Prolonging the Magic

Prolonging the Magic: This is an album by the band Cake.  You remember Cake, they had a big hit with The Distance [1] off of their Fashion Nugget album.  Except that wasn't Cake.  I mean it was Cake that put out the album and sang the song, but it wasn't really Cake.  For that album they got a new producer or somesuch that totally "redesigned" the band to make them more marketable.  The result was The Distance and while it did well on the charts and all that, it made Cake into not Cake.[2] Prolonging the Magic is the album after that where Cake said 'forget that nonsense we're going to be Cake and not not Cake.'[3]

This is a great album.  They've really hit the stride they were trying to find in their first album and were forced to partially move away from in their second.  It's got all of the goodness you expect from Cake: sarcastic lyrics delivered in a serious voice, obscure references scattered throughout, trumpets scattered throughout and the band using everything that they can think of as a musical instrument.[4]

Some of my favorite songs off of the album are Sheep Go to Heaven, Cool Blue Reason, When You Sleep and even Satan is Motor.  If you want to give yourself a chuckle surf around the various 'lyrics meanings'   websites and see what people say this song is about.  On one sight there were about twenty different explanations, each one containing a section in which the erstwhile explainer politely apologizes to all of the previous posts about correcting them for how wrong the previous explanations were and how right theirs is.[5]

Also there's a pig on the CD cover.  That's got to be worth some positive points.

Prolonging the Magic: A






[1] - He's going the distance.  He's going for speed.  He's all alone (all alone) in his time of need.
[2] - What?  Are you confused?
[3] - Except that they didn't literally say that, but it would have been cool if they had.
[4] - I sometimes think the band tried to be a part of Stomp but got rejected for using things for instruments that were just too weird.
[5] - fwiw I am not 100% sure what it means but I do know that McCrea (the song writer) has emphatically stated that it is not a satanic song.  Personally I think it's just saying that we can dress ourselves up in shiny clothes and look nice, but were all base impulses on the inside.