musics that are trying to preserve the accuracy and purity of the form, something where they're not letting it change - whether it's New Orleans jazz or classical music. But then with the creation of country music, it was Appalachian music dripping into the Delta, mixing with blues - two cultures that didn’t really even like each other - and the combination of the two. And then came rockabilly and eventually Led Zeppelin came from that. It's not about purity, some kind of pristine thing.

SFBG: What are you listening to now from the thrifts?

JM: Perez Prado. I'm always looking for Perez Prado records. I just think the horn arrangements are genius. I also find some really bad music like space-age bachelor-pad music. And recently a lot of '70s schlock rock, which I sometimes like - butt-rock music from the '70s. Music that you're not supposed to like anymore like BTO and Bad Company and all that kind of crap. I have a limited tolerance for it. I just listen to a lot of things. I enjoy the other bands that were on the Unlimited Sunshine tour: Oakley Hall and Detroit Cobras, Brazilian Girls. Also King City. It was quite revelatory, I think, for a lot of audience members, having that music right after Brazilian Girls.

SFBG: Cake picks the bands for the tour?

JM: We do. If you get music handlers picking bands you get all the same kind of music because they're aiming at a certain demographic and they think, how can we most effectively get this demographic to come. What they create is five hours of the same drumbeat. And after a certain point, your ear just turns off. It’s a matter of the human nervous system - it's not an ethical struggle.

That’s why we did that tour, and it was actually a really good tour. The bands weren’t so different that no one felt violated, and at same time, they were different enough for people to hear. In the past, probably listening to Cheap Trick after Charlie Louvin... I didn't know how loud they were. One thing you can't predict is how loud people are going to want to be. For me it’s a practical thing: can the human ear access this information? Beyond a certain point you're just getting a lot of noise and rumble. To me I'd think you'd want people to have get the information transmitted. Though as a band, I think it is fun for people to feel the physical force of your music - big slabs of sound foisted at people's heads.

But we don’t do that. The geometry of our music doesn't work in super-large venues - it sounds a lot of better in smaller venues where subtle gestures are intelligible. We used to freak people out when we played shows aggressively, hatefully quiet. Our band came out during the grunge era and the excess of sound, and we thought, this is just an American wide-load sensibility. Why don’t we turn the amps down and freak people out? We played a show with heavy metal bands and went on stage and won over the crowd. That’s a problem culturally - the idea that turning up is automatically somehow better. That’s what I mean by the endlessly stuffing of iPods. When you have endless amount of music on your iPod, slowing it down a bit and turning down the volume of the experience means actually listening to the songs. It's hard to swim against that current. For anyone.

SFBG: What are you planning for the NYE show?

JM: Much excitement and surprise, even. I don’t know if I can tell you everything, but there's going to be other kinds of entertainment, and we’re looking for recycled confetti. If we can find that, we’ll be happy. It would be a waste of paper to just drop it from the ceiling, just a big mess. Maybe bubbles and some nice biodegradable soap. Anyway there will be surprises, tap dancers, some crazy stuff. Beth Lisick will, I think, do some spoken word. What else? New songs we haven't played in the Bay Area: a Kenny Rogers songs about war - "Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town," the saddest song about war I know.

Cake perform with the Lovemakers Mon/31, 9 p.m., Warfield, 982 Market, SF. $69.50-$79.50. (415) 775-7722.